Don't panic, I've not gone 'round the bend. As part of my paperback book tour for WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS, I made a weekend swing through Atlanta to visit one of my best friends, Michael Coles, who is running for the U.S. Senate. I thought it would be fun to spend a few days with him campaigning to see what that is like, and Sunday morning I joined him and the other Democratic candidates (Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, etc.) as we drove around Atlanta to visit six different black Baptist churches (a high black voter turnout is a big boost for the Democrats), including Martin Luther King's old stumping grounds, now surrounding by the impressive Martin Luther King Jr. Center for nonviolent social change. There is a lot of history in that church and it really gave me a eerie feeling to be in there.

Anyway, since I'm just wrapping up my next book on God and religion, and why people believe, I thought this experience would also be a useful exercise in data collection (albeit anecdotal) since I have always heard (but never witnessed first hand) that the black religious experience is somewhat different from the white religious experience. That is an understatement. Personally, most church services I have attended--both as a youth and as an adult--were boring beyond belief. Falling asleep, reading, daydreaming, and other activities meant to do something--anything--with the brain that was rapidly being put into an alpha state, was not at all unusual.

I can now tell you from first hand experience that not a soul in one of these six black churches was asleep. It would be an impossible feat, in fact, since these services are a holotype of interactive feedback loops. And not just the usual signing, praying, and getting up and down, but the vocal responses on the part of audience members to the songs being sung, prayers being prayed, and the sermon being preached. The PA systems were powerful and cranked up full coal--they had to be in order to hear the preachers over the preached. "Say it preacher" ... "Oh ya brother" ... "That's right" ... and hundreds of other responses came bursting forth from around the room, now filled with energy and excitement. You would have to be made of wood not to feel a spiritual presence there, and thus only the tiniest amount of faith, and only a modicum of the willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to "get into the spirit" of the experience. We could not stay long enough to hear the actual message of the formal sermons as we traded quality for quantity, but it really was not necessary to understand the power of religion on this most fundamental level--the human experience of the sacred and divine.

I argue in my God book that religion plays (and played, in both historical and evolutionary time frames) a crucial social role in binding and bonding a people together. Nowhere (with the possible exception of Judaism) is this truer than for the black religious experience in America. As Michael Coles wispered (more like spoke loudly into my ear with cupped hands) to me during one of the serviceds, "the church is the only social institution in the last four centuries that has not let these people down." Religion has played its own ugly role in the ghastly history of slavery, and anything can and has been justified in the name of God and cited in the Bible, including murder, war, and slavery, but Michael is right. Through centuries of slavery, decades of corrupt reconstruction, decades more of Jim Crow American apartide, and overt and covert racism at all levels of our society (I think we are all enlightened enough by now to know that Reagan's fantasy of "colorblindness" is a rather unrealistic appraisal for most of us most of the time), religion and the church has stood steadfast by the side of African Americans, and provided a safe haven where they might enjoy (however fleeting) a sense of freedom from the physical or psychological chains that bound (and, in many ways, still bind) them.

It is hard to argue against the power of belief in an example such as this. It is hard to think of a secular institute that has done as much for blacks as the church has done over the centuries and in our own time. Yes, the government in general, and some private institutions in particular (but not many), have fought for the rights and freedoms of blacks, but sitting there in the pews--one of only a tiny handful of white faces in a sea of color (real and metaphorical)--I could not help but feel at the deepest gut level the sense of togetherness these folks were sharing that morning. As I was greeted by, met and talked to, and listened to the words and messages of hope by what were obviously intelligent, resourceful, gutsy, strong-willed black people, I could not help but feel disgust at the thought of the pseudoscientific crank theories of racial differences in I.Q. being primarily genetically determined (and therefore irrevocably fixed at a lower station in life, for life), or the even more absurd fantasies of Philippe Rushton that the supposedly causal inverse relationship between penis size and I.Q. is somehow related to the higher crime rates and greater number of children born out of wedlock by blacks.

As I listened to the preachers extol their followers to get out and vote because this is the way peaceful, civilized, intelligent people implement social change, I recalled a news item from the night before of a KKK rally in Georgia, and wondered who is the less intelligent race; and simultaneously I had this bizzaro picture in my mind of Charles Murray or Phillipe Rushton standing up there before the congregation, explaining to them: "You see, the data from our scientific studies show that not only are you less intelligent and more inclined to commit crimes and have children out of wedlock, but it appears that this is, largely, a genetically-fixed trait so there really isn't much you can do about it." It would be understandable if even the mighty Martin Luther King, Jr. could have contained his non-violent urges through such ideological nonsense masquerading as science. And before you challenge me with the argument "ya, but the data really DO support that argument," instead of getting into a debate on the subject (which we've already done with an entire issue of SKEPTIC MAGAZINE {Vol. 3, #3} devoted to "Race and I.Q."), in this context I cannot help but wonder to what end such research is directed. Since in science, especially the social sciences, the data never just speak for themselves but must be interpreted through the colored lenses of theory (our perceptions are "theory laden" in the jargon of the trade), given the emotional nature of this subject, and the fuzziness of concepts like "intelligence," just how objective can any of us really be with our theories and observations?