Episode 5: Morality from Religion? Nah.

There is a claim at the center of almost every argument for keeping religion embedded in public life: without religion, we have no morality. Strip away the church and the commandments, and all that remains is chaos. This argument is so pervasive that it has become almost invisible. An assumption so widely shared that questioning it feels like questioning whether children need parents.

It is also, as it happens, precisely backwards.

Morality does not require religion. If anything, morality has survived despite some of what organized religion has done in its name. Let me make this argument carefully, because it is easy to make carelessly in ways that are unfair to religious people.

I am not claiming religion has never produced moral goods. It has. The American abolition movement was substantially religiously motivated. Frederick Douglass. Harriet Tubman. The Quakers who ran the Underground Railroad. The white northern clergy who preached against slavery in the years before the Civil War. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was organized largely through Black churches, led largely by ministers, and spoke a moral language thoroughly grounded in the Hebrew prophetic tradition. Liberation theology in Latin America produced generations of activists. The Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day, built one of the most substantial networks of practical care for the poor in American history. These are not edge cases. They are central to the history of moral progress.

What I am claiming is more specific. The moral content of these movements — their commitment to human dignity, their opposition to domination, their insistence on the equal worth of every person — is not derived from religion in the sense that it is not available by any other route. The same commitments can be reached, and have been reached, by rigorous secular reasoning. The Enlightenment thinkers who developed the philosophical foundations of human rights — Locke, Kant, Mill, later Rawls — arrived at conclusions about human dignity that are not distinguishable in their content from what the prophets insisted on. The route was different. The conclusions were the same.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the distinction precisely. What he called the social gospel was not an appeal to Biblical authority as such. It was an insistence that faith, lived honestly, points toward the same evolved moral truths that a clear examination of human dignity requires. That every person counts. That suffering matters. That the powerful do not have the right to oppress the powerless simply because they are powerful. He did not derive his moral commitments from Scripture and then apply them to civil rights. He recognized that Scripture, read honestly, condemns the same things that evolved moral intuition condemns. The cruelty of arbitrary power. The dehumanization of people who do not fit the dominant category. The cowardice of those who could speak and chose silence.

That is the social gospel. It is being fiercely opposed today, just as it was in King's time, precisely because it points to the same moral conclusion that the evidence of evolutionary psychology points to. That every human being's dignity is not negotiable. And that no institution's certainty about God's preferences changes that.

Transcript

Episode 5: Morality From Religion? Nah.

This episode is about where morality actually comes from. And to tell you that, I have to start with my own family. Because the question of where morality comes from has, for me, never been abstract.

It came to me through a Catholic childhood and a lifetime of trying to honor the parts of it that were honest and lay down the parts that weren’t.

I was baptized as a baby in a Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Ukrainian Church. I went through Catechism — the traditional training for young people that is intended to produce fully confirmed Catholics who know exactly what they believe and exactly why they are required to believe it. The teachings stress, from an early age, that the Church has answers to the greatest mysteries of existence — and that those answers were not provisional but final. Not subject to revision. Revealed by God and transmitted, unbroken, through an institution that had been transmitting them for two thousand years.

The questions the Church offered to answer were genuine. Why are we here. What do we owe each other. What happens when we die. But the answers were not to be questioned. Questioning them was not intellectual honesty. It was a failure of faith. The catechism was not an invitation to think harder about God. It was a set of pre-approved conclusions whose acceptance was the price of belonging.

My family attended, but we were not what you’d call strict Catholics. My dad was the least interested in attending, and his rants about the Church were legendary. Which is why I was genuinely surprised by his reaction, much later, when I casually mentioned as an adult that I was thinking of attending a different denomination. He said, “No. You don’t change churches. You’re Catholic. You were born a Catholic and you die a Catholic.”

It took me much longer to understand his reaction. To understand it, you have to know a little about what shaped him.

My dad was born in Soviet Ukraine in the summer of 1932, during the peak of the Holodomor — Stalin’s forced famine that killed an estimated four million Ukrainians. Stalin collectivized the farms, sold off the grain and livestock to finance his industrial program, and left millions to starve. He hid the atrocity by paying off Western journalists and assassinating the ones who wouldn’t comply. It took a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, to finally expose it. My dad was raised, quite literally, in a barn on one of Stalin’s brutal collectives. His earliest memories were of constant hunger and of digging in the fields for a stray potato.

His family moved to France just before the outbreak of World War II. That is where he met my mom.

My mom was born in Versailles in 1935. She spent a good portion of her childhood living under Nazi occupation. She and her seven brothers and sisters were raised alone by her mother in a one-room attic, a short distance from the Castle of Versailles — which, draped in an oversized Nazi banner, had become home to the German Wehrmacht. She vividly remembers standing in long lines for food, and seeing children and adults wearing the yellow Star of David patches.

She learned at a very young age how simply being born a certain religion or race could subject you to unspeakable horrors. Man’s inhumanity to man, on full display for everyone to see.

