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Why Religion Is Not the Source of Moral Progress

All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.

—The Dalai Lama’s Facebook statement for September 10, 2012

The claim that religion cannot be the driver of moral progress will surprise—and in many cases offend—some readers, who may assume that advancement in the realm of morality has been primarily due to the guiding light of religious teachings.1 The reason for this misunderstanding is twofold. One, religion has had a monopoly on morality for millennia, and so we have grown accustomed to associating any moral progress with the one institution most closely associated with it. Two, religious institutions take credit for moral progress while ignoring or glossing over moral regress. Before I turn to what the data show, a brief history of religious morality is illuminating for my thesis.

On the good side of the moral scale, it was Jesus who said to help the poor, to turn the other cheek, to love thine enemies, to judge not lest ye be judged, to forgive sinners, and to give people a second chance. In the name of their religion, people have helped the poor and needy in developed nations around the world, and in America they are the leading supporters of food banks for the hungry and postdisaster relief. Many Christian theologians, along with Christian churches and preachers, advocated the abolition of the slave trade, and continued to press for justice in modern times. Some civil rights leaders were motivated by their religion, most notably the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose speeches were filled with passionate religious tropes and quotes. I have deeply religious friends who are highly driven to do good and, though they may have a complex variety of motives, they often act in the name of their particular religion.

So religion can and does motivate people to do good works, and we should always acknowledge any person who or institution that pushes humanity farther along the path of progress, expands the moral sphere, or even just makes the life of one other person a little better. To that end we would do well to emulate the ecumenicalism of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who appealed to all religious faiths to join scientists in working to preserve the environment and to end the nuclear arms race. He did so because, he said, we are all in this together; our problems are “transnational, transgenerational and transideological. So are all conceivable solutions. To escape these traps requires a perspective that embraces the peoples of the planet and all the generations yet to come.”2 That stirring rhetoric urges all of us—secularists and believers—to work together toward the common goal of making the world a better place.

But for too long the scales of morality have been weighed down by the religious thumb pressing on the side of the scale marked “Good.” Religion has also promoted, or justified, such catastrophic moral blunders as the Crusades (the People’s Crusade, the Northern Crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, and Crusades One through Nine); the Inquisitions (Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman); witch hunts (products, in part, of the Inquisitions that ran from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period and executed tens of thousands of people, mostly women); Christian conquistadors who exterminated native peoples by the millions through their guns, germs, and steel; the endless European wars of religion (the Nine Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, the French Wars of Religion, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the English Civil War, to name just a few); the American Civil War, in which Northern Christians and Southern Christians slaughtered one another over the issue of slavery and states’ rights; and the First World War, in which German Christians fought French, British, and American Christians, all of whom believed that God was on their side. (German soldiers had Gott mit uns—God with us—embossed in the metal of their belt buckles.) And that’s just in the Western world. There are the seemingly endless religious conflicts in India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, and numerous countries in Africa, the Coptic Christian persecution in Egypt, and of course Islamist terrorism has been a scourge on societal peace and security in recent decades, and a day doesn’t go by without some act of violence committed in the name of Islam.

All of these events have political, economic, and social causes, but the underlying justification they share is religion. Once moral progress in a particular area is under way, most religions eventually get on board—as in the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, women’s rights in the twentieth century, and gay rights in the twenty-first century—but this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time. In this chapter I will focus primarily on the effects of religion in the Western world, especially Christianity, since it has been so influential in the history of the West and because it lays claim more than any other to being the driver of moral progress.

WHY RELIGION CANNOT BE THE DRIVER OF MORAL PROGRESS

The rules that were dreamed up and enshrined by the various religions over the millennia did not have as their goal the expansion of the moral sphere. Including other sentient beings within the circle of moral concern was not on their radar. Moses did not come down from the mountain with a detailed list of the ways in which the Israelites could make life better for the Moabites, the Edomites, the Midianites, or for any other tribe of people that happened not to be them. One justification for this constricted sphere can be found in the Old Testament injunction to “Love thy neighbor.” Who, precisely, is thy neighbor? According to the anthropologist John Hartung, thy neighbor was understood to be one’s immediate kin and kind, which was admittedly an evolutionary stratagem appropriate for the time:

The phrase Love thy neighbor as thyself comes from the Torah. The word Torah means law and the Torah is the Law. If Moses had been transmitting the word of his god to modern biologists he might have said “Love your neighbor as if r = 1—as if all of your genes are identical.” According to the ancient Israelites’ autobiographical ethnography, this was the general principle from which prohibitions against murder, theft, and lying were derived. But who qualifies for this apex of morality? Who is thy neighbor?3

Hartung notes that “Most contemporary Jews and Christians, who both have the highest regard for the god of the Torah, answer that the law applies to everybody,” but as I have outlined above, this is because Jews and Christians have inculcated into their moral thinking the modern Enlightenment goal of broadening and redefining the parameters of moral consideration. But that is not what the authors of the Old Testament had in mind, as Hartung explains:

[W]hen the Israelites received the love law, they were isolated in a desert. According to the account, they lived in tents clustered by extended families, they had no non-Israelite neighbors, and dissention was rife. Internecine fighting became rather vicious, with about 3,000 killed in a single episode (Exodus 32:26–28). Most of the troops wanted to “choose a [new] captain and go back to Egypt” (Numbers 14:4). But their old captain, Moses, preferred group cohesion. If we want to know who Moses thought his god meant by neighbor, the law must be put into context, and the minimum context that makes sense is the biblical verse from which the love law is so frequently extracted.

