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reference sources and isolated into the new group that now controls her life. Elgin later confessed as much: “I was needy and compulsively fixated on her and our friendship. I was trying to make that replace what I had given up. I felt a need to have something.” It still wasn’t enough, as Sherrill explained: “She went through a period of promiscuity, becoming sexually involved with several men at the center and others outside. For nearly two years ‘I was either at the temple,’ she said, ‘or out on a date. It was a bit crazy.’ Her daughters were left alone at night. Eventually the older one moved out to live with her father. Her younger girl, just sixteen, was ‘close to the edge.’” Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident, and Sherrill considers the sometimes subtle differences between a cult and a religion.

Still, a much more common story is like that of Sherrill herself, a successful journalist at a prestigious publication (The Washington Post), who discovers in her self-searching that “aside from the well-trod pleasures of the quotidian—holidays at the beach, dance parties—you could still feel a greater need for something else entirely. You could feel a hunger and emptiness. You could be tormented by unanswered questions. Modern life leaves many people feeling insignificant and a bit lost. If you were living a spiritual life—and believed you were helping to end suffering—that could make you feel quite potent.”

Indeed, and here we begin to approach that mystery of mysteries of why people believe. Sherrill does not give us the answer, but she does offer one explanation that carries an important qualifier: “There is nobility in sacrifice—any sacrifice. And as much as I didn’t want to admit this, there is in fact a sort of ladder that people seem to ascend in order to be liberated from self-concern and see themselves as part of something larger. And sometimes people do ridiculous things to get there.”

The rub, of course, is in finding that larger something without losing yourself along the way. It is the journey of a lifetime, a voyage we all must take if we want to find deeper spiritual meaning.

APPENDIX I

What Does It Mean to Study Religion Scientifically? Or, How Social Scientists “Do” Science

Chapter 4, “Why People Believe in God,” involves a considerable amount of statistical analysis, so what follows is a brief explanation of what it means to study religion scientifically, and how social scientists “do” science. Human behavior, including religious behavior, is so complex that we must use statistics and probabilities to understand cause-and-effect relationships. Because humans are pattern-seeking animals, we cannot rely on intuitive guesses, as this might result in a scholarly version of “seek and ye shall find”—we may end up discovering what we are looking for in the data.

A good example of this can be seen in the powerful influence of Karl Marx’s theory that social class is the most powerful force in human thought and behavior. For the past century historians intuitively interpreted historical events in this light. Starting with the assumption that social class dominates history, it is very easy to seek and find historical examples of it. In a 1992 biography of Charles Darwin by social historians Adrian Desmond and James Moore, for example, the authors struggled mightily to find evidence to prove their hypothesis that the Darwinian Revolution was class driven, with the upper class in opposition and the lower class in support. The biggest problem for the authors, of course, was that Darwin himself, from womb to tomb, was solidly embedded in the monied aristocracy of nineteenth-century England, thus their book’s subtitle is The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (tormented by the anxiety produced in leading this lower-class revolution). It was not until social scientists began to test this hypothesis that it became clear that socioeconomic status—SES, as it is called—is only one of many variables influencing human action, and more often than not it is a minor variable. In his 1996 book, Born to Rebel,