David Desteno's "How God Works"
Religioprospecting, considering the source, and minding the hack.
“There are no atheists in foxholes”, so the saying goes. In How God Works, David Desteno shows that while that may not be true, there are likely less atheists in those foxholes today than in the recent past. Desteno is just one of what seems to be a growing assortment of academics from a variety of disciplines who are writing in defense of (if not promotion of) what was once in low-regard amongst their kind: religion.
I was introduced to Desteno’s research through the fabulously produced How God Works podcast series, and was easily convinced to pick up a copy of the book bearing the same name. I consumed the book relatively slowly, trying to grapple with the content as I went. I even did a podcast conversation with a friend of mine, Jeremy MacDonald, about a particular section of the book on rites of passage from childhood to adulthood. On the whole, I found the book stimulating, challenging, and helpful. I would definitely recommend people engage with the podcast and/or the book… with caveats, that is.
Desteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University who got his PhD from Yale and (in addition to his classroom work and public work) seems to still find the time to practice behavioural psychology through his own “Social Emotions Lab”. So, he’s a pretty smart cookie. If his website is to be believed, the thesis of his work in general is to understand the mechanisms that underlie human virtue and how science can “nudge” them. Clearly, then, he wishes to move beyond the mere philosophical understanding of how things work and into the more practical application of those principles in an almost technological sense; to move from passivity to activity. In fact, in this book in particular, he frequently refers to what he calls “spiritual technologies”, which are essentially religious rituals.
The structure of the book takes the lifespan of a human and breaks it up into seven sections:
1 - Infancy: Welcoming & Binding
2 - The Formative Years: Learning What’s Right & Wrong
3 - Coming Of Age: Adulting Isn’t Easy
4 - Transcending the Twenties & Thirties: Love, Connection, and (Maybe) Ecstasy
5 - The Business of Midlife I: Maintenance for the Body
6 - The Business of Midlife II: Maintenance for the Soul
7 - Saying Goodbye: All That Lives Must Die
In each section, Desteno lays out some of the psychological needs that present themselves specifically in each phase of life in question. He then takes the reader upon an anthropological tour of the various ways that world religions seem to have created or curated solutions to those needs. There is a very non-judgmental, utilitarian tone to these reflections, which is pretty well in-line with the vision & mission of one of Desteno’s major financial backers for this project, the John Templeton Foundation:
“Our vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing. Our purpose is to enable people to create lives of purpose and meaning.”
I will not delve too deeply into the JTF here, though I plan to reflect more upon their unique place in the world of modern scholarship in the future. For our purposes here, the point is to say that Desteno’s work is not so much about what is true or false, but more so about what works. As an example, after surveying a number of different ways that various religious rituals seem to have a measurable impact on the growth of what would be deemed positive character traits in young people, Desteno lays out a potential path forward for parents who wish to reap the rewards of these so-called “spiritual technologies” without believing in the deities behind the religions in question:
“...it's true that many of these religious nudges depend on people already holding certain beliefs. For example, nudges provided by prayer instill honesty only in people who already believe in God. This doesn't mean that using multiple-nudge strategies to enhance character requires belief in God. Gratitude, awe, and elevation can increase honesty, generosity, kindness, and other ethical behaviors in any context, including secular ones.” (pg 62)
The word “nudge” here seems to be a hyperlink to a behavioural-psychological concept known as “nudge theory”. The way Desteno uses it, it seems to mean something like: any action or choice taken to consciously make certain outcomes more likely. Religious rituals are like this, the book argues, because they are designed to make certain feelings and actions more likely in the long run. But non-religious rituals are also like this, for the very same reason. As such, the above quote goes on to propose potential secular rituals to stand-in for the various religious rituals that were weighed in the chapter:
“While the result might not be as finely tuned a package as many religions use, it will still help you shape your children's character while also nudging your own.” (ibid)
Here is the twist that (for me) makes this book worth recommending with caveats. If I went through the text and highlighted then shared the sections that spoke well of Christianity and its rituals, you could be inclined to think that this book was written by a Jesus-believer:
“…Christians have a point in saying that suffering can serve a greater purpose... This doesn't mean, of course, that you should look for ways to suffer. Rather, it means that when suffering does come, as it invariably will for each of us when we lose someone we love, we should accept it. Sit with it. Don't rage against it. Recognize the ways it unites you with others…” (pgs 181 & 182)
In fact, though Desteno was raised Catholic and speaks positively about Christian ritual, he appears to be a self-professed agnostic. Plus, he not only speaks well of Christian ritual but of Jewish and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu and Native American rituals. But if I tweeted any number of paragraphs from his book and simply edited via ellipsis, then I could easily convince you that Desteno is someone you’d want to bring in to preach at your church next Sunday! If you’re engaging with aspects of this content from that vantage point, you could then read sentences like, “Simply put, thinking about God made religious people calmer” (pg 17) or, “Saying you're religious doesn't matter much for health and happiness... It's being religious – taking part in the rituals and practices of a faith – that makes life better” (pg 4) and subconsciously replace the words God/religion with Jesus/Christianity. This is not what Desteno is teaching, exactly. As far as I can tell, in his worldview, there is a relationship between these concepts, but that relationship is more dynamic than static, more correlative than causal. Christianity participates in a pattern more so than it defines a pattern.