The biblical passage in question is Leviticus 19:18, which reads, “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” As Hartung notes, “In context, neighbor meant ‘the children of thy people,’ … in other words, fellow in-group members.”

Again, from an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense. Indeed, it would be suicidal to love thy neighbor as thyself when thy neighbor would like nothing better than to exterminate you, which was often the case for the Bronze Age peoples of the Old Testament. What good would have come of the Israelites loving, for example, the Midianites as themselves? The results would have been catastrophic given that the Midianites were allied with the Moabites in their desire to see the Israelites wiped off the face of the earth. That’s why Moses assembled an army of twelve thousand troops as recorded in Numbers 31:7–12:

They warred against Mid′ian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and slew every male. They slew the kings of Mid′ian.… And the people of Israel took captive the women of Mid′ian and their little ones; and they took as booty all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods. All their cities in the places where they dwelt, and all their encampments, they burned with fire, and took all the spoil and all the booty, both of man and of beast. Then they brought the captives and the booty and the spoil to Moses.

That sounds like a good day’s pillaging, but when the troops got back, Moses was furious. “What do you mean you didn’t kill the women?” he asked, exasperated, since it was apparently the women who had enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful with another god. Moses then ordered them to kill all the women who had slept with a man, and the boys. “But save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man,” he commanded, predictably, at which point one can imagine the thirty-two thousand virgins who’d been taken captive rolling their eyes and saying, “Oh, God told you to do that, did he? Right.” Was the instruction to “keep the virgins for yourselves” what God had in mind by the word “love” in the “love thy neighbor” command? I think not. Of course, the Israelites knew exactly what God meant (this is the advantage of writing scripture yourself—you get to say what God meant) and they acted accordingly, fighting for the survival of their people. With a vengeance.

The world’s religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces.

The history of Mormonism is a case in point. In the 1830s the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, received a revelation from God to enact what he euphemistically called “celestial marriage,” more accurately described as “plural marriage”—the rest of the world calls it polygamy—just about the time he found a new love interest while married to another woman. Once Smith caught the Solomonic fever for multiple wives (King Solomon had at least seven hundred), he couldn’t stop himself or his brethren from spreading their seed, along with the practice, which in 1852 was codified into Mormon law through its sacred Doctrines and Covenants. Until 1890, that is, when the people of Utah—desirous for their territory to become a state in the Union—were told by the US federal government that polygamy would not be tolerated; it was outlawed in all other states.

Conveniently, God issued a new revelation to the Mormon leaders, instructing them that a plurality of wives was no longer a celestial blessing, and that instead monogamy was now the One True Way. As well, Mormon policy forbade African Americans to be priests in the church. The reason, Joseph Smith had decreed, was that they are not actually from Africa but instead are descendants of the evil Lamanites, whom God cursed by making their skin black after they lost the war against the good Nephites, both clans of which were descendants of two of the lost tribes of Israel. Naturally, since the evil Lamanites were prohibited from having sexual relations with the good Nephites, interracial marriage was also banned. (Smith claimed to know this story because it had been dictated in an ancient language onto gold plates by the angel Moroni, who buried them in Smith’s backyard near Palmyra, New York. Smith translated the plates into English by burying his face in a hat containing magic stones.) This racist nonsense lasted a century and a half until it came into contact with the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Even then, it took the church a while to notice that the times they were a-changing. In 1978, the church head, Spencer W. Kimball, announced that he had received a new revelation from God instructing him to drop the racial restrictions and adopt a more inclusive attitude.4

There are three reasons for the sclerotic nature of religion: (1) The foundation of the belief in an absolute morality is the belief in an absolute religion grounded in the One True God. This inexorably leads to the conclusion that anyone who believes differently has departed from this truth and thus is unprotected by our moral obligations. (2) Unlike science, religion has no systematic process and no empirical method to employ to determine the verisimilitude of its claims and beliefs, much less right and wrong. (3) The morality of holy books—most notably the Bible—is not the morality any of us would wish to live by, and thus it is not possible for the religious doctrines derived from holy books to be the catalyst for moral evolution. Let’s look at this last point in more detail to understand why.

THE MORALITY OF THE BIBLE

The Bible is one of the most immoral works in all literature. Woven throughout begats and chronicles, laws and customs, is a narrative of accounts written by, and about, a bunch of Middle Eastern tribal warlords who constantly fight over land and women, with the victors taking dominion over both. It features a jealous and vengeful God named Yahweh who decides to punish women for all eternity with the often intolerable pain of childbirth, and further condemns them to be little more than beasts of burden and sex slaves for the victorious warlords. Why were women to be chastened this way? Why did they deserve an eternity of misery and submission? It was all for that one terrible sin, the first crime ever recorded in the history of humanity—a thought crime, no less—when that audacious autodidact Eve dared to educate herself by partaking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Worse, she inveigled the first man—the unsuspecting Adam—to join her in choosing knowledge over ignorance. For the appalling crime of hearkening unto the voice of his wife, Yahweh condemned Adam to toil in thorn- and thistle-infested fields, and further condemned him to death, to return to the dust whence he came.

Yahweh then cast his first two delinquent children out of paradise, setting an angel and a flaming sword at the entrance to be certain that they could never return. Then, in one of the many foul moods he was wont to fall into, Yahweh committed an epic hemoclysm of genocidal proportions by killing every sentient being on Earth—including unsuspecting adults, innocent children, and all the land animals—in a massive flood. To repopulate the planet after he decimated it of all life save those spared in the Ark, Yahweh commanded the survivors—numerous times—to “be fruitful and multiply,” and rewarded his favorite warlords with as many wives as they desired. Thus was born the practice of polygamy and the keeping of harems, fully embraced and endorsed—along with slavery—in the “good book.”

