From God to Ideology: When Secular Orthodoxy Becomes Religion
There is an uncomfortable statistical relationship between intelligence and religious belief. It is real, reproducible, and considerably less dramatic than either atheists or believers might prefer. A series of meta-analyses spanning decades of research has found a modest negative correlation between psychometric intelligence and religiosity. Miron Zuckerman and his colleagues reported in 2013, after reviewing 63 studies, that among college students and adults the relationship between intelligence and the strength of religious belief was approximately r = −.20 to −.25. An updated analysis expanded the literature to 83 studies and reached substantially the same conclusion, while a larger 2022 multiverse meta-analysis encompassing 89 studies, 105 samples, and more than 200,000 participants produced a smaller correlation of approximately r = −.14. These figures do not mean that religious people are stupid or that atheists are intelligent. At r = −.14, religiosity statistically explains only about two percent of the variation in intelligence, and even at −.24 the figure remains below six percent. The distributions overlap enormously. Newton believed in God, Pascal believed in God, and there are brilliant rabbis, priests, imams, and theologians just as surely as there are spectacularly stupid atheists. Individual stereotypes tell us almost nothing.
The statistical relationship is interesting for a different reason. It invites us to ask why any relationship exists at all, and I think that question becomes much more revealing once we stop talking exclusively about God. Religion has historically performed functions extending far beyond explaining the origin of the universe. It provides belonging, establishes moral rules, identifies good and evil, explains suffering, creates ritual, locates individuals within a larger community and historical narrative, identifies authorities whose teachings deserve special deference, and establishes propositions that are treated as sacred and challenges that are condemned as heretical. Perhaps most importantly, religion provides certainty. It tells us not merely what happened, but what events mean and what we are expected to believe about them.
There is no obvious reason to assume that the psychological need for those functions disappears when supernatural belief declines. Secularization may remove God without eliminating the appetite for certainty, belonging, moral hierarchy, ritual, orthodoxy, and collective meaning that made religion attractive in the first place. We may stop worshiping gods without becoming particularly good at living without dogma. When traditional religion retreats, therefore, political ideology can become remarkably well equipped to occupy the empty cathedral. The vocabulary changes, the metaphysics changes, and the institutions change, but the underlying psychological architecture can remain surprisingly familiar.
Marxism provides an unusually revealing example because it presented itself not as religion but as its opposite: scientific materialism. Marx claimed to have discovered the mechanisms governing human history. Class conflict was not simply one useful perspective through which society might be examined; it became the principal engine of historical development. Capitalism contained contradictions that would ultimately destroy it, the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeois order, private ownership of the means of production would disappear, and eventually class itself would disappear. History had a direction, and Marx purported to understand where it was going.
The religious parallels are difficult to ignore. Marxism offered an account of original transgression in private ownership and class domination, a fallen human condition expressed through exploitation and alienation, an oppressor class in the bourgeoisie, and a redemptive class in the proletariat. It developed prophets and canonical texts, condemned heretics and revisionists, and possessed a doctrine explaining why unbelievers could fail to recognize the truth in the concept of false consciousness. It envisioned an apocalyptic overthrow of the existing order followed by redemption in a classless society in which the fundamental contradictions of the old world would disappear. One need not insist that Marxism is literally a religion to recognize that it can perform many of the same psychological and sociological functions. I would describe it instead as a post-agrarian religion: a comprehensive secular belief system constructed for industrial society that replaced supernatural causation with historical inevitability, sin with exploitation, salvation with revolution, and heaven with the classless society.
What makes the comparison particularly interesting is what happened when much of Marx's original economic architecture encountered formidable theoretical and empirical challenges. The marginal revolution, including Carl Menger's subjective theory of value, transformed economics away from labor-centered theories of value. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk attacked Marx's theories of capital, interest, and exploitation. Ludwig von Mises developed the socialist calculation argument, contending that without private ownership of productive assets and genuine market prices for capital goods, central planners lack the price information required for rational economic calculation. Friedrich Hayek pushed the argument even further by demonstrating that the problem was not merely that planners were insufficiently intelligent. The necessary knowledge does not exist in any single place. It is dispersed among millions of individuals, and market prices coordinate fragments of that knowledge without requiring any central authority to possess it. The twentieth century subsequently supplied extraordinarily expensive empirical evidence about the limits of centralized economic planning.
