For many people there is another psychological need. It is the need to bolster their own self-respect. Many of these are the people in lower economic, cultural, social, and intellectual classes. These people live sad and desperate lives. They envy and resent the more fortunate people of the world. They do not get enough respect and they feel looked-down-upon by others. For these people, there is a need to believe that they are as good as if not better than others. They need to believe that they are among the elect few who practice the correct religion, and that however lucky other people may seem, those others are condemned to religious error on earth and to hell upon death. These people need to believe that somehow in the afterlife God will level the playing field and that they are not condemned for all eternity to being poor, backward, inferior, or ignorant. They need to believe that in eternal life there will be no aristocrats and peasants, no intellectuals and simple minds.
Scott Atran says: “In Britain and the United States, the highest measures of religious commitment and the most radical forms of traditional religious affiliation (Pentecostal, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists etc.) are registered among the most marginal or underprivileged social groups, especially minorities and persons at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole.”
If you listen to the preachers of the resentful people of the world you will hear the frequent admonition that as long as they accept Jesus or some other deity as their god and savior, they are better than anybody else. Sometimes their preachers stoke their anger towards the more fortunate. People like Jimmy Swaggert were able to touch a nerve when they inveighed against those others. He would get his congregation into a lather of hatred and condemnation. He appealed to the common psychological phenomenon by which people elevate their own feelings of self-worth by denouncing others.
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