As an exercise in moral casuistry, this perspective-taking question comes to mind: did anyone ask the women how they felt about this arrangement? What about the millions of people living in other parts of the world who had never heard of Yahweh? What about the animals and the innocent children who drowned in the Flood? What did they do to deserve such a final solution to Yahweh’s anger problem?

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It’s chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.

Consider the morality of the biblical warlords who had no qualms about taking multiple wives, adultery, keeping concubines, and fathering countless children from their many polygamous arrangements. The anthropologist Laura Betzig has put these stories into an evolutionary context in noting that Darwin predicted that successful competition leads to successful reproduction. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin showed how natural selection works when members of a species compete for reproductive resources: “It is certain that amongst almost all animals there is a struggle between the males for the possession of the females,” adding this anthropological observation: “With savages, the women are the constant cause of war.”5

With this framework in mind Betzig analyzed the Old Testament and found no less than forty-one named polygamists, not one of which was a powerless man. “In the Old Testament, powerful men—patriarchs, judges, and kings—have sex with more wives; they have more sex with other men’s women; they have sex with more concubines, servants, and slaves; and they father many children.”6 And not just the big names. According to Betzig’s analysis, “men with bigger herds of sheep and goats tend to have sex with more women, then to father more children.”7 Most of the polygynous patriarchs, judges, and kings had two, three, or four wives with a corresponding number of children, although King David had more than eight wives and twenty children, King Abijah had fourteen wives and thirty-eight children, and King Rehoboam had eighteen wives (and sixty other women) who bore him no fewer than eighty-eight offspring. But they were all lightweights compared to King Solomon, who married at least seven hundred women. There were Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women he married, then for good measure added three hundred concubines, which he called “man’s delight.”8 (What Solomon’s concubines called him was never recorded.)

Although many of these stories are fiction (there is no evidence, for example, that Moses ever existed, much less led his people for forty years in the desert but leaving behind not a single archaeological artifact), what these biblical patriarchs purportedly did to women was, in fact, how most men treated women at that time, and that’s the point. Put into context, the Bible’s moral prescriptions were for another time for another people and have little relevance for us today.

To make the Bible relevant, believers must pick and choose biblical passages that suit their needs; thus the game of cherry picking from the Bible generally works to the advantage of the pickers. In the Old Testament, the believer might find guidance in Deuteronomy 5:17, which says, explicitly, “Thou shalt not kill”; or in Exodus 22:21, a verse that delivers a straightforward and indisputable prohibition: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

These verses seem to set a high moral bar, but the handful of positive moral commands in the Old Testament are desultory and scattered among a sea of violent stories of murder, rape, torture, slavery, and all manner of violence, such as occurs in Deuteronomy 20:10–18, in which Yahweh instructs the Israelites on the precise etiquette of conquering another tribe:

When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves.… But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded.

Today, as the death penalty fades into history, in the Old Testament Yahweh offers this list of actions punishable by death:

• Blaspheming or cursing the Lord: “And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.” (Leviticus 24:13–16)

• Worshiping another god: “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” (Exodus 22:20)

• Witchcraft and wizardry: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (Exodus 22:18) “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:27)

• Female loss of virginity before marriage: “If any man take a wife [and find] her not a maid … Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.” (Deuteronomy 22:13–21)

• Homosexuality: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:13)

• Working on the Sabbath: “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the LORD: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death.” (Exodus 35:2)

The book considered by more than two billion people to be the greatest moral guide ever produced—inspired as it was by an all-knowing, totally benevolent deity—recommends the death penalty for saying the Lord’s name at the wrong moment or in the wrong context, for imaginary crimes such as witchcraft, for commonplace sexual relations (adultery, fornication, homosexuality), and for the especially heinous crime of not resting on the Sabbath. How many of today’s two billion Christians agree with their own holy book on the application of capital punishment?

And how many would agree with this gem of moral turpitude from Deuteronomy 22:28–29: “If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are caught in the act, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman’s father, and she shall become his wife. Because he violated her he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives.” I dare say no Christian today would follow this moral directive. No one today—Jew, Christian, atheist, or otherwise—would even think of such draconian punishment for such acts. That is how far the moral arc has bent in four millennia.

The comedian Julia Sweeney, in her luminous monologue “Letting Go of God,” makes the point when she recalls rereading a familiar story she learned in her Catholic childhood upbringing:

This Old Testament God makes the grizzliest tests of people’s loyalty. Like when he asks Abraham to murder his son, Isaac. As a kid, we were taught to admire it. I caught my breath reading it. We were taught to admire it? What kind of sadistic test of loyalty is that, to ask someone to kill his or her own child? And isn’t the proper answer, “No! I will not kill my child, or any child, even if it means eternal punishment in hell!”?9

Like so many other comedians who’ve struck the Bible’s rich vein of unintended comedic stories, Sweeney allows the material to write itself. Here she continues her tour through the Old Testament with its preposterous commandments:

Like if a man has sex with an animal, both the man and the animal should be killed. Which I could almost understand for the man, but the animal? Because the animal was a willing participant? Because now the animal’s had the taste of human sex and won’t be satisfied without it? Or my personal favorite law in the Bible: in Deuteronomy, it says if you’re a woman, married to a man, who gets into a fight with another man, and you try to help him out by grabbing onto the genitals of his opponent, the Bible says you immediately have to have your hand chopped off.10

Richard Dawkins memorably characterized this God of the Old Testament as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”11 Most modern Christians, however, respond to arguments like mine and Dawkins’s by saying that the Old Testament’s cruel and fortunately outdated laws have nothing to do with how they live their lives or the moral precepts that guide them today. The angry, vengeful God Yahweh of the Old Testament, Christians claim, was displaced by the kinder, gentler New Testament God in the form of Jesus, who two millennia ago introduced a new and improved moral code. Turning the other cheek, loving one’s enemies, forgiving sinners, and giving to the poor is a great leap forward from the capricious commands and copious capital punishment found in the Old Testament.