Yet Marxism proved remarkably durable because Marxism was never merely economics. Its economic propositions could weaken while its moral architecture survived. Capital and labor, oppressor and oppressed, exploitation, structural inequality, privilege, consciousness, and power proved more durable than the labor theory of value. The vocabulary migrated. Classical Marxism had encountered an inconvenient problem in prosperous capitalist societies: the proletariat frequently declined to behave as Marxist theory expected. Workers bought homes, accumulated pensions, started businesses, invested in stocks, and joined the bourgeoisie they were theoretically destined to overthrow. Rather than progressively immiserating the working class, capitalism produced historically extraordinary levels of mass prosperity.
The oppressor-oppressed framework, however, did not have to disappear simply because class became a less persuasive organizing category. It could be transferred to race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, colonial history, nationality, and other forms of collective identity. The categories changed while the intellectual grammar remained recognizable. Society could still be interpreted primarily as a hierarchy of groups, disparities could be regarded as presumptive evidence of structural injustice, individual relationships could be interpreted through collective power, and unequal outcomes could be explained primarily through oppression rather than through the vast mixture of preferences, behavior, ability, culture, history, geography, incentives, luck, and individual choice that produces social outcomes.
None of this means that racism or sexism is imaginary, nor does it mean that every analysis of structural discrimination is secretly Marxist. Such claims would be intellectually unserious. The narrower and more consequential point is that an intellectual framework can survive the failure of some of the propositions that originally produced it. Religions are extraordinarily good at accomplishing precisely that because their survival does not depend entirely upon empirical success. An economic theory can therefore weaken while its moral categories continue to organize how millions of people understand society.
This brings us back to intelligence. A second body of research may ultimately be more important than the correlation between intelligence and religiosity. A 2016 meta-analysis involving 31 studies and more than 15,000 participants found an approximately r = −.18 relationship between religious belief and performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. The significance of the Cognitive Reflection Test is that it does not merely ask whether someone is intelligent. It asks whether a person is willing to examine an intuitively appealing answer before accepting it as correct. That distinction matters enormously because high intelligence and intellectual independence are not synonymous. A brilliant person can be a conformist, and intelligence may sometimes make ideological commitment more formidable rather than less. An intelligent person possesses greater intellectual resources with which to defend what he already wants to believe. He can rationalize more effectively, locate supporting evidence more efficiently, construct more sophisticated arguments, and identify weaknesses in his opponents while remaining remarkably blind to equivalent weaknesses in his own position. The real problem is therefore not stupidity but motivated intelligence.
That distinction helps explain why ideological orthodoxy can flourish in universities populated by highly intelligent people. American academia leans substantially toward the political left, particularly within the humanities and social sciences. That observation by itself proves neither intellectual corruption nor conspiracy; people self-select into professions, and political orientation is no exception. Yet ideological homogeneity creates an epistemological problem even when every participant acts in complete good faith. When nearly everyone within an intellectual community shares certain assumptions, those assumptions eventually cease to appear as assumptions. They become the intellectual atmosphere everyone breathes.
Consider the difference between asking why capitalism produces inequality and asking why equality should constitute the moral baseline against which capitalism is judged. The first question sounds perfectly normal within much of contemporary scholarship, while the second interrogates the premise embedded within the first. Likewise, one can ask how systemic racism produces disparities, but intellectual seriousness requires also asking what evidence would allow us to conclude that a particular disparity was not caused by systemic racism. These are not necessarily left-wing or right-wing questions. They are epistemological questions. The problem begins when one question is regarded as sophisticated scholarship while the other is interpreted as evidence of moral deficiency.
At that point, an institution dedicated to intellectual inquiry begins acquiring characteristics of a church. Certain doctrines may be investigated, while others must effectively be affirmed. Canonical thinkers emerge, moral transgressions acquire their own vocabulary, rituals of affirmation develop, language becomes regulated, and heresy begins carrying professional or social consequences. Most importantly, some propositions can become structured so that rejection of the proposition itself is interpreted as evidence of the pathology that the proposition describes. That is an extraordinarily powerful mechanism for protecting a belief system because disagreement no longer challenges the theory; disagreement confirms it.
This is why the central pathology is not belief but asymmetric skepticism. I have no objection whatsoever to skepticism toward religion. Ask the Christian why Christianity rather than Islam, ask the Muslim why Islam rather than Hinduism, and ask the Hindu why Hinduism rather than Christianity. The geographical distribution of revelation presents an obvious epistemological problem. Children born in Riyadh disproportionately discover Islam, children born in evangelical Alabama disproportionately discover Christianity, and children born into Hindu families disproportionately discover Hinduism. God appears remarkably respectful of parental religious affiliation.