As someone who considers himself not merely a believer in but also a follower of Christ, I am always pleased to see & hear people speak well of Jesus, of His Church, and of the legacies entailed. Since I believe God loves everyone and wants human flourishing, I am inclined to put forward much of the work of this book. I would not, however, recommend that people start citing this work as a Christian apologetic. Desteno (in ways similar to folks like Tom Holland or Jordan Peterson) speaks positively about Christianity without affirming the theology behind it. In other words, he may or may not believe that Jesus is divine… or, that there even is a God (knowable or otherwise). As such, I think it would be wise to treat this work in much the same way I would treat the work of a biblical scholar who is not a “confessional Christian”; to look for the Truth within it, without necessarily believing the truth-claims behind it1. In recent years, I have noticed a fair amount of Christians who have been drawn to certain statements that politicians or celebrities or academics have made that seem to intersect with their own Christian beliefs, unquestioningly using those statements to defend those Christian beliefs, and then unknowingly supporting a person or a system that is (at bottom) unChristian. I believe that here we might be seeing a tension that can allow the author of the Gospel of Luke to quote Jesus as saying both “whoever is not against you is for you” (Luke 9:50) and “whoever is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23).
So, this is the first caveat I would make, then. Something like: Consider the source. The second caveat is less obvious, yet perhaps a tad more problematic. It would be something like: Mind the hack. A running theme throughout this book is the belief that once we feel we can understand how a religious ritual produces certain desired results, we can either adopt or adapt that ritual for ourselves (regardless of our own theological beliefs) to produce the same results. What’s more, the conclusion of the book makes the reader aware of the fact that there are companies out there (such as Sacred Design Lab) who partner with other organizations to specifically create rituals to meet certain needs. In some respects, you could consider this to be a “life hack” approach to religion, looking for ways to beat/cheat the system in order to improve your results. Another word for it might be magic.
Oftentimes, spiritual or religious people are accused of “magical thinking” by naturalists, making no distinction between gods & goblins, luminaries & leprechauns. In such a worldview, prayer is equated with sorcery; humans trying to manipulate the divine. But from a Christian perspective, there is a fundamental difference between magic & religion. Magic is trying to heedlessly bend the will of God, while religion is trying to align ourselves with His will. There is more nuance here, to be sure, but roughly speaking the distinction (I believe) stands. Throughout the Bible, both in the Old & the New Testaments, we see many examples of magical thinking. For Christians, perhaps the prototypical example of such transactional model would be the man oft-known as Simon The Sorcerer (Acts 8:9-24). He was sympathetic to the way Jesus was presented by Phillip the Evangelist, and even went so far as to be baptized into the Church. But when Peter came to visit and prayed for the believers in their area to be filled with the Holy Spirit, Simon tried to purchase this ability for himself. There are more blanks to fill in and than we are able to or have time to, but needless to say, Simon receives a significant rebuke for this request, and not likely because Peter wanted to jealously guard this power for himself. Rather, Simon’s mistake was likely that he thought he could control God. Peter didn’t use God, but he was used by God. The early Church so identified with this subtle but real distinction that traditions began early on that Simon Magus was the origin point for all sorts of heresies. Simon may have been a standout, but he was not unique.
