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between birth order and openness, with laterborns scoring higher than firstborns. Sulloway has pointed out that laterborns tend to be more open to experience than firstborns because they must generally be more exploratory in finding a valued family niche and to compete for limited parental attention and resources. Not surprisingly, we found a strong correlation between openness and political liberalism. But we also discovered a significant correlation on the agreeableness (tough-minded—tender-minded) scale: We found that religious people are more tender-minded. But it should be noted that laterborns, when controlled for sex, socioeconomic status, education, age, and sibship (brother and sister) size, are more liberal than firstborns. Related to this is the finding that laterborns are more tender-minded than firstborns. So, overall, belief in God was significantly related to being conservative and being tender-minded, but because laterborns are more liberal and also more tender-minded than their elder siblings, these two predisposing factors will tend to cancel themselves out in the expression of religiosity.

In sum, people who score high in openness are less religious, more likely to entertain religious doubts, more likely to change their beliefs, and less likely to attend church. Why? Additional adjectives that correlate highly with openness to experience on the Personality Inventory we used offer some insight. These include: inventive, versatile, curious, optimistic, original, insightful, and unconventional. Consider what it means to be less religious and skeptical of God in a country in which 90 to 95 percent of the population are believers. To even arrive at this position one would have to be inventive, curious, and insightful. And to maintain this skepticism in the face of the possibility of great scorn being heaped by zealous believers would mean one would need to be optimistic and original. More than anything else, one would need to be unconventional. Religion and belief in God is, if nothing else, conventional. In fact, I would argue that it is the convention in our culture. With the possible exception of politics (and even this is probably a distant second), you would be hard pressed to find another convention that generates so much zealousness on the part of followers. To be pious—an adjective almost exclusively used to describe compliance in the observance of religion—means compliance to convention.

In order to probe deeper into the question of why people believe, we asked next a series of questions with similar wording, for example, To what extent does emotional comfort contribute to your religious beliefs? (followed by a 1 to 9 scale, from not at all to completely). Additional reasons for belief included “faith,” “apparently intelligent design of the world,” “without God there is no basis for morality,” and “a desire for meaning and purpose in life.” We also included two questions involving the undermining of religious belief: To what extent does the existence of evil, pain. and suffering undermine your religious beliefs? and To what extent have scientific explanations of the world undermined your religious beliefs? The final question was concerned with belief and evidence: To what extent do you believe there is concrete evidence or proof of God?

In analyzing the data, we lumped these questions into two groupings: (1) rational influences on belief (the apparent intelligent design of the world; without God there is no basis for morality; the existence of evil, pain, and suffering; and scientific explanations of the world); and (2) emotional influences on belief (emotional comfort, faith, and desire for meaning and purpose in life). The single strongest correlation we found was for gender: Men tended to justify their belief with rational reasons, while women tended to justify their belief with emotional reasons. This finding dovetails well with the other significant relationships we found, such as a positive correlation between education and rational arguments for God’s existence, and a negative correlation