osu.edu | Throughout history, scholars and researchers have tried to identify the one key reason that people are attracted to religion.
Some
have said people seek religion to cope with a fear of death, others
call it the basis for morality, and various other theories abound.
But
in a new book, a psychologist who has studied human motivation for more
than 20 years suggests that all these theories are too narrow.
Religion, he says, attracts followers because it satisfies all of the 16
basic desires that humans share.
“It’s not just about fear of
death. Religion couldn’t achieve mass acceptance if it only fulfilled
one or two basic desires,” said Steven Reiss, a professor emeritus of psychology at The Ohio State University and author of The 16 Strivings for God (Mercer University Press, 2016).
“People are attracted to religion because it provides believers the
opportunity to satisfy all their basic desires over and over again. You
can’t boil religion down to one essence.”