Intellectual consistency, however, requires that the same skepticism be applied elsewhere. The academic who asks a Christian what evidence would falsify his belief should be willing to ask what evidence would falsify the academic's own belief that disparities primarily demonstrate structural oppression. The socialist who demands empirical evidence for capitalism should be able to identify what observable economic outcome would cause him to abandon socialism. The DEI theorist who treats unequal representation as evidence of systemic discrimination should be able to specify what evidence would demonstrate that a particular unequal representation arose without discrimination. Nor is the conservative exempt. If no evidence could change my conviction that tax cuts always increase revenue, immigration always lowers wages, climate change cannot be anthropogenic, or my preferred politician is uniquely virtuous, then I have exactly the same epistemological problem.
This is not fundamentally a left-right phenomenon. It is a human phenomenon. It becomes institutionally dangerous when one ideology becomes sufficiently dominant within institutions charged with producing knowledge because intellectual communities require internal dissent for the same reason markets require competition. Without competing hypotheses, assumptions become invisible, and without meaningful exposure to contradictory evidence, conviction easily disguises itself as knowledge.
The same dynamic can operate in journalism. Traditional religion organized reality into morally intelligible narratives involving saints and sinners, temptation and redemption, innocence and guilt. Political journalism is naturally attracted to similar structures because complex systems are difficult to narrate. Markets are particularly frustrating because spontaneous order has no central protagonist. A price changes, millions of people respond, producers substitute inputs, consumers alter preferences, entrepreneurs discover opportunities, investors allocate capital, and no single actor designs the final result. Hayek's world makes terrible theater. Marx's world makes excellent television because it supplies victims and oppressors, rich and poor, capital and labor, powerful and powerless. Complex adaptive systems can then be transformed into morality plays in which someone benefits because somebody else must have lost. This does not require journalists to be Marxists, and most journalists have probably never seriously read Marx. Cultural frameworks can persist long after people have forgotten their intellectual origins.
The dividing line between rational conviction and ideological faith is therefore not the content of a belief but our relationship to evidence. The most important question may be extraordinarily simple: what evidence would make you change your mind? That question should be asked of the believer and the atheist, the socialist and the capitalist, the feminist and the Objectivist, the progressive and the conservative. It should also be asked of me. If the answer is "nothing," we are no longer describing a conclusion generated through rational inquiry. We are describing an article of faith.
That does not necessarily mean that the proposition is false. An unfalsifiable proposition can conceivably be true. It does, however, change the epistemological status of the belief, and this is where religion and ideological orthodoxy finally converge. Both become dangerous to rational thought when they create closed epistemological systems possessing internal mechanisms for neutralizing contradictory evidence. The unbeliever lacks faith. The worker who rejects socialism suffers from false consciousness. The individual questioning an ideological proposition reveals his privilege. The dissenter has internalized oppression. The critic's objection itself becomes evidence that the theory is correct. Once a belief system reaches this condition, empirical argument becomes nearly impossible because contrary evidence has been immunized in advance.
Perhaps, then, we have misunderstood secularization. We assumed that as societies became wealthier, better educated, and more scientific, supernatural religion would retreat and rationality would simply occupy the territory it surrendered. There was never any guarantee that this would occur. The human need for belonging did not disappear; our attraction to moral certainty did not disappear; conformity did not disappear; tribalism did not disappear; and our desire to divide an incomprehensibly complicated world into good people and bad people certainly did not disappear. Perhaps we did not become as irreligious as we imagine. Perhaps some of us merely changed religions.
The old religions offered God, sin, confession, redemption, and heaven. New secular orthodoxies can offer privilege, guilt, acknowledgment, activism, and social justice. Classical Marxism offered exploitation, consciousness, revolution, and communism. The vocabulary is different, and the metaphysics is different, but the psychological architecture can sometimes be remarkably similar. None of this proves Marxism false, just as identifying religious characteristics within capitalism would not prove capitalism false. Marxism must rise or fall on evidence and argument, exactly as capitalism must. Feminism must rise or fall on evidence and argument. Objectivism must rise or fall on evidence and argument. Every intellectual system deserves the same treatment.
The proper alternative to religion, therefore, is not merely atheism, because atheists are every bit as capable of dogmatism as believers. Nor is the proper alternative to one ideology simply another ideology. The genuine alternative is epistemic independence: the willingness to subject one's own beliefs to the same evidentiary standards one enthusiastically applies to the beliefs of one's opponents. Intellectual honesty does not require us to live without convictions. It requires us to remember that convictions are conclusions rather than sacred possessions.
The most important intellectual question may therefore not be what you believe. It may be what you would have to discover to stop believing it. A person who can answer that question has at least left the door open to reason. A person who cannot has closed the epistemological system from within. If no conceivable fact, argument, observation, or experience could cause us to reconsider a proposition, we may believe that we have escaped religion. In reality, we may simply have entered another church.