Politics and religion: commutable, conflicting, and collaborative systems for satisfying the need for order
In this chapter, we outline a program of research that has sought to understand how sociopolitical and religious systems overlap in their satiation of psychological needs and suggest that this overlap helps one explain a range of sociocultural phenomenon regarding the complex relationship between these systems. Compensatory control theory (CCT) posits that people have a psychological need to see the world as orderly and nonrandom, and when a sense of personal control cannot satiate this need, people will turn to external systems of control and order, such as secular institutions (e.g., government) and religious institutions and beliefs (e.g., organized religion and belief in a controlling god). We summarize work showing that both the secular and the religious can be turned to in order to maintain a view of an orderly, nonrandom world. Due to this overlap, they are also substitutable, such that relying on one renders the other less necessary. Finally, symbolic (or literal) alignments between secular and religious systems can be incidentally or strategically leveraged to further maintain confidence in these systems to satiate concerns about disorder, randomness. We relate these findings to the broader literature on religious and political beliefs and ideology and use a CCT lens to explain a range of sociocultural phenomenon.