That may be, but nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus revoke God’s death sentences or ludicrous laws. In fact, quite the opposite (Matthew 5:17–30 passim): “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” He doesn’t even try to edit the commandments or soften them up: “Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven.” In fact, if anything, Jesus’s morality is even more draconian than that of the Old Testament: “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.”

In other words, even thinking about killing someone is a capital offense. In fact, Jesus elevated thought crimes to an Orwellian new level (Matthew 9:27–29): “Ye have heard it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” And if you don’t think you can control your sexual impulses Jesus has a practical solution: “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” President Bill Clinton may have physically sinned in the White House with an intern, but by Jesus’s moral code even the evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter sinned when he famously admitted in a 1976 Playboy magazine interview while running for president, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”12

As for Jesus’s own family values, he never married, never had children, and he turned away his own mother time and again. For example, at a wedding feast Jesus says to her (John 2:4): “Woman, what have I to do with you?” One biblical anecdote recounts the time that Mary waited patiently off to the side for Jesus to finish speaking so that she could have a moment with him, but Jesus told his disciples, “Send her away, you are my family now,” adding (Luke 14:26): “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

Charming. This is what cultists do when they separate followers from their families to control both their thoughts and their actions, as when Jesus calls to his flock to follow him or else (John 15:4–7): “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” But if a believer abandons his family and gives away his belongings (Mark 10:30), “he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands.” In other passages Jesus also sounds like the tribal warlords of the Old Testament:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:34–39)

Even sincere Christians cannot agree on Jesus’s morality and the moral codes in the New Testament, holding legitimate differences of opinion on a number of moral issues that remain unresolved based on biblical scripture alone. These include dietary restrictions and the use of alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine; masturbation, premarital sex, contraception, and abortion; marriage, divorce, and sexuality; the role of women; capital punishment and voluntary euthanasia; gambling and other vices; international and civil wars; and many other matters of contention that were nowhere in sight when the Bible was written, such as stem-cell research, gay marriage, and the like. Indeed, the fact that Christians, as a community, keep arguing over their own contemporary question “WWJD?” (What Would Jesus Do?) is evidence that the New Testament is silent on the answer.

IS RELIGION RESPONSIBLE FOR WESTERN CIVILIZATION?

Even if our morality does not originate in the Bible, religious believers will often argue that Christianity gave Western civilization its most precious assets: art, architecture, literature, music, science, technology, capitalism, democracy, equal rights, and the rule of law. In the United States, you hear it in the boosterism of everything from conservative talk radio to presidential speeches. According to the conservative president Ronald Reagan, for example, America is “a shining city on a hill,”13 a metaphor he got from the liberal president John F. Kennedy, who quoted the seventeenth-century cofounder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, who proclaimed, “We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”14 The reference originates from Jesus’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount to his followers: “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Matthew 5:14)

The question of religion’s role in the shaping of the West is an empirical one, which the popular conservative Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza attempts to answer in the affirmative in his 2008 book What’s So Great About Christianity, sans question mark to affirm the case.15 “Western civilization was built by Christianity,” D’Souza proclaims. “The West was built on two pillars: Athens and Jerusalem. By Athens I mean classical civilization, the civilization of Greece and pre-Christian Rome. By Jerusalem I mean Judaism and Christianity. Of these two, Jerusalem is more important.”

After the Dark Ages, in which marauding hordes of Huns, Goths, Vandals, and Visigoths overturned the progress that arose from Athens and Jerusalem and transformed Europe into a cultural backwater, Christianity illuminated the dark continent “with learning and order, stability and dignity. The monks copied and studied the manuscripts that preserved the learning of late antiquity.”16 To support his case, D’Souza quotes the historian J. M. Roberts, who opined in his book The Triumph of the West, “We could none of us today be what we are if a handful of Jews nearly two thousand years ago had not believed that they had known a great teacher, seen him crucified, dead, and buried, and then rise again.”17 Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Mozart, Handel, Bach, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and all the other geniuses throughout the past half millennium, D’Souza asserts, were inspired by the great “Christian themes of suffering, transformation, and redemption.” D’Souza’s point is not just that all these great artists were Christian. “Rather, it is that their great works would not have been produced without Christianity. Would they have produced other great works? We don’t know. What we do know is that their Christianity gives their genius its distinctive expression. Nowhere has human aspiration reached so high or more deeply touched the heart and spirit than in the works of Christian art, architecture, literature, and music.”18

This last claim is both preposterous and parochial. Were Homer and Sappho Christians? Were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World inspired by Christ’s great gift of salvation? Clearly we do know what geniuses in the past have done without Christianity, in the great ancient pre-Christian civilizations of Sumeria, Babylonia, Akkadia, Assyria, Egypt, and Greece in the West; the ancient civilizations that arose in the Indus Valley in modern-day Pakistan and India; in the Yellow River and Yangtze River valleys in modern-day China; and in many others besides. Every one of these peoples produced magnificent works of art and architecture, music and literature, science and technology—though it should be noted that both Christians and Muslims often did their best to annihilate all evidence of these achievements with innumerable acts of cultural vandalism, pillaging, and censorship.

