So you’ve decided to write an opinion piece about how science has just about explained religion.
Congratulations! What you’re doing is incredibly important, and it couldn’t be easier. Just follow these four easy steps and you’ll get published in no time:
1. Write a short, disarming introduction. You don’t want to lose religious readers from the start, so try opening with something cheeky, like a reference to those popular television cavemen, or a breakdown of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Really, just about anything to sugar the pill will be fine—most religious people won’t read this far, and scientists and atheists will skip past the introduction to get to the juicy, hard science.
2. Get to the juicy, hard science. Promise the reader that there are robust, objective new studies that have empirically proven exactly where religion comes from and how it operates. This is what your reader wants, so give it to them as fast as you can! You can just copy the sentence before last… really, it’s that easy! Whatever you do, don’t complicate things by mentioning that “religion” is a difficult category to pin down, or that its multifaceted study is the subject of an entire discipline. Instead, try a callback to the cheeky reference you made in the first section. Everybody loves a callback!
3. Cherry pick. There are plenty of persuasive scientific theories about seemingly-religious things, like our need for attachment or our hatred of The Other. List them as fast as you can! Don’t let on that there are other dimensions of religion that aren’t being considered here, which plenty of established non-scientific fields are investigating. Instead, try another callback!! (Did you notice that I just made a callback to the callback? Did you chuckle? Then you know it works! Callbacks are important.)
4. Wrap it up. You’ll want to get out as fast as you can, before any questions get raised. The pithier the conclusion, the better. You may want to try a callback. (Seriously, you can’t overuse it.)
We hope that you have found these four steps helpful, and I look forward to reading your work! If you’re having trouble with our template, try reading this article from the LA Times. They really have it nailed down!
