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Zinnbauer and Pargament studied 130 college students at a Christian college, ages eighteen to twenty-eight. They found that religious converts—those who convert to a sacred, transcendent force such as Jesus, God, or Allah, and feel connected to that force—have undergone more stress in the six months before their conversion. They did not actually have more stressful lives than the nonconverts, but they thought they did. They also had a greater sense of personal inadequacy and limitation. One problem with this study, of course, is that students attending a Christian school do not greatly differ from one another, so you have the sense that the researchers are straining at gnats.

4 P. McNamara, ed., Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion, 3 vols. (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Perspectives, 2006).

5 Raymond F. Paloutzian, Erica L. Swenson, and Patrick McNamara, “Religious Conversion, Spiritual Transformation, and the Neurocognition of Meaning Making,” in McNamara, Where God and Science Meet, vol. 2: The Neurology of Religious Experience, pp. 151-69.

CHAPTER 5. HUNTING FOR THE GOD GENE

1 W. Miller, Quantum Change (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), p. 94.

2 The Gospel of Thomas is one of the Gnostic gospels, not included in the Bible. Don Eaton closely paraphrased verse 77, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

3 C. R. Cloninger, D. M. Svrakic, and T. R. Przybeck, “A Psychobiological Model for Temperament and Character,” Archives of General Psychiatry 50 (1993): 975-90. Cloninger’s self-transcendence trait is determined by three criteria. One is called “spiritual acceptance versus rational materialism” and involves phenomena such as mystical experience or a belief in miracles, the supernatural, and a force greater than oneself directing one’s life. Another is “transpersonal identification,” that is, a connectedness to the universe and everything in it, including nature and people. Finally, there is “self-forgetfulness,” or absorption with beauty, music, and the task at hand, to the point of forgetting oneself, time, and space. One’s spirituality is measured by how one responds, “True” or “False,” to a series of statements such as “I believe in miracles” or “Sometimes I have felt like I was part of something with no limits or boundaries in time or space.”

4 Researchers make a distinction between spirituality, which involves personal experience, and religiosity, which pertains to doctrinal beliefs and external religious practices. One way to distinguish the two is to consider intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness. Spirituality is often equated with intrinsic religiousness—that is, an inward-looking faith that is not necessarily tethered to a particular religion; it involves private prayer, meditation, and a strong sense of God’s presence; one’s whole approach to life is based on religion. Extrinsic religion is outward-looking: I go to my church or synagogue to spend time with my friends; I pray because I’ve been taught to pray; I don’t let religion affect my daily life. Saroglou found that people who are intrinsically religious (more spiritual than traditional) score high on agreeableness and conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Those who are more extrinsically religious (traditional) are conscientious and agreeable, but are not open to new experience. They also show high levels of neuroticism. V. Saroglou, “Religion and the Five Factors of Personality: A Meta-analytic Review,” Personality and Individual Differences 32 (2001): 15-25.

5 On the heritability of spirituality, see the following:

K. Kirk, L. Eaves, and M. Martin, “Self-Transcendence as a Measure of Spirituality in a Sample of Older Australian Twins,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 81-87. In a sample of more than 3,000 twins (identical and fraternal), genes appeared to explain 41 percent of the variation of spirituality in women, and 37