No one disputes the magnificence of countless works of art, architecture, literature, and music that were inspired by Christianity: the great cathedrals that make the spirit soar, the requiems that capture the heartache of loss, the psalms of joy that unite listeners, the paintings that dazzle with light and human emotion. But artists who live in a Christian world, who are surrounded by other Christians, who understand next to nothing beyond Christianity, and who are likely being supported by Christian patrons are going to produce Christian work. Christianity was the dominant religion at a moment in history when Europe was going through a Renaissance and an explosion of discoveries of new lands and new sources of energy; no wonder it ended up being the great patron. Thus the fact that artists living in Christendom were inspired by the life and death of Jesus by crucifixion, and not, say, by the life and death of the Buddha by mushrooms is not a surprise. Christianity was the only game in town.

RELIGION AND CAPITALISM

In his 2005 book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, Rodney Stark writes of Christianity, “It is this commitment to manual labor that so distinguishes Christian asceticism from that found in other great religious cultures, where piety is associated with rejection of the world and its activities. In contrast with Eastern holy men, for example, who specialize in meditation and live by charity, medieval Christian monastics lived by their own labor, sustaining highly productive estates. This … sustained a healthy concern with economic affairs. Although the Protestant ethic thesis is wrong, it is entirely legitimate to link capitalism to a Christian ethic.”19

Once again we can run the historical experiment and make a prediction: if this hypothesis is true, then societies in which Christianity is or was the dominant religion should show Western-like forms of democracy and capitalism. They don’t. The Byzantine Empire, for example, was predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian from the early AD 300s, and for seven centuries produced nothing remotely like democracy and capitalism as practiced in modern America. Even early America wasn’t like it is today when, a mere two centuries ago, women couldn’t vote, slavery was legal and widely practiced, and capitalism’s wealth was vouchsafed to only a tiny minority of landholders or factory owners. Throughout the late Middle Ages and well into the Early Modern Period, all the nation-states, city-states, and various political conglomerates of western and central Europe were not only Christian but also Western Christian, and yet as late as the nineteenth century the only quasi-democratic republics in Europe were England, Holland, and Switzerland.20 In Christian Europe, both England and Spain profited handsomely from their overseas colonial empires, made more profitable yet by the decimation of the native populations and the looting of their troves of precious metals, gems, and other natural resources—actions that by today’s moral standards would be condemned.21

In any case, how modern conservatives turned Jesus into a free-market capitalist is baffling given what he had to say on the matter in the Bible: In Matthew 19:21 Jesus told his flock: “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” In Matthew 19:24 Jesus told a disciple: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” In Luke 6:24–25 the Messiah admonished the wealthy (along with the fulfilled and happy): “Woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! For ye shall mourn and weep.” And in Luke 16 Jesus recounts a moral homily about a rich man “clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day” and “a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” When the beggar died he “was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom” but when the rich man died he was buried, “and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.”

Religion has a mixed effect on the psychology of wealth—how the poor feel about being poor, and how the rich feel about being rich. According to a 2013 study by Humboldt University of Berlin psychologist Jochen Gebauer and his colleagues, religion makes being poor less onerous, but it makes being rich less salubrious: “In comforting the poor, religious teachings de-emphasize the importance of money, which would buffer low-income’s psychological harms.” The study involved a massive dataset of 187,957 respondents from eleven religiously diverse countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Turkey), who took the Trait Psychological Adjustment Scale, which measures adaptability, calmness, cheerfulness, contentedness, energy, health, optimism, positivity, resilience, and stability.

They found that believers who are rich are better adjusted than believers who are poor, but only in less religious cultures. In more religious cultures, rich believers were more poorly adjusted than rich nonbelievers. And richer nonbelievers were better adjusted than poorer nonbelievers in both highly religious and less religious cultures.22 The study, however, just examined religiosity in general, and thus it does not distinguish, say, the Protestant prosperity preachers of the United States—such as Oral Roberts, the Reverend Ike, and Joel Osteen—who tell their aspirants that God wants them to be rich (and give plenty back to the church),23 from the Catholic Mother Teresa–like nuns of India, who tell their supplicants that prosperity is to be found in the next life as a salve for their misery in this one.24 So here again religion is a mixed bag: offering consolation to the poor for what they don’t have and justification to the rich for what they do have.

RELIGION AND EQUAL RIGHTS

If God really believes in equal rights for all of his people, one would think that he would have said something about them in his holy book. But such sentiments are nowhere to be found in the Bible.

