Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [40]
It makes sense that some of Mom’s spirituality landed in my genes, since half my genetic coding comes from her. I decided to try to measure how much our sensibilities overlapped. I called psychiatrist Robert Cloninger at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. Cloninger has developed what has become the gold standard of personality tests.3 His paper-and-pencil questionnaire measures, among other things, “self-transcendence,” or an inclination toward spirituality. That includes one’s belief, or disbelief, in phenomena such as mystical experience, or a belief in miracles, the supernatural, and a force greater than oneself directing one’s life.
The four dozen or so spirituality questions are embedded in 240 questions, so you cannot really know which ones are aimed at measuring one’s propensity toward God beliefs or, say, optimism. After my mother and I took the test, separately, we found that our answers about spirituality were identical. I was impressed. Of course, that does not prove anything. But it is suggestive.
Certainly, I wondered whether this was a rigorous enough instrument. And one night at dinner, my husband—a political scientist and an expert on South Asia—asked the obvious.
“Is anyone concerned that self-reporting questionnaires are notoriously unreliable?” he asked. “If I wrote an article about India and said, ‘I interviewed the Indian government and they said they were into peace and disarmament, that they had no desire to threaten Pakistan with nuclear weapons’—if that was the extent of my research, people would question its validity.”
Scientists admit this is the chink in the armor. Indeed, the test itself implied this weakness. Question 230 is: “I have lied a lot on this questionnaire. True or false.” But at this point, it is their best methodology. The self-transcendence questionnaire has become, for now at least, the basis for not only statistical twin research but genetic analysis as well.
A few days later, I told Nathan Gillespie about the identical results my mother and I had scored on the spirituality test. Gillespie is a researcher at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in Richmond, and he has been thinking about the interplay between genes and spirituality for some years now.
“Spiritual beliefs tend to clump in families,” he replied. “That’s one of the questions we’re interested in: What makes some individuals more spiritual than others? Why does spirituality aggregate in families? Why does the apple fall not very far from the tree?”
To unravel that mystery, scientists look to twins—in particular, identical twins, who come from the same embryo and share virtually all their genetic makeup. (Recent studies suggest that there are tiny variations in the DNA of identical twins, but they are minuscule.)
Of course, social environment or upbringing clearly plays a part in one’s spiritual yearnings. Moreover, researchers believe that which religion a person practices has almost nothing to do with DNA, and everything to do with parenting and culture. A person joins a Southern Baptist church not because there’s a Baptist gene but because he grew up in Mississippi going to his parents’ Baptist church. The same is true of the Hindu girl in New Delhi and the Shia Muslim boy in Tehran.4 Still, how intensely a person believes in Jesus or Vishnu or Allah is guided at least in part by his or her genes.
Let me pause here, because the words that I have so blithely written represent a tectonic shift for me, and perhaps for anyone raised in a particular religion. While religions make claims to doctrinal truth, genetics points to the capacity in each of us to experience transcendence, to envision and connect with another dimension. Genetics—and science in general—cannot referee between Christianity and Islam, or Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. It cannot determine winners and losers. It can explain the mechanics of satellite transmission