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Morning decisions. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

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Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist on my way, as it turns out, to licensed psychologist. And that is what today's episode, and if all goes according to plan, a bunch of future episodes will primarily be about. So here's kind of what's going on. When you are on the road to becoming a psychologist as I am, there's nothing above licensed psychologist. You could also be something else in another field. But it's kind of like it's the terminal licensure. It's sort of the top spot that you can get to. And since I started my doctoral grad program, that has been the goal all along and I've always planned to get all the way to that top spot. Now, like a medical doctor who has to pass their boards or like a lawyer who has to pass the state bar, if you want to become a licensed psychologist, you have to pass the eppp. People study for months and months even if they've been in school for years and years. So I am beginning this long study process and I've done a couple workshops and things like that to make sure that I'm kind of using my time well. And there is this recurrent theme in the research around test taking, learning, and everybody says some variation of the same thing. The best way to show that you or to make sure that you really absorb it is to know it well enough that you can explain it in general language to a non specialist. Now, dear listener, you might think what I thought immediately. Huh? I wonder if I might try something with the podcast, which is, you know, among other things, a place to explain psychological concepts in plain language to non specialists. So I'm going to take some of the concepts that I am reading through that I think also have interesting applications to religion and I'm going to basically share with you the simple language version of these concepts and then I'm going to do a little additional research for those items in into religion and psychology of religion for applications there. And then I'm gonna share that with you guys and these episodes will be on the shorter end. So a couple ideas I have that I'll try out today with this nature nurture dichotomy is to think about like applications in religion or psychology of religion and group those into maybe three categories like where are the most secure, the most well regarded applications in the domain of religion, what are some kind of moderate middle ground, maybe newer, but interesting. There's some evidence here, or maybe there might be an issue where this seems true, but it's very hard to confirm it because of there's ethical problems, for instance, with studying children in developmental psychology. There might be some theories we have about faith development in children, that they look good from the perspective of our theories and some of the evidence that we have. But it would be hard ethically to get really the kind of data that would really confirm or disconfirm it. And then maybe a final section for like, and here's just some wilder, a bit more speculative, but maybe quite interesting possible applications or kind of like questions that it brings up for me or other researchers. But today we're going to talk about nature and nurture in developmental psychology. You may have heard me say this in previous episodes, that the debate, as it were, between nature or nurture, that is, are human traits and tendencies inborn? Are they part of our nature and they're just going to show up no matter what? Or do they only show up because of the way that we are nurtured, the way that our parents raise us, the way that we are socialized in our larger social context? Things like this. It's not really an either or. We now basically know that it's both. Nature and nurture are both very important. And to the extent that there is a debate or an argument, it's just about the proportion of one or the other. And there is even to complicate things a bit further, the epigenetic view that says, well, we've got genetics, which is, that's nature, right? That's encoded into our genome. But then we've got epigenetics, which is really the study of what types of factors turn on, switch on genes that may or may not be switched on, and these other kind of downstream factors that, that it's like your genetic coding is not itself destiny, that genetic nature has to be expressed within a certain context for certain traits. So that's the kind of basics. It's both. It's nature and it's nurture. Let's go through some of the interesting concepts here. So one really important concept in developmental psychology is critical or sensitive periods. So critical period is the term used for animals. And it's like a limited period of time in an organism's development. So as its body, including its brain, is developing, there are these periods where basically the organism, the animal, which could be a human Animal or another animal is like, ready. It's prepared to get something, a certain behavior or a trait or a capacity. But it does have to have the right environment for it. Now, a very common version of that environment would be like, it has to have enough calories, right? So this is the time when a developing, I don't know, frog gets its hearing. Its hearing, really? I'm making this up. But, like, right, so it's like its hearing develops in the second month of gestation or something like that. I know. I know that frogs come from tadpoles. So I don't know if that's actually called gestation. Just go with me here. So in the second month, you know, that's when a frog gets its ears really start working. But in order for that to happen, the frog needs to be maybe in a safe place. If the frog is feeling frightened, then maybe its brain fills up with cortisol to keep it safe. But that affects the way that it can hear. Again, I'm making this up. In humans, we normally call this a sensitive period, because humans just have a bit more flexibility and plasticity. There are optimal times for certain capacities to develop. That's what the sensitive period is. But those capacities can also develop to some degree or other at an earlier time or at a later time. So the boundaries of a sensitive period are more flexible than the boundaries of a critical period. And this is a guess of mine, but I'm