In an entire book on the subject, for example, Dinesh D’Souza manages to find only one biblical passage that supports anything like a modern moral value—in Galatians 3:28—when the Apostle Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” D’Souza imagines that this Bible verse is the foundation of the famous line in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence—“All men are created equal.” D’Souza opines, “Here Christian individualism is combined with Christian universalism, and the two together are responsible for one of the great political miracles of our day, a global agreement on rights held to be inviolable.”25

I’m afraid not. D’Souza has yanked the passage out of context, and the surrounding verses demonstrate clearly what Paul is up to (Galatians 3:1): “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?” And what is this truth, according to Paul? The truth is that “[T]he Jew in becoming a Christian did not need to become a Greek, nor the Greek a Jew. The slave might continue to serve his master, and ‘male’ and ‘female’ retained each its function in the ongoing stream of life.”26 In other words, Paul is saying that you can carry on as you are. If you’re Greek, there’s no need to become a Jew—a significant dispensation, given that a man converting to Judaism often had to submit to adult circumcision, and this is just the kind of thing that puts a guy off the whole idea. (Rule number one for getting lots of converts, Paul realized, is let the guys keep their foreskins. Let circumcision be spiritual—“of the heart”—instead of physical, as Paul writes in Romans 2:29, and a lot more men are going to sign up and become card-carrying members of the faith.) Paul was not a revolutionary advocating violence,27 and he most assuredly wasn’t ghostwriting the US Constitution. He was saying that if you’re a slave, you must keep on being a slave; if you’re a wife, you must continue being regarded as property; no matter who you are, you can still worship Jesus Christ and be abused by your culture in whatever manner is customary for someone of your breeding and station.

D’Souza’s claim that the Bible points toward equality is especially nonsensical in light of the fact that slaves remained slaves for eighteen more centuries, and women remained little more than property for nineteen more centuries in Christian countries around the world. Clearly, even if Paul’s message were interpreted to mean that we’re all equal, absolutely no one took it seriously. But what Paul’s passage really meant was that anyone can go to heaven by accepting Jesus as the Christ (as instructed in John 3:16), and that’s the message of universalism—not equal treatment in this world, but in the next world.28

Finally, as for Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “All men are created equal,” far from the Bible being the source of this greatest of all moral precepts, Jefferson explained its inspiration a half century after he wrote it. In a letter to Henry Lee in 1825, he wrote: “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”29

IS RELIGION GOOD FOR SOCIETAL HEALTH AND HAPPINESS?

If religion is not the source of morality nor the foundation of Western civilization, is it nonetheless good for societal well-being? This is a hotly contested question for which the data are complex and often conflicting—in part because different scholars have different definitions of societal health—so it is easy to data-snoop studies to support one conclusion or the other. I will expound on the many possible criteria of societal health below, but let’s start with something relatively simple: charity.

According to the social scientist Arthur C. Brooks, in his book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (another book title that boldly carries no question mark), when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering, numerous quantitative measures debunk the myths of “bleeding heart liberals” and “heartless conservatives.”30 Conservatives donate 30 percent more money than liberals (even when controlled for income), give more blood, and log more volunteer hours. Religious people are four times more generous than secularists in giving to all charities, 10 percent more munificent to nonreligious charities, and 57 percent more likely to help a homeless person.31 Those raised in intact, religious families are more charitable than those who are not. Charitable givers are 43 percent more likely to say they are “very happy” than nongivers, and 25 percent more likely than nongivers to say their health is “excellent” or “very good.”32 The working poor give a substantially higher percentage of their incomes to charity than any other income group, and three times more than those on public assistance of comparable income; in other words, poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is.33 “For many people,” Brooks explains, “the desire to donate other people’s money displaces the act of giving one’s own.”34 This, he concludes, has led to a “bright cultural line inside our nation”:

On one side are the majority of citizens who are charitable in all sorts of formal and informal ways—so charitable that they make America exceptional by international standards. On the other side of the line, however, is a sizeable minority who are conspicuously uncharitable. We have identified the reasons these two groups are so different, and they are controversial reasons: One group is religious, the other secular; one supports government income redistribution, the other does not; one works, the other accepts income from the government; one has strong, intact families, the other does not.35

A major explanation for these findings, however, is that they don’t reflect religious belief but political belief. People who think it is the government’s job to take care of the poor through public programs (liberals and many secularists) feel less of a need to give privately, since they already give through their taxes, whereas people who think taking care of the poor should be done privately (many religious conservatives) feel the need to step up and deliver.

Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren observes that Brooks focuses too little on what he calls “the forgotten middle: moderates.” Liberals donate significantly more money than moderates, even while conservatives give significantly more than both moderates and liberals. Thus, Lindgren concludes, “moderates would seem to be the ungenerous ones, not liberals.” Yet, to the point of what beliefs lead to an expansion of the moral sphere to include more people, Lindgren adds, “Those who oppose income redistribution tend to be less racist, more tolerant of unpopular groups, happier, less vengeful, and more likely to report generous charitable donations.”36 But conservatives hold that government income redistribution of other people’s money is not the same as charitable giving of one’s own money. When the government takes money from one person and gives it to another person, the moral motivation is removed and shifted into the realm of politics. You may think this is where it belongs (as many liberals do), but note that this difference between rates of giving by liberals and conservatives may reflect a personal versus political perspective.

On the negative side of the moral ledger, social scientist Gregory S. Paul conducted an in-depth statistical analysis involving seventeen First World prosperous democracies (those with a population of four million or more and a per capita GDP of $23,000 or more in 2000 dollars) in the Successful Societies Scale database (Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States). He wanted to know how they score on a wide range of twenty-five different indicators of social health and well-being, including homicides, incarceration, suicides, life expectancy, gonorrhea and syphilis infections, abortions, teen births (fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds), fertility, marriage, divorce, alcohol consumption, life satisfaction, corruption indices, adjusted per capita income, income inequality, poverty, employment levels, and others, on a 1–9 scale from dysfunction to healthy. Paul also quantified the religiosity of each of the seventeen countries by measuring to what extent the citizens in each believe in God, are biblical literalists, attend religious services at least several times a month, pray at least several times a week, believe in an afterlife, and believe in heaven and hell, ranking them on a 1–10 scale.37

The results were striking … and disturbing. Far and away—without having a close second—the United States is not only the most religious of the seventeen nations but also the most dysfunctional. You can see it in figure 4, 1–7 below: figure 4-1: religiosity and overall societal health; figure 4-2: religiosity and annual homicides per 100,000; figure 4-3: religiosity and incarcerations per 100,000; figure 4-4: religiosity and suicides per 100,000; figure 4-5: religiosity and teen pregnancies per 1,000; figure 4-6: religiosity and abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–19; and figure 4-7: religiosity and divorces per 100.

