Vatican city

Source: Huffington Post

By Steven Reiss; Educated at Dartmouth, Yale, and Harvard, I was a professor of psychology at University of Illinois at Chicago and Ohio State University.

Religious participation is declining among Americans even though religion is still very popular. According to the latest Religious Landscape Study by the Pew Research Forum, the percentage of Americans who believe in God, attend religious services and pray daily has declined significantly during the last eight years, especially among adolescents. The drop in religious participation is larger among whites, and less among blacks. One group bucking the trend is political conservatives, who show no decline.

The Pew surveys document the rise in secularism but don’t attempt to explain it.

Psychologist Jean Twenge and her colleagues have cited a rise in narcissism and self-centeredness among young people, but in truth there are no hard data scientifically linking narcissism to the decline in religious participation.

Could something else be behind this important shift?

As a researcher who has spent 30 years studying human motivation, I believe we embrace or reject religion based on our values. I see four possible psychological reasons for the recent rise in secularism in America based on decades of studying what makes people tick.

Surveying 100,000 people

Decades ago, we began by creating a list of every possible goal or motive we could think of. We then asked people to rate the extent to which each goal motivated them.

The respondents indicated how much they love to learn, for example, play sports or do things their way. We have surveyed about 100,000 people from many cultures in North America, Europe and Asia.

As described in my book Who Am I?: The 16 Basic Desires That Motivate Our Behavior and Define Our Personality, we discovered that humans share 16 basic desires.

They are: acceptance, curiosity, eating, family, honor, idealism, independence, order, physical activity, power, romance, saving, social contact, status, tranquility and vengeance.

My colleagues and I now believe that everything that moves us – all human motives – express one or more of these 16 basic desires.

For the past 10 years, we have been learning how these desires play out in religion and spirituality. In my latest
book, The 16 Strivings for God: The New Psychology of Religious Experience, I suggest that virtually every religious belief and practice expresses one of the 16 basic desires, or two or more of them acting together. Your most important desires may be curiosity and social contact, for example, but your partner’s most important needs may be acceptance and order.

We have a choice of satisfying our desires through religion and spirituality or through secular institutions. The believer may satisfy his or her need for acceptance by embracing God-as-savior, whereas the nonbeliever might embrace, say, positive psychology. The believer may satisfy a need for status by embracing the idea of having been created by God, whereas the nonbeliever might pursue wealth and materialism to feel important.

Religion rises and falls in popularity depending on how well it satisfies our needs versus the secular alternatives. Viewed in this light, four major shifts in secular culture may be behind the decline in religious affiliation.

Read more