assuming that, especially in terms of psychology, the fact that the human brain is more complex than other animal brains might be one of the factors for moving into what we more called sensitive periods versus critical periods. So there's more flexibility here. Now, religious psychologists or psychologists of religion and other researchers have looked at critical sensitive periods in the realm of the psychology of religion. And there are three areas. Well, four areas, actually. There are four areas that are kind of in this first category of. These are pretty solid. These are empirically and theoretically pretty solid applications of this idea specifically to the psychology of religion. So whether or not a child is socialized into a faith community basically becomes a believer. Whatever we mean by that, you know, at the age we're talking about, there is a pretty well established window for religious and worldview formation. A sensitive period, roughly ages 3 through 12, but with a particular intensity around 3 to 7. So this first finding is gonna include kind of under it, the other three. So I mentioned there are four things. So that's the kind of one main one, and then two through four are sort of examples of this. So. But first, let me Just say three to seven. Pretty young, right? My oldest turned seven within six months or so. No, no, within a year. He's six. He just turned six. Getting the kids birthdays mixed up. Raise your hand if you've ever done that, if you have more than one kid. So he's six. And I would say, like my kind of basic sense of where's he at with psychology of religion? Where's he at with developing any sort of religious worldview? I mean, it's. I would just say, so early. Right. The kind of stuff that I'm used to talking about on this show, theology, kind of deeper concepts, like a little bit of philosophy. Obviously he's nowhere near any of that, but the research says he is actively and really significantly forming a worldview, a view of how things work, what goodness is, justice, things like this. And some basic concepts about God. Right. Three to seven, but continuing on till. Till age 12. So the first of these three sub points is Attachment and God Image. I've talked about God Image on previous episodes. It was a while ago, I want to say, like the first two, three years. Maybe Josh will track down for me the Attachment to God and God Image episodes. I believe there's two episodes where we put that in the title because it was close enough to the kind of central theme of the episode. I'll see if we can find those. Put links in the show notes for those of you who want to listen deeper, learn more about this. But basically, in the first few years of life, we each get early attachment figures. So we talk about attachment science and attachment theory on this show. A lot of times. Generally one or more parent will be primary attachment figure. But other caregivers, family members, adults who are in a kid's life a lot, can also serve as attachment figures, sometimes secondary attachment figures. And basically, Anamaria Rizzuto, who's a psychoanalytic researcher, her concept of God representation basically is this internalized image of God that each person kind of starts with. And what she said was, it actually stays quite stable. It is hard to update later. And it really kind of is your default image of God, and it's based on who your attachment figures were and what they are like. So Lee Kirkpatrick kind of followed up on Rizzuto's work, and he showed that the attachment style that you form as a kid, secure, insecure, things like this predict the character of how you describe God later as an adult. Is God loving primarily or primarily punishing? Primarily judgment judging, judgmental, primarily absent. Right. That like that is this pretty fixed not totally fixed, but pretty solid picture of God that is not going to change unless other things, you know, significantly change in your life. I don't know the percentages here, but basically that's what you're starting with as your default. So that means that at age 6, my oldest son is well on his way to. Okay, if there's a God, God's like this. And what's God like? It's like my wife and I. Basically that's kind of an intense thought if I'm totally honest with myself. Right, so attachment and God image, that's the first of the three subcategories. Second value and moral framework acquisition. Okay, basically the idea here is that a kind of moral grammar, a basic sense of what is morality, how does it work in the world? This comes in early to middle childhood. In other words, early to middle childhood is the sensitive period, like the bullhorned frog developing its hearing. That's the sensitive period when human beings develop their default foundation for values and morality, which includes basic religious reasoning. You know, God is good, God loves me or doesn't love me or does or doesn't love these people and then I'm supposed to love them or whatever. These kind of really basic building blocks. This happens in that early to middle childhood period. Some of you know that I really like Christian Smith. I usually talk about him in the context of his book the Bible Made Impossible. But he's a sociologist and this, what I'm about to share is kind of more what he's known for. So he ran with colleagues the National Study of Youth and Religion. And his work there argued that adolescence is not really the critical window for forming religious identity. We often think that's when we kind of, we figure out who we are, we differentiate from our parents. That's all true, but it's really more of a consolidation period for religious identity. Adolescence is the real formation happens earlier. So families who sort of wait and quote, let children decide for themselves, unquote, which is a very common approach, especially in more left leaning circles. As far as I can tell, those families often find that the window has already, if not closed, closed, like certainly some formation has already happened. So let's get into the research there a little bit. So this national study of youth and religion launched in about 2001, it tracked thousands of young people from ages 13 to 17, when they started through their mid-20s. So it's like a longitudinal big study, big surveys and in depth interviews and just a lot of great data. The headline of all this research was basically by the time