Neither of my parents placed much trust in the Church. And yet they still felt an obligation to belong. The promised certainty the Church offered was powerful enough to overcome whatever distrust they still carried. For my dad, it was powerful enough that he wouldn’t even consider changing denominations.

Here is the part I am least comfortable admitting. I recognized those same tendencies in myself, years later. Despite my agnosticism, I felt the pull of the Church after each of my kids was born. The desire for certainty and community for my children led me back, much as it had led my parents. So I am not describing a weakness I watched from a safe distance.

Then my son started experiencing gender dysphoria. And it became clear that this topic seemed to breathe new life into the religious right and the emerging Christian nationalist movement. Their messaging was clear. Gender is binary. Determined by God at conception. Fixed for life. Deviation is immoral. So immoral that it represented a threat to God’s Kingdom.

The Church had an answer. The answer was wrong. Not because I decided it was wrong. Not because I preferred an answer that was easier for my family. Because when I followed the evidence — the same evidence my engineering training had taught me to follow — it was impossible to ignore.

So I want to ask the question this chapter is named for. Where does morality actually come from?

There is a claim at the center of almost every argument for keeping religion embedded in public life: without religion, we have no morality. Strip away the church and the commandments, and all that remains is chaos. This argument is so pervasive it has become almost invisible — an assumption so widely shared that questioning it feels like questioning whether children need parents. It is also, as it happens, precisely backwards.

Morality does not require religion. If anything, morality has survived despite some of what organized religion has done in its name. Let me make this argument carefully, because it is easy to make carelessly in ways that are unfair to religious people.

I am not claiming religion has never produced moral goods. It has. The American abolition movement was substantially religiously motivated — Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the Quakers who ran the Underground Railroad. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was organized largely through Black churches, led largely by ministers. The Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day, built one of the most substantial networks of practical care for the poor in American history.

These are not edge cases. They are central to the history of moral progress, and they are genuinely religious.

What I am claiming is more specific. The moral content of those movements — their commitment to human dignity, their opposition to domination, their insistence on the equal worth of every person — is not available by religion alone. The same commitments can be reached, and have been reached, by rigorous secular reasoning. The Enlightenment thinkers who built the philosophical foundations of human rights — Locke, Kant, Mill, later Rawls — arrived at conclusions about human dignity not distinguishable in content from what the prophets insisted on. The route was different. The conclusions were the same.

And here is a clue worth pausing on. The philosopher Derek Parfit, in his three-volume On What Matters, spent decades arguing that the major secular ethical theories, pursued honestly, all converge on the same conclusions about what we owe each other. When frameworks that start from completely different premises arrive at the same answer, that convergence is itself a form of evidence. You don’t need a revelation. The reasoning gets there on its own.

Now, here is the harder part. If morality evolved rather than was revealed, we have to ask where it actually came from.

Michael Tomasello, of the Max Planck Institute, has spent more than thirty years investigating the origins of human moral psychology. His work, synthesized in A Natural History of Human Morality, points to one capacity. Modern humans evolved, far beyond any other primate, in their capacity for shared intentionality — the ability to jointly attend to a common situation, share a goal, coordinate toward it. That gave us a survival advantage no other species has matched.

And it produced something else. Morality. Not handed down from above, but evolved — imperfectly, unevenly — as the set of rules that enable the cooperation our species depends on.

Chimpanzees share food. Apes protect their young. Our ancestors, long before they had a single word for any god, were already governing themselves by principles of mutual aid — because bands that internalized them survived better than bands that didn’t. That’s not a pious story. It’s a practical one. And it’s older than every temple on earth.

The evolutionary account also explains why those intuitions fail in predictable ways. They were calibrated for in-groups of a few hundred people, not nations of hundreds of millions. They produce in-group favoritism and out-group hostility — exactly the raw material that organized religion and nationalism have learned to exploit.

This is where Jonathan Haidt’s work becomes useful. Haidt identified six basic building blocks of human moral intuition — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Progressives weight care and fairness heavily. Conservatives spread their weight more evenly across all six. 

That explains why moral disagreement is so persistent — the people disagreeing are often not disagreeing about the evidence at all. They are weighting different foundations differently. It also explains why people resist clear evidence on a question like gender identity. The claim that gender is a binary is experienced not as a factual proposition but as a sacred one. Challenge it, and you don’t just seem wrong. You seem to be transgressing. Try to argue someone out of a sacred belief using only facts and logic, and you are engaging the wrong circuitry.

So if morality evolved rather than was revealed, we also have to ask what role religious institutions have actually played in its development. Not in theory. In practice. Over the centuries when they held the most power.

The record is not encouraging.

By the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church had become the first global organization to formally authorize the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A series of papal decrees declared that European Christian monarchies had the God-ordained right to conquer and permanently enslave the peoples of Africa and the Americas. This was the mainstream theological consensus of the most powerful religious institution in the world, and its certainty about God’s will made it immune to the moral evidence surrounding it.

