Do We Need God or Religion to be Good?

Secularism and Moral Progress

According to Pew Research, approximately half the people on earth believe that we need god or religion to be moral, to be good. Beliefs about this vary considerably between individuals, regions, and nations. This variation closely parallels levels of economic development and education—the lower they are, the more likely people are to believe that we do indeed need god or religion to be good. Christians and Muslims tend towards this affirmative response, often even holding the belief that it must be their particular sect or denomination that one must believe in to be good. But such beliefs are simply one more among religion’s surfeit of fables, fictions, and falsehoods. Another lie. A sales pitch. Essentially, propaganda.

Importantly, the question is not really a matter of belief. The question, and answer, concern matters of fact. The abundance of evidence informs us that the answer is actually no—we do not need god or religion to be good. The common assumption that we do is simply false, regardless of people’s beliefs or opinions.

A quarter of all human beings today, around two billion of us, claim no religious affiliation. There is no evidence to suggest that these people are relatively depraved or immoral. The last few centuries actually tell us that human progress is real and is happening. Our moral progress is founded upon increases in secular education, literacy, reason, and science, all of which are at least in part the result of increasing freedom from religion, of increasingly a-theistic thought.

Today’s progressively more secular, atheistically-inclined nations serve as exemplars of this progress. The traditionally myopic, self-centred citizens of the United States (including yours truly) tend to turn a blind eye to the details of life beyond our shores. But it is well worthy of note that many nations, including Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the UK, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, and Sweden, are just some of the nations currently exhibiting:

• Improvements in general education as they shift away from religious indoctrination towards secular education

• Improvements in health care, including lowered infant mortality and significantly improved life expectancy, as religious opposition to science and secular learning loosens its grip

• Reduced provincialism and xenophobia, hand-in-hand with increases in multiculturalism, diversity, and a growing appreciation of global citizenship

• Overall decreases in both criminal and military violence (post-WWII)

• Improvements in justice and the rights of long marginalised groups of people

• Increased respect for human autonomy and personal liberty

• Improved economic development and general wealth

These progressive improvements have a range of distinctly moral ramifications. For example, the more secular nations generally tend to have notably lower rates of violent crime, suggesting, counter-intuitively for many, that non-religious persons may actually be ahead of the faithful in this obviously ‘moral’ area of concern.

Muddying the Waters

Much depends upon the meaning of ‘good’ or ‘moral’, of course. For many, including the secular-minded, ‘moral’ means ethical, principled, or simply inclined to do good, to do the right thing. But considerable confusion stems from the fact that moralising religions like Christianity and Islam blur the line between genuine moral wrong on the one hand, and that which is merely religiously prohibited on the other.

Abrahamic scriptures variously condemn the consumption of shellfish, of pork, and even the wearing of mixed fabrics, as moral abominations. Various sects and denominations continue to prohibit gay marriage and even birth control. Christianity’s Ten Commandments list ‘making false idols’ as a sin, right along with murder, adultery, and lying. But while we would all generally agree that the latter three are indeed moral concerns, the rest are merely culturally and historically specific religious prohibitions. These are not the same thing at all.

Religion is characterised by this muddying of the waters. Another example of this is the manner in which Christianity regularly conflates morality with obedience. This has had obvious real-world implications. Such conflation was a core ideological tool used by white America to control enslaved Africans; they used religion to encourage subservience and promote the view that slavery was a positive for all involved. Christian women have famously been exhorted to obey their husbands as they would Jesus or the Lord.

During the reign of Hitler and the Nazis, over 95% of German citizens were Christians. Those were god-fearing, church-going, bible-reading Christians who dropped a million bombs upon the men, women, and children of Europe. Those were faithful believers who laid the tracks, manufactured the trains, erected the barbed wire fences, dropped the Zyklon B into the ‘showers’, and shovelled the emaciated corpses into mass graves. Then went back to do it again. And again. After the war, a number of the guilty famously asserted that they were ‘simply following orders’, as if this were somehow morally vindicating.

Moral Development

Christianity often does the opposite of what it claims. Though claiming to be the fount of human morality, it serves more to hinder than help our development and maturation as autonomous, reasoning moral agents.

Over the last several centuries, our increasing emphasis upon scientific over religious epistemology has encouraged the development of human knowledge regarding the nature of human morality. Psychologists such as Jean Piaget and his protégé Lawrence Kohlberg helped us recognise and better understand the process by which Homo sapiens undergo stages in moral development.

Moral development is, like so much in human experience, a combination of nurture and nature. Human beings undergo a natural process of cognitive growth, of maturation, marked by clear stages, as we grow from infancy through to adulthood. Our development as moral agents occurs in lock-step with this natural process of cognitive maturation. This natural development is combined with the ongoing nurture supplied by diverse social experiences, interpersonal relations, prosocial modelling and, ideally, ongoing secular education as we continue to grow and mature.

We learn to be good, moral members of a society precisely as we learn to master a language, knap a flint, prepare a meal, parent a child, repair an engine, or perform open-heart surgery. Moral agency is in part a learned behaviour—one which encourages and builds upon prosocial instincts—cultivated incrementally as we grow and mature, cognitively and socially. Consider this description from the field of childhood development:

[Children’s] ability to extend concern to others improves with development, much like numeracy and literacy skills do. This suggests the penny drops at multiple points through a child’s moral development as their understanding of the moral needs of others becomes more nuanced.

