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The Church, Autism and Men

2: God and the male brain - part one

By Craig Millward

[NOTE: I am acutely aware that I am taking a big risk even mentioning the established fact that there are observed and recorded differences between typical male, and typical female, brains.]

Some time ago I found myself wrestling with the implications of an article which concludes that 'adults who reported being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder were more likely than a neuro-typical comparison group to self-identify as atheist and less likely to belong to an organized religion'. Stay with me please - don’t turn to another post because autism doesn’t interest you. If you are male, you are in a relationship with a male or you care about connecting men to God please read on, because men are more likely to be nonbelievers and are also more likely to score highly on the autism spectrum. There may be a link.

“The autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence… In the autistic individual the male pattern is exaggerated to the extreme” Hans Asperger.

In this first post I am simply going to summarise the relevant parts of the study you can find here.

In future posts I will reflect on lessons we can learn from this study about how faith in God can be made more intelligible to men and those with autism. I do not believe that men and those with autism are inherently unable to believe in, and engage with, ideas about God. What they find difficult is the package of features which form the Christian sub-culture within which God is presented to them. My aim is to identify and encourage a culture which assists men, women, children; neuro-typical and those on the autistic spectrum to relate to and follow Jesus. I believe my conclusions will help us all.

Mentalizing Deficits Constrain Belief in a Personal God - a summary

The article begins with the observation that most Christian believers intuitively understand God to be a personal being with the desire and ability to relate to humans. We also trust that God knows and understands us and is willing to use his supernatural powers to respond to human concerns and desires. What is more, we teach the importance of rooting our identity in knowing these things to be true.

Our ability to relate to God in these ways is determined, and may be limited by, our ability to perceive the facts we decide to believe. Because we use the same faculties to relate to ‘God’ as to the world around us, it follows that, if we struggle to appreciate the meanings behind the actions of others, we are going to have similar struggles with understanding what others tell us are the actions of 'God'. To quote the article, 'the social-cognitive capacity to represent and reason about minds - termed mentalizing, theory of mind, or mind perception - also enables the mental representation of God'.

'If mentalizing supports the mental representation of supernatural agents, then mentalizing deficits associated with the autistic spectrum, and also commonly found in men more than in women, may undermine intuitive support for supernatural agent concepts and reduce belief in God.'

The article references neuro-imaging studies which demonstrate how 'thinking about and praying to God activates brain regions implicated in mentalizing' which suggest that the ability to imagine a god might be a necessary step in a journey to believe in a specific God, without being a sufficient cause. 'When adults form inferences about God's mind, they show the same mentalizing biases that are typically found when reasoning about other peoples' minds.'

Digging further, I came across a second study which tests the thesis that the gender gap in religious belief may be better explained by gender differences in empathic concern rather than differences in mind perception.

This report describes eight studies that establish a clear link between the ability to empathise (described as ‘moral concern’ in the report), and belief in God. Whilst the second report calls into question the view that the ability to imagine a god can be used to predict whether a person is likely to believe in God, it is surely self-evident that an inability to form a mental picture is going to restrict an autistic person’s ability to relate to God in ways a neuro-typical person may find compelling. What may come entirely naturally to an individual with a neuro-typical brain may be impossible to grasp by someone with Asperger's Syndrome.

I believe these studies call into question the language we use about God and about faith, some of the practices we engage in when we gather and the assumptions we make about the way all of us relate to God. I will explore each of these in coming posts.