Since this 2009 study Paul has accumulated additional supporting data that he shared with me. “I have since doubled the SSS [Successful Societies Scale] to a massive four dozen indicators of socioeconomic success and dysfunction, everything including the kitchen sink is in this thing,” he wrote in an email, concluding even more definitively:

In both the original and upgraded SSS the U.S. scores the worst, sometimes severely so, in the most factors, and despite some strengths it scores the lowest on the 0–10 SSS at around 3. It is not just social ills—income growth is mediocre (1995–2010), social mobility is so low that we have become a rigid class society, private and public debt loads are unusually high. The laissez-faire World Economic Forum used to rank the U.S. as the most competitive, now we are behind five of those progressive Euro countries the right endlessly denounces as “Entitlement Societies” and falling. This cannot be explained away by inherent extraneous factors such as high ethnic-racial diversity or immigration because the correlations are too weak.… The most successful democracies are the most progressive, scoring up to 7 on the SSS.39

Correlation is not causation, of course. But if religion is such a powerful force for societal health, then why is America—the most religious nation in the Western world—also the unhealthiest on all of these social measures? If religion makes people more moral, then why is America seemingly so immoral in its lack of concern for its poorest, most troubled citizens, notably its children?

It may well be that the left and the right are not so cleanly cleaved, and the moderate middle is muddying the statistical waters. The right and the left do seem to cluster along religious lines. Political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart examined data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, analyzing thirty-seven presidential and parliamentary elections in thirty-two nations over the previous decade. They found that 70 percent of the devout (those who attend religious services at least once per week) voted for parties of the right, compared with only 45 percent of the secular (those who never attend religious services). The effect is especially striking in America. For example, in the 2000 US presidential election, they write, “religion was by far the strongest predictor of who voted for Bush and who voted for Gore—dwarfing the explanatory power of social class, occupation, or region.”40

Figure 4-1

Figure 4-2

Figure 4-3

Figure 4-4

Figure 4-5

Figure 4-6

Figure 4-7

Figure 4, 1–7. The Relationship Between Religion and Societal Health

Figure 4-1: religiosity and overall societal health; figure 4-2: religiosity and annual homicides per 100,000; figure 4-3: religiosity and incarcerations per 100,000; figure 4-4: religiosity and suicides per 100,000; figure 4-5: religiosity and teen pregnancies per 1,000; figure 4-6: religiosity and abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–19; and figure 4-7: religiosity and divorces per 100.38

The theory of “social capital” may help explain the benefits of religious community. As defined by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, social capital means “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” This is something different from individual “civic virtue,” Putnam qualifies. “The difference is that ‘social capital’ calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.” The reason is that social capital has what economists call “positive externalities,” or the unintended consequences accruing to others or to society at large. “If the crime rate in my neighborhood is lowered by neighbors keeping an eye on one another’s homes, I benefit even if I personally spend most of my time on the road and never even nod to another resident on the street.”

Thus, Putnam continues, social capital can be both a private and a public good. “Some of the benefit from an investment in social capital goes to bystanders, while some of the benefit redounds to the immediate interest of the person making the investment. For example, service clubs, like Rotary or Lions, mobilize local energies to raise scholarships or fight disease at the same time that they provide members with friendships and business connections that pay off personally.”41 For our purposes here, however, social capital has implications for moral progress by defining relationships of reciprocity and enforcing rules of conduct in communities that may or may not be religious in nature. This is an example of reciprocal altruism discussed in chapter 1, and social capital generalizes the principle to communities at large, as Putnam expounds:

I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road. The Golden Rule is one formulation of generalized reciprocity. Equally instructive is the T-shirt slogan used by the Gold Beach, Oregon, Volunteer Fire Department to publicize their annual fund-raising effort: “Come to our Breakfast, we’ll come to your fire.” “We act on a norm of specific reciprocity,” the firefighters seem to be saying, but onlookers smile because they recognize the underlying norm of generalized reciprocity—the firefighters will come even if you don’t.42

Consider Putnam’s “social capital” in the context of Norris and Inglehart’s analysis of data from the World Values Survey, in which they found a positive correlation between “religious participation” and membership in “non-religious community associations,” including women’s, youth, peace, social welfare, human rights, and environmental conservation groups and, apparently, bowling leagues (evidently, religious people are less likely to bowl alone). As Norris and Inglehart note, “By providing community meeting places, linking neighbors together, and fostering altruism, in many (but not all) faiths, religious institutions seem to bolster the ties of belonging to civic life.” The data, Norris and Inglehart conclude, support one theory that explains religion’s endurance in the face of secularism: “This pattern confirms social capital theory’s claim that the social networks and personal communications derived from regular churchgoing play an important role, not just in promoting activism within religious-related organizations, but also in strengthening community associations more generally.”43

Integrating all of these studies and their mixed findings, I hypothesize that in less religious democracies, it is secular institutions that produce the social capital that leads to societal health. In America, sacred social capital leads to charitable generosity but does comparatively less well when it comes to such social ills as homicides, STDs, abortions, and teen pregnancies. Two reasons suggest themselves: (1) these problems have other causes entirely; (2) secular social capital works better for such problems. The social scientist Frank Sulloway proposed another explanation when I queried him about these studies. “The first and most important influence is as follows: people who live in awful situations, with rampant disease, war, crime, and general insecurity, turn to religion. With reference to this relationship, bad health and a threatening existence are causing religiosity, not vice versa.” The causal relationship, says Sulloway, is not “religion leads to bad health,” but rather “bad health leads to religion” and “good health promotes liberalism.”44

On balance, then, my conclusion is that religion does not contribute significantly to a nation’s overall well-being. Religion doesn’t “poison everything,” as Christopher Hitchens famously concluded in his book God Is Not Great,45 but it is noxious enough to conclude that it is not needed to create a healthy society.