All of this presumes, of course, that this process is not thwarted or perverted in some way. Unfortunately, religious indoctrination tends to do just that. Our understanding of right and wrong, of good and bad, and our ability to become mature moral agents are all too often twisted and diminished by religious training. Rather than becoming more nuanced and sophisticated moral agents, the faithful often become mired in the less mature stages of moral development. The capacity to bring sufficient critical reasoning skills to bear in adjudicating complex moral dilemmas remains relatively under-developed.

Kohlberg observed that religions like Christianity tend to freeze us at the immature stage of morality, which is defined by simple self-regard, consisting of little more than the basic drives to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Rather than deep ethical considerations and sophisticated, mature moral agency, religious doctrine often teaches devotees to make moral decisions based solely upon self-seeking: simple fear of the stick of hell in combination with the desire for the rewarding carrot of heaven.

Properly nurtured and cultivated, human maturation moves us well beyond this base stage of moral development. The mature moral agent does not do what is right or good for personal benefit, out of fear of punishment, or for some anticipated reward, nor are their moral beliefs and behaviours a result of authoritative command, be it from scripture or a priest. Mature moral agents do what is right or good based upon principle. They do good simply because it is good. They do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

Moral Relativism

Does this mean that everyone will have their own different concept of what is right or good? Is our increasingly secular society inevitably doomed to moral relativism or subjectivism? If god is removed as an absolute source of the good, will morality simply boil down to a matter of personal taste (subjectivism) or cultural context (relativism)?

Human civilisation has made great strides in our understanding of the ties which bind us, the scientific, humanist, and rational findings which all point in the direction of a shared understanding of the good. One of the finest examples is the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Published in 1948, this inspiring document is a clear-cut example of a universally applicable, humanist vision of the good, of what is right, and of ethics and justice. It captures a unified understanding of the good which would have been unthinkable until that point in human history. The UN’s UDHR is 100% secular, directly countering both religious fear and propaganda that we need god or religion to be good, as well as post-religious concerns regarding the twin threats of relativism and subjectivism.

Much of the progress that has been made in recent decades and centuries is a result of our advancing scientific knowledge. Moral progress is no exception. Scientific knowledge is helping us improve our understanding of Homo sapiens, and of the naturalistic phenomenon of human morality. In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, neuroscientist Sam Harris uses the concept of ‘the wellbeing of conscious creatures’ as an example of a naturalistic, objective touchstone upon which we might ground morality.

I do not argue that Harris’ work is definitive, nor is this example of a naturalistic principle the final word on the subject. But we can see his work as a template, a north star or beacon, pointing us in the right direction. An absolutist foundation for morality can be rooted in just such a naturalistic, science-based understanding of human nature and our evolution as the particular kind of intelligent, social animals we are.

Religion and Social Justice

Thus far the focus has been on morality on the psychological, individual level. But what about our collective morality? Do religious faith and god beliefs help or hinder collective movements for social justice, our progress towards a more just, moral society?

The widely accepted narrative is that religion is a force for good overall. But the evidence of history, viewed objectively, stripped of propaganda, strongly suggests otherwise. Christianity is a conservative social force, generally aligned with the status quo, the power elite, and backwards-facing tradition. As a rule, religion impedes our overall progress by opposing movements for social justice. After the fact, once progress has been made—more often than not as a result of nonreligious, secular forces, motivations coming from outside of, and often opposed by and to, the church—religious institutions eventually change their tune. It may take three or four hundred years for the pope to apologise, but it has been known to happen.

A relatively recent example of this ongoing pattern is religious opposition to LGBTQ persons and lifestyles, and to their quest for justice and equal rights. Rather than champion this moral cause, prominent American Christians like Anita Bryant, the reverend Jerry Falwell, and groups like Moral Majority and Family First viciously vilified LGBTQ persons in the early days of the ‘gay rights’ movement of the 1970s. Millions gathered under the banner of religion to vehemently support anti-queer, anti-diversity forces. They argued—often stridently, even violently—that LGBTQ lifestyles were not merely morally wrong, but that they also threatened the sanctity of marriage, the family, and the American way of life.

Now that a majority of Americans support equal rights for those who are in the LGBTQ+ community, some sects and denominations of the Christian church have switched to claim support for them, waving rainbow flags and banners reading ‘All Are Welcome’. But these churches certainly resisted this moral growth, and many today remain largely unchanged, continuing to oppose this movement for social justice. The historic truth is that Christians tend to be conservative socially, and to oppose progressive movements towards social justice. They are often first among those who fan the fires of injustice and inequality for anyone so unfortunate as to be a member of an ‘out group’.  

So….

Contrary to popular belief, the answer to the original question—‘Do we need god or religion to be good?’—is demonstrably, ‘No, we do not’. The truth is that religions like Islam and Christianity do more to hinder than help us in that regard. Overall, humanity is slowly changing for the better. But the genuine progress we are making is not happening because of religion so much as it is happening in spite of religion.

Positive changes are not coming from inside the church, the alleged source of moral good, but more so from the outside, from our increasingly secular, more progressive society. Religion is in fact a major part of what is holding us back today, slowing the pace of our moral growth. Religious faith and god beliefs serve to limit and hinder human moral growth more than cultivate or encourage it. Freedom from religion is an important prerequisite for the fulfilment of human potential, moral and otherwise.