This week, Vermont and Iowa became the latest states to legalize same sex marriage. This is clearly a matter of life and death. Before you put me in the loony bin for writing that, let me explain.
Decades of research has demonstrated the role of belief systems in helping people deal with awareness of death. In short, humans don't want to die (usually), but we also know that we will. This creates the potential for enormous angst and anxiety. How do humans deal with this?
A theory called terror management theory, put forth by social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski and Sheldon Solomon, argues that people cling to their belief systems (secular or religious) because these beliefs protect them from death anxiety. In short, we still know we will die, but our beliefs give us a sense of immortality. Literally, we can beat death by living on in a next life. Symbolically, we can defeat death by being valuable members of a worldview that will continue beyond our death.
As with any theory, empirical evidence can either support or reject its predictions. In this case, hundreds of lab studies have demonstrated that people reminded of death (compared to a whole range of other negative thoughts) respond more negatively towards people with different beliefs. For instance, Americans become more supportive of war against Iran, and Palestinians of suicide bombings. This is not just all talk. People also become more violent themselves. In several studies, participants gave more hot sauce to people with different beliefs when first reminded of death. They did this despite believing that the sauce could aggravate the person's stomach condition.
Current research has begun to explore "death thoughts" when people's beliefs have been supported or challenged. To test this, people are given a series of word fragments that can possibly be completed with a death word (e.g., they are given G R A _ _ which can be "grape" or "grave.") In one version of this, people who scored high on a religious fundamentalist scale were shown arguments against the Bible. Participants who were exposed to these messages had higher thoughts of death than those that were not. Other studies have shown that the converse is also true. People who are allowed to defend their beliefs later have lower thoughts of death than people who are not.
People on both sides of the gay marriage debate are often baffled by the arguments for or against it. For instance, people in favor of it might think that gay marriage threatening the sanctity of marriage, and society itself, is absurd. Surely, if two males are allowed to marry, men all over the US are not going to up and leave their wives and children for other men (don't worry, they will not magically be sexually drawn to penises like moths to a flame). Nor, do I think society as we know it is going to crumble, or that God is going to somehow destroy the nation with a flood (last I checked other countries allowing gay marriage haven't been destroyed). And of course, whether two guys upstairs can legally have sex and file taxes together has nothing do with a straight couple's marriage. Straight couples can still have children, fight, go to movies and do whatever else they always have done.
But when you look at it from a terror management perspective, you can see why people are so threatened by these different worldviews. It is a matter of life and death. Hopefully, perhaps, knowledge of this can help us all co-exist a bit more peacefully.
