Why Do People Worship? Sex and Stress Relief, Study Says

Jan. 16, 2010— -- Ask 100 people what they get out of religion and you will probably get 100 different answers. Some worship out of habit, others out of fear of death. New experiments offer two surprising reasons people find God: sex and stress relief.

Men and women shown dating profiles of attractive members of the same sex will describe themselves as more religious than people who don't feel as if they have to compete in the attractiveness stakes. Meanwhile, another study finds that thoughts of randomness push people toward God – but only if they can't attribute feelings of stress to some easily defined external factor. Subjects were primed for random thoughts by being exposed to phrases containing words such as "chance", "haphazard" and "random".

"You can become more or less religious depending on the situation," says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved in the studies.

Such fickle religious behaviour could be especially important as promiscuous students mature into monogamous adults, says Douglas Kenrick, a psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, whose team uncovered the link between mating and religion.

In a previous survey of 22,000 mostly Christian Americans, he and colleague Jason Weeden found a strong correlation between mating behaviour and religiosity. As you might expect, believers were more likely to be married, want to have large families and frown upon cheating and contraception.

To probe the relationship between sex and God more explicitly, Kenrick and colleague Yexin Jessica Li presented hundreds of students at their university with dating profiles of highly attractive men or women, then probed them about their religious beliefs. A control group of 1500 students merely filled out the religion survey.