Science and corporeal religion: a feminist materialist reconsideration of gender/sex diversity in religiosity

This dissertation develops a feminist materialist interpretation of the role the neuroendocrine system plays in the development of gender/sex differences in religion. Data emerging from psychology, sociology, and cognitive science have continually indicated that women are more religious than men, in various senses of those contested terms, but the factors contributing to these findings are little understood and disciplinary perspectives are often unhelpfully siloed. Previous scholarship has tended to highlight socio-cultural factors while ignoring biological factors or to focus on biological factors while relying on problematic and unsubstantiated gender stereotypes. Addressing gender/sex difference is vital for understanding religion and how we study it. This dissertation interprets this difference by means of a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach. This approach builds upon insights from the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, affect theory and affective neuroscience, and social neuroendocrinology, and it is rooted in the foundational insights of feminist materialism, including that cultural and micro-sociological forces are inseparable from biological materiality. The dissertation shows how a better way of understanding gender/sex differences in religion emerges through focusing on the co-construction of biological materiality and cultural meanings. This includes deploying a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of ultrasociality and an understanding of the biology of performativity to argue that religious behavior and temperaments emerge from the enactment and hormonal underpinnings of six affective adaptive desires: the desires for (1) bonding and attachment, (2) communal mythos, (3) deliverance from suffering, (4) purpose, (5) understanding, and (6) reliable leadership. By hypothesizing the patterns of hormonal release and activation associated with ritualized affects—primarily considering oxytocin, testosterone, vasopressin, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin—the dissertation theorizes four dimensions of religious temperament: (1) nurturant religiosity, (2) ecstatic religiosity, (3) protective/hierarchical religiosity, and (4) antagonistic religiosity. This dissertation conceptualizes hormones as chemical messengers that enable the diversity emerging from the imbrication of physical materiality and socio-cultural forces. In doing so, it demonstrates how hormonal aspects of gender/sex and culturally constructed aspects of gender/sex are always already intertwined in their influence on religiosity. This theoretical framework sheds light on both the diversity and the noticeable patterns observed in gender/sex differences in religious behaviors and affects. This problematizes the terms of the “women are more religious than men” while putting in place a more adequate framework for interpreting the variety of ways it appears in human lives