After the Civil War, Southern churches did not simply acquiesce to the reimposition of racial hierarchy. Many of them provided its most eloquent defenses, deploying Biblical language against integration with the same fluency they had once deployed against abolition.

The point is not that religion is uniquely malignant. Human institutions of every kind have been capable of terrible things. The point is specific. The claim that religion is the source of morality is empirically false. And the political implication drawn from it — that we need religion in our government to keep us moral — is not only false but dangerous. Governments that have embedded religious doctrine into law have not been more moral. They have been more certain. And certainty is not the same thing as goodness.

Phil Zuckerman has spent much of his career studying the most secular societies on earth — Scandinavia, Japan, Iceland. By almost every measurable indicator — violent crime, child welfare, civic trust, corruption — they rank among the most morally successful societies in human history. If the story that you need religion to be moral were true, these countries would be a mess. They are not.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the distinction precisely. What he called the social gospel was not an appeal to Biblical authority as such. It was an insistence that faith, lived honestly, points toward the same evolved moral truths a clear examination of human dignity requires. That every person counts. That suffering matters. That the powerful do not have the right to oppress the powerless simply because they are powerful.

He did not derive his commitments from Scripture and then apply them to civil rights. He recognized that Scripture, read honestly, condemns the same things evolved moral intuition condemns — the cruelty of arbitrary power, the dehumanization of people who do not fit the dominant category. The social gospel is fiercely opposed today, just as it was in King’s time, precisely because it points to the same conclusion the evidence points to. That every human being’s dignity is not negotiable. And that no institution’s certainty about God’s preferences changes that.

Now, something personal. I have been told, more than once — by clergy, by politicians, by neighbors — that as a parent of a trans child who is also a person of no religion, my moral standing in this debate is limited. That because I don’t believe in God, I can’t speak to the values at stake. I reject that completely. The argument assumes exactly what needs to be demonstrated — that God has a design, that the design is knowable, and that the people claiming to know it are reading it correctly. None of that can be established by evidence. It is a matter of faith. And it cannot be the basis for laws that govern people who do not share the faith.

The Constitution doesn’t protect my son’s rights because the founders were more theologically correct than their opponents. It protects his rights because they built a system in which the government cannot impose any particular theology on the people it governs.

The First Amendment is not an anti-religious document. It is an anti-theocratic one. Thomas Jefferson, in his Statute for Religious Freedom in Virginia, wrote that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry. James Madison opposed government chaplains and any mingling of religious and civil authority at all. The argument that people of no religion have no standing in debates about governance is not a theological argument. It is a political argument about who gets to participate in democracy. And the Constitution’s answer is unambiguous. All citizens have equal standing, regardless of their theological convictions or lack thereof.

Here is what I am asking of religious people — and it is not that they abandon their faith. The philosopher John Rawls called it public reason. In a democracy, the arguments used to justify the coercive power of the state have to be accessible to all citizens, not only to those who share a particular religious tradition. Religious arguments don’t have to be absent from public life. They have to be translatable — stated in terms a citizen who does not share the faith can evaluate on the merits. The evidence about what transgender children need is translatable in exactly that way. It does not require any religious commitment to evaluate.

There is one more piece worth putting on the table, because it explains how otherwise decent people end up on the wrong side of this. The psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying what he called moral disengagement — the mental maneuvers by which good people neutralize their own moral responses to harm they are causing. Euphemistic labeling: we’re restricting access, not denying care. Displacement of responsibility: I’m just following the rules. Dehumanization: they’re confused children being manipulated by adults.

Every one of those maneuvers is visible in the current campaign against transgender children. The politicians voting for these bills mostly did not look carefully at the evidence and disagree with it. They deployed one of Bandura’s maneuvers to avoid engaging with the evidence at all.

The antidote to moral disengagement is moral re-engagement — the simple restored perception that a real human being is being affected. That is why testimony matters. That is why my son’s story matters. There is a word for the willingness to extend moral concern to people who are not in your group, who do not share your certainty. It is empathy. And empathy is not a soft virtue. It is the hardest and most politically consequential thing I know how to ask of anyone — because it requires you to sit with the discomfort of someone else’s reality without resolving it into a reassuring certainty. That is not a liberal position. It is the logical extension of the moral instincts evolution gave us, applied honestly.

So let me bring this back to where I started it. To my dad. Who could not let go of his Catholic identity even as he raged at the Church. Whose certainty about who I was — Catholic, by birth and by death — could not be revised, even as he revised so many other inherited certainties over a long life. I loved him. I miss him. And I understand now, in a way I didn’t then, that what he was holding onto was not theology. It was belonging. The need to know who you are and where you stand. And the danger of asking too many questions of the answer that gave you safety.

Morality before religion. Evidence before revelation. Democracy before theocracy. That is what the evidence shows. And so, when an institution tells you that it speaks for God and therefore need not answer to you — when it tells you that your son’s dignity is up for a vote because a doctrine says so — the appropriate response is the same one Rosa Parks gave the bus driver.

Nah.