that they could study these adolescent individuals, the religious formation had largely already happened. So the strongest predictor of adolescent religiosity, that is how religious an adolescent was, was parental religiosity. So the biggest indicator is how religious are your parents, not your peers, not your youth group programming, not your youth pastor parents. And particularly the warmth and consistency of parental religious practice were overwhelmingly determinative. This is interesting because I think a lot of listeners of this show, and myself included, you know, we are the type of people who are really interested in doctrine, in concepts, in arguments, biblical arguments, theological arguments. We worry a lot about the content of, you know, who's allowed to get married, who's allowed to become a pastor, and these things. Obviously they really matter. They matter tremendously for especially individuals who are denied that opportunity. But they don't have as much of a role in determining who will end up a Christian, basically. And this effect of warm, consistent parental religious practice was not really about instruction. It wasn't about explicit teachings. It was about modeling. It was about participating in rituals with your parents. That is like going to church, taking communion, praying before meals. And it was about relational texture. Is this faith something that the parents visibly live versus they just sort of talk about it? So teenagers were actually kind of conservative in Smith's framing, he uses that not like politically conservative, but like the technical term of conserving tradition. Mostly teenagers hold the religious or non religious orientations of their families of origin and mostly they want to. So this narrative of adolescence as rebellion, which is of course, you know, a part of society, and there is differentiation that happens for sure within adolescence. The average adolescent in terms of religion is not rebellious against their parents or religion. The average teenager, the average adolescent is in line with them. Another big finding is this term that Smith coined called moralistic therapeutic deism. It's this vague belief in a God who wants us to be nice, wants us to feel good about ourselves, doesn't ask a ton of us, and is always available for emergencies. That's moralistic therapeutic deism. I'm going to hold off on talking about this because we did a whole episode. I had an episode with Meredith Ann Miller where we talked about this and we did a Patreon episode where we dug deeper into the moralistic therapeutic deism. So I'll put links to those episodes in the notes. Another big takeaway. Smith's data suggested that parents who deliberately withheld religious formation, this kind of quote, we'll let them choose when they're older. This actually did not create neutrality. What they were really doing. The parents who chose that path is they let the sort of wider ambient culture create the framework. And that often was that moralistic, therapeutic deism. That's kind of what's just broadly available in American culture. And they actually were missing the developmental window where they could have had a greater effect. And if you think about that, it's like, well, you want your kids to decide because you want to give them autonomy. I totally understand the motivation for that, and I understand it doubly if you have been harmed in a church setting. And these are both things that I would say are true of me. I want them to have autonomy, and I have been harmed in church settings. More Christian school settings personally than church. But you get the idea. But the problem is it just doesn't work that way. Doesn't appear to work that way. Jaffrey and I sort of got to decide what we want their default to be, or it'll just get decided for us because we will be busy deciding other things and making other choices about our time and energy and all that kind of a thing. And that's just. That's life. But religious formation, from Smith's research, it works more like language or people who learn to play an instrument by ear and kind of train their ear. It's closer to that than it is to taking a college course that you could just sign up for it when you're ready. It's more about habit, capacity, and expectation, and it is less about content and doctrine. Now, as promised, I said I would also include some kind of little more out there, little less secure findings, but that I think are interesting nonetheless. So here are some of those. One idea is that early childhood is a rare window that closes, you know, closes pretty soon for what we in psychology of religion would often call like mystical or numinous experiences. Now, this is hard. Again, like I think I mentioned this earlier, it's hard to measure stuff about children. And there are a lot of reasons that it's hard to study children. One reason is that children are not as reliable of narrators of their own experience as older individuals. Now, in some ways, you might think that they are more reliable, like they don't know how to lie as much and stuff like that. So there may be some applications where you're better off with kids than adults. But when we're talking about mystical experiences, religious experiences, I mean, these are just areas where language tends to be inexact. I mean, anybody who's had one of these experiences and tried to explain it to somebody else knows what I'm talking about this is a place often where we feel like language breaks down. And so for instance, what we call pre operational children, 2 to 6 year olds, they might have a hard time telling us, but there is some evidence that they are in a heightened state of what we might call of openness to what we might call numinous or oceanic experiences. So they are pre categorical, conceptual, if you want to put it in developmental language. They're not so much coming up with these language systems boxes to put things in like, oh, that's real and that's imaginary and oh, that's my real friend, and oh, that's a friend I talk to in my mind or whatever. So it's difficult. Like again, that makes it hard to kind of capture it in a way that we're happy with as adults. But there is, yeah, there's some evidence that like kids have the type of experience that we would call spiritual, transcendent, mystical experiences. They have them more regularly because they're more open to them. And