How do non-Christians account for the belief in the resurrection of Jesus? It’s the most important question in apologetics because for Christianity the resurrection is the most crucial doctrine. It is standard fare for Christians, myself to included, to ask for an account of how the disciples came to believe in something so strongly that they would be willing to die for it if they somehow knew it wasn’t actually true?
There are a variety of responses but when it comes to the psychology of the disciples one theory predominates and that is cognitive dissonance. This, the theory goes, that when people have strongly held beliefs (that Jesus is the Messiah for example) and then are faced with a reality that contradicts this deep belief (that Jesus was crucified), humans look for strategies to remove this dissonance (‘He’s alive – it’s a resurrection’) rather than update their beliefs. And this, it is claimed, is exactly what Jesus’ disciples did.
Tim O’Neill, behind the well known site History for Atheists, gives the essential background to cognitive dissonance in his attempt to explain the development of the belief in the resurrection:
The classic psychological study of this phenomenon is Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter’s ‘When Prophecy Fails’, which analyses a case study of a UFO cult that expected the end of the world in December 1954. When the cataclysm and expected alien rescue for the believers did not eventuate, the core of the cult managed to reinterpret the failure into a victory by saying their faith had led God to spare the world. So total failure suddenly transformed into a great victory. We can see various other examples of this phenomenon – eg the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ repeated reinterpretations of their predictions of the end of the world when it failed to happen or the reaction of New Age believers when the recent “2012 Mayan Prophecy” turned out to be wrong.
People refer to cognitive dissonance because it has become an almost universal theory in explaining human behaviour as this article from The New Yorker makes clear:
It’s hard to overstate how influential the theory is today. “You almost certainly can’t get through an introductory psychology class without hearing about cognitive dissonance,” Adam Mastroianni, writer of the psychology Substack “Experimental History,” told me. The phrase has been invoked to explain why environmentalists eat meat and why some Trump supporters play down the President’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Last month, on social media, memes making fun of Cynthia Erivo, the lead actress in the “Wicked” films, for rushing to protect Ariana Grande from a fan, spread on social media. The musician SZA said that we’d eventually look back on these posts and experience cognitive dissonance.
However recent research shows massive problems with Festinger’s work:
Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.
Not only are there reasons to now disregard the original work that sparked the theory but other attempts to replicate the results have also failed leaving the author of The New Yorker article to wonder, “But how successful is a theory of human behavior if it can’t tell you how people will behave?
Now, it’s not necessarily true that all the work done on this since Festinger’s work in the 1950s can be thrown out but it no longer looks like the strong knock back argument that its proponents believe. I wonder as a result if O’Neill and others might now be experiencing a little cognitive dissonance of their own.
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