While I confess that I’m not extremely well-versed on the topic, my understanding is that we have extant copies of so-called “magical texts” going as far back as the 5th century BCE, and they are characteristic of a tradition that was alive at the time of Christ, carries through to the medieval period, and (much to the amazement of many) on to today. These texts tend to prescribe not just what one ought to say or how they ought to say it, but also what actions ought to accompany what words, and what one ought to be able to expect based upon successful and correct completion of the ritual. The degree to which these magical practices compare and contrast with what we might think of as more “religious” practices encircling the beginning of the common era (religion often referred to today as “pagan”) is too complicated to tease out here.
The reason for this diversion into a brief consideration of magical practices is that, in my opinion, the kind of approach that Desteno is essentially illuminating (if not advocating) is one where if we do or say the right things in the right way then we’ll likely reap the desired outcomes. The analogs to magic are hard not to see. A potential disjuncture between ancient magical thinking and the intentional application of spiritual technologies (as defined by Desteno) might be something like faith. It seems unlikely that one would go through the rigamarole of reciting a spell to Isis or Athena if they did not believe those entities existed, but the book in question seems to imply that one can work through certain rituals and attain certain benefits whether or not one believes the only unseen power behind those mechanisms happens to be the way unseen neurons fire inside our skulls.
So, if not magic, then what? “Spiritual technology”, that’s what. Leaving aside that “spiritual” here is not so much an antonym for “material” but more so a synonym for “religious”, I still haven’t really justified my stated concern above about the so-called “hacking” involved. Desteno himself refers to the purpose of the book as “religioprospecting” (pg 13), exploring the existing fields of religions and mining for things that will “work” outside of their natural habitats. It is this self-conscious approach that I am most wary of, since it seems to me that it places the burden of determining what “works” onto the shoulders of the person who will also be responsible for implementing the practice. So I determine what I want and then I choose how I will get it. It’s almost a type of eugenics aimed at personality more than physicality. In the case of the chapters on parenting, it’s not even exclusively self-experimentation, but also involves how we experiment on our children.
You might say I’m being dramatic, to which I might reply, “Who? Meeeeeeee?!?!?” Listen, I don’t actually begrudge Desteno for advocating this religioprospecting approach. He didn’t invent it out of thin air. This sort of self-conscious self-creation coupled with materialist utilitarianism is likely just a natural extension of our culture’s trajectories. Charles Taylor might describe it as a natural consequence of “the bind of modernity”. Jacques Ellul might describe it as “technique run amok”. Either way, it would make me sound like a nutjob to imply that we should have no role in mapping our individual & collective destinies. To simply fall-in-line with any way of life, wholesale, without even questioning that way of life’s underpinnings… that’s just running away & joining a cult, right? Obviously, I’m not advocating that. The truth is that I can’t foresee exactly how we as a society can deescalate this “I make me” arms race we find ourselves in. I am optimistic that (by God’s grace) there is a way to step things backward. All I feel equipped to do at the moment, though, is to chime in with the growing choir of people who are noticing the problem, and trust that solutions will present themselves in time.
So, in summation, I would absolutely recommend How God Works to anyone who is interested in religion and social change. It’s a deep & well-researched work, but it’s also a light & enjoyable read. If you’re more of a listener, the audiobook is read by the fabulous Arthur Morey, and the “How God Works” podcast series is phenomenally produced by PRX and features the voice of Desteno himself. You are virtually guaranteed to garner some valuable insights by engaging with the work. If you consider yourself to be a devout follower of any religion (not merely Christianity), I would merely suggest that you consider approaching this religioprospecting with a positively critical frame. It is always good for people to discover that they have things in common, but we need not assume that those commonalities render our distinctives unimportant. With time & patience, we can deduce a lot of things, but I’m not sure we’ll ever fully understand how God works… at least, not on this side of eternity.
I was recently introduced to St Basil’s “Address To Young Men On The Right Use Of Greek Literature”, and I feel there’s an analogue: https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/basil_litterature01.htm