“Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
A whatsapp forward goes viral.
“They have thrown beef into the temple!”
And a riot promptly starts. Hundreds are killed. And….
An election is won. It could as well be- “Our book is desecrated”…! Or- “They drew a cartoon of our holy leader”.
Such things also keep people in power. In fact, in a bygone era, religion was THE source of political power. ‘An emperor ordained by the Sun-god!’- rings a bell?
If you watch humans long enough, you will notice something peculiar:
we are the only species that can argue about tax slabs in the morning, meditate on cosmic oneness by noon, and vote based on what our grandmother said about God in the evening.
For decades, economists and political scientists tried to model this creature — Homo rationalis — a tidy species who made neat decisions with calculator-like precision (Simon, 1985). But real humans are more not like rational automobiles. More like temperamental horses. We swerve. We neigh. We spray emotional horseshit at the universe.
And nothing sends us swerving harder than religion.
Mystical Experiences- What the hell are they?
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A cardiologist once described to me a man who returned from a near-death experience and said, “I felt I touched something more real than reality. I saw everything… from the outside.” He wasn’t trying to convert anyone. He was trying to describe something that felt as true as his own name.
A patient described a religious retreat, where he danced with other devotees, and felt an ‘energy’ entering him. He had a profound experience that changed him somewhat permanently.
Science calls these ‘mystical experiences’ — ineffable, timeless, emotionally nuclear states that visit monks in mountains, yogis in caves, mothers in prayer halls, ravers at 3 a.m., and cardiac arrest survivors in emergency rooms (Woollacott, 2020; Parnia, 2022; Wulff, 2014; Shrader, 2008).
In these moments, humans feel:
-completely connected,
– utterly loved,
– and convinced that they have touched the fundamental truth of existence.
Once touched by this lightning, people seldom remain the same. They return softer, more generous, and sometimes… more dangerous. More ZEALOUS.
Because conviction — deep conviction — is potent. It is the raw material of both saints and revolutions. We have no idea why humans have this psychological capacity. But it may have deep evolutionary roots.
From Tribal Fires to Massive Temples that reach the sky:
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Picture a small prehistoric tribe dancing around a fire. The flames flicker, the drums beat, and the people sink into a shared trance (Papadimitropoulos, 2009).
What began as a shaman’s ecstatic moment soon became the glue of tribes.
Shared stories → shared values → shared loyalty → shared identity.
Over thousands of years, these firelit rhythms evolved into the mighty religions of today — the cathedrals, the mosques, the gopurams, the stupas (Armstrong, 2011; Proudfoot, 1985; Webb, 2011).
Religion, in essence, is tribal glue that scaled up. It helped humans cooperate in numbers that would make even ants jealous (Haidt, 2012).
The Bee in the Chimpanzee:
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Jonathan Haidt famously wrote that humans are “90% chimpanzee, 10% bee.”
Bees are colonies. Thousands of Individuals forming a single super-organism. We too are- a bit. Maybe a whole lot.
Religion taps the bee.
It transforms individuals into a hive. Into a “people.” Into a “we.”
And political science slowly discovered that no constitution, however elegant, can compete with:
- the emotional warmth of belonging,
- the thrill of sacred identity,
- the fierce loyalty of group morality (Haidt, 2007; McKay, 2015).
This is why politics so easily slips into the language of religion:
Nation becomes temple.
Flag becomes totem.
Constitution becomes scripture.
Leaders become anointed. There is a certain sacredness to courts, the parlement.
Modern democracies are, in many ways, religions without gods (Jelen, 2002; Fox, 2018). This is doubly true of modern autocracies, sometimes actual religion is enmeshed with an ethno-cultural identity and dictatorship.
Why Politics Loves Religion:
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Religion is a biological megaphone. It amplifies moral instincts that evolution baked into us during hundreds of thousands of years in small tribal units (Purzycki, 2018; Traulsen, 2006).
It offers:
-identity
– unity,
– moral purpose,
– emotional firepower.
Politicians cannot resist that. No one can.
But here lies the paradox:
The same force that unites within can divide between.
Religion creates brotherhood — but also boundaries.
It inspires compassion — but also crusades.
Humans can die for a flag, but they can also kill for it.
This duality is not a flaw of religion — it is a design feature. 😊
The Secular Tightrope:
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After Europe’s bloody religious wars, people realized something:
If everyone insists their God is the only God, nobody wins.
Secular democracy was the brilliant compromise.
A truce among tribes. (Empires also were truce among tribes- they had their own religious solutions).
But secular systems are emotionally pale compared to religion.
They lack awe, ritual, transcendence.
So they borrow some:
parades, constitutions, anthems, patriotic songs.
A nation without sacredness is fragile (Sosis & Bressler, 2003).
But too much sacredness is explosive. The trick is balance.
The Way Forward:
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This essay is not a plea to bring religion back into politics.
It is a call to understand why religion is political in the first place.
Humans crave belonging.
Humans respond to ritual.
Humans hunger for meaning.
And humans are willing to die for symbols.
A stable democracy must acknowledge these truths — not fear them.
Perhaps the future lies in designing secular sacredness: rituals that unite rather than exclude,
institutions that inspire without dominating. Identities that are strong yet humane.
But traditional religious frenzy should be relegated to the private sphere, gradually but firmly.
References:
Armstrong, K. (2011). A History of God. Random House.
Bloom, P. (2012). Religion, morality, evolution. Annual review of psychology, 63, 179-199.
Fox, J. (2018). An introduction to religion and politics: Theory and practice. Routledge.
Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316(5827), 998-1002.
Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage.
Jelen, T. G., & Wilcox, C. (2002). The political roles of religion (pp. 314-324). Cambridge University Press: New York, NY, USA.
Maxim, D. S. (2015). POLITICIZATION OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY. The Indian Journal of Political Science, 76(3), 600-604.
McKay, R., & Whitehouse, H. (2015). Religion and morality. Psychological bulletin, 141(2), 447.
Papadimitropoulos, P. (2009). Psychedelic Trance: ritual, belief and transcendental experience in modern raves. Durham Anthropology Journal, 16(2), 67-74.
Parnia, S., Post, S. G., Lee, M. T., Lyubomirsky, S., Aufderheide, T. P., Deakin, C. D., … & Shirazi, T. K. (2022). Guidelines and standards for the study of death and recalled experiences of death––a multidisciplinary consensus statement and proposed future directions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1511(1), 5-21.
Proudfoot, W. (1985). Religious experience. Univ of California Press.
Purzycki, B. G., Henrich, J., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q. D., Baimel, A., Cohen, E., … & Norenzayan, A. (2018). The evolution of religion and morality: a synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(2), 101-132.
Shrader, D. W. (2008). Seven characteristics of mystical experiences. Sixth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities.
Simon, H. A. (1985). Human nature in politics: The dialogue of psychology with political science. American political science review, 79(2), 293-304.
Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-cultural research, 37(2), 211-239.
Traulsen, A., & Nowak, M. A. (2006). Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(29), 10952-10955.
Webb, M. (2011). Religious experience.
Woollacott, M., & Shumway-Cook, A. (2020). The Mystical Experience and Its Neural Correlates. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 38(1).
Wulff, D. M. (2014). Mystical experiences. In Varieties of anomalous experience (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.