there's basically a developmental psych reason for thinking that that might be the case. I find that interesting. Whether or not that ends up being accurate. It does make me think of a paper that I saw presented at the American Academy of Religion one year by a philosophy professor out of Cal Poly, my alma mater. Not my alma mater, I didn't actually graduate from it, but I went there for first couple years of school and he was saying he showed brain scans of adults on psilocybin, you know, magic mushrooms, and then brain scans of younger kids, or I think it was actually babies, like maybe six month olds, something like that. And the graphic that he showed was a sort of a computer generated graphic that was trying to sort of take the, what I imagine was FMRI data, dysfunctional mri. You know, you put the little helmet on and over your head and you measure brain waves in different areas. And it was trying to map out the connections between parts of the brain. And so when you take psilocybin, more parts of your brain are sort of able to talk to each other. They are, I mean, that's what we say, they're connected. There is some electricity flowing back and forth between them that we can crudely measure. And the main point was these maps that this computer generation made. The map of a six month old and the map of an adult on psilocybin had a lot in common. And so this presenter said, so one way of thinking about what a little baby is going through is that they're like constantly on kind of like a psychedelic trip. And if you have been around little babies, it's kind of. It's kind of believable. They are just, like, absorbing the world in a way that we couldn't do when we're. When we get older, or we would. You know, our ancestors, if they. If they were tripping balls like that as adults, they would just get killed. You know, you get killed by an animal or killed. If you get in a war with another tribe or whatever, it just. It would not be good for survival. So we don't end up living like that as adults. And we have to sort of induce that through drugs or you can do it through meditation over years of practice, things like this. So that's kind of interesting. Another one, some of you know, Andrew Newberg, he's one of the like. Like, this is your brain on prayer. I don't think that's actually the title of one of his books, but he's like that guy. He's talks a lot about Buddhist monks who have spent a lifetime practicing meditation. And he's done a bunch of sort of neuroscience and religion stuff. And this is a kind of a claim that he and others make that basically it's possible. We know from conversion experiences, we know from adult conversion experiences, that adult conversions, religious conversions, these can make huge changes in people's lives. There is a sense in which it can be a kind of like a boulder tipping over down a hill that was ready to go, and you get these kind of cascade effects, and people's lives are genuinely changed. Now. The research also shows that over time, some of that change reverts back to the mean, but it doesn't always do that. And nonetheless, the change is very significant. And so one idea is that in some way, I don't think the mechanism is known here, but in some way what happens in a dramatic conversion for an adult is that there is, in a sense, a sensitive period. Is revolution opened, like a brief reopening of that sensitivity. He would call it heightened reorganization, or we might say, you know, rewiring or something like that of the brain. This is speculation still, but it's really interesting. I mean, to some extent, it doesn't really matter if the sensitive period is the mechanism. That's interesting. That could be what it is. It may be that something similar neurologically is happening there. But even if it's not a sensitive period, we know it happens. We know that conversion can be a huge change for people. But I thought that was kind of an interesting connection, kind of a mirror claim on the Other side is that maybe just like conversion might reopen this capacity for a sensitive period, and that that period might even last like months or a year or something like that, that there may be sort of a negatively framed thing as well, that trauma and things like trauma may also kind of bring someone into a somewhat prolonged, you know, a medium length period of additional plasticity in the brain, that this functions kind of like another sensitive period and religious change, which I, you know, as a lot of my clients, that especially if there was something kind of traumatic that brought that about, something that, that really kind of shocked the brain, so to speak, maybe like a forced reopening of sensitivity, that that would then open up the capacity for like a deconstruction reconstruction period where you are kind of like able to work in that field now, at a certain point, you start to get interested in it, and then the interest is bringing its own kind of organic energy and kind of bringing you back to the table, so to speak. But it's possible again, that something about that sensitive period, the way that our brains develop, that some of that is being unlocked, maybe in a positive sense in the conversion story. Generally, people report that to be a benefit for their life. You know, they stop drinking, they make up relationships with people that they were estranged with. You know, they stop bad patterns and habits. And also in the negative sense, oh, this bad thing happened to me. And now I have to kind of pick up the pieces. And I've been sort of forced back into a developmentally sensitive period for a time. And that might explain why people feel sometimes this need to kind of work this shit out. Which is where a lot of listeners of this podcast have found me, if not more than half, maybe. So that's pretty interesting as well. I think we're gonna wrap it up here. Please leave me some feedback. Let me know if you enjoy this, if you want more of these. It's definitely helpful for me to kind of keep my mind connected with all this incredible amount of studying. I think maybe I'll bring on guests sometimes. Maybe I'll bring on conversation partners sometimes. Might mix it up different ways, but for now, here's the sort of trial, balloon, test, balloon, the first one. And yeah, let me know what you think. Thanks for listening. We'll see you, I assume, next week with another episode.