IS RELIGION GOOD FOR PERSONAL HEALTH AND HAPPINESS?

If religion does not give us the moral values we hold today, and it did not produce Western civilization, and it does not make societies healthier and happier, does it at least make individual believers healthier and happier? Here again the results are mixed. On the one hand, certain religious beliefs are blatantly bad for health: Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refuse life-saving blood transfusions; Christian Scientists, who believe God will heal their disease or sickness, thus there is no need for medical treatment and as a consequence some die from treatable diseases; Pentecostal Followers of Christ, who reject all medical treatment and as a consequence have a childhood mortality rate twenty-six times greater than that of the general population; Hindus, who believe in reincarnation and who believe illness is the result of karmic revenge from bad action in a prior life and thus do not seek medical care.46

On the other hand, in a meta-analysis of more than three dozen studies published in 2000, the psychologist Michael McCullough and his colleagues found a strong correlation between religiosity and health, well-being, and longevity: highly religious people were 29 percent more likely to be alive at any given follow-up point than were less religious people.47 When this study was widely publicized, skeptics were challenged by believers to explain the results, as if to say, see, there is a God and this is the payoff for believing.

In science, however, “God did it” is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were at work. “God works in mysterious ways” will not pass peer review. Even such explanations as “belief in God” or “religiosity” must be broken down into their component parts to find possible causal mechanisms for the links between belief and behavior that lead to health, well-being, and longevity. This is what McCullough and his University of Miami colleague Brian Willoughby did in a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies. They found that religious people are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors such as exercise, visiting dentists, and wearing seat belts, and they are less likely to smoke, drink, take recreational drugs, and engage in risky sex.48 Why? Religion provides a tight social network that reinforces positive behaviors and discourages negative habits, and it leads to greater self-regulation for goal achievement and self-control over negative temptations—another form of social capital that can be constructive whether it is religious or secular.

Even the term “self-control” needs to be operationally defined and broken down into its component parts to see how it works. This is precisely what the Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister did in his 2011 book coauthored with the science writer John Tierney and appropriately titled Willpower.49 Self-control is the employment of one’s power to will a behavioral outcome, and research shows that young children who delay gratification (for example, forgoing one marshmallow now for two later50) score higher on measures of academic achievement and social adjustment later in life. Religions offer the ultimate delay of gratification strategy (eternal life), and Baumeister and Tierney cite research showing that “students who spent more time in Sunday school scored higher on laboratory tests of self-discipline,” and that “religiously devout children were rated relatively low in impulsiveness by both parents and teachers.”51 Of course, many religions require a certain level of self-discipline to even become a member (through required membership rituals, sacraments, tithing, and the like), so when measured later by social scientists they may be a self-selected group who are already high in self-control and willpower.

The underlying mechanisms of setting goals and monitoring one’s progress, however, can be tapped by anyone, religious or not. Meditation, in which you count your breaths up to ten and then do it over and over, Baumeister and Tierney note, “builds mental discipline. So does saying the rosary, chanting Hebrew psalms, repeating Hindu mantras.” Brain scans of people conducting such rituals show strong activity in areas associated with self-regulation and control of attention. McCullough, in fact, describes prayers and meditation rituals as “a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”

In his lab, Baumeister has demonstrated that self-control can be increased with the practice of resisting temptation, but you have to pace yourself because, like a muscle, self-control can become depleted after excessive effort, leaving you more likely to succumb to a subsequent temptation. Finally, Baumeister and Tierney add that religion acts as a monitor of behavior, a feedback system, and it gives people a sense that someone is watching over them. For believers, that someone may be God or other members of their religion.52 For nonbelievers, family, friends, and colleagues serve as the watchers—those who will look upon misbehaviors with disapproval.

The world is full of temptations, and as Oscar Wilde said, “I can resist everything except temptation.” Religion is one path to resisting temptation, but there are others. We could follow the secular path of the nineteenth-century African explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who proclaimed, “self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder,” especially if we have a “sacred task,” as Stanley called it; his was the abolition of slavery. We would do well, in our darker moments, to reflect on Stanley’s admission that “This poor body of mine has suffered terribly … it has been degraded, pained, wearied & sickened, and has well nigh sunk under the task imposed on it; but this was but a small portion of myself. For my real self lay darkly encased, & was ever too haughty & soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.”53

Select your sacred task, monitor and pace your progress toward that goal, eat and sleep regularly to increase your willpower, sit and stand up straight and be organized and well groomed (Stanley shaved every day in the jungle), and surround yourself with a supportive social network that reinforces your efforts. Such sacred salubriousness is the province of everyone—believers and nonbelievers—who will themselves to loftier purposes.

DECONSTRUCTING THE DECALOGUE

There is arguably no better known set of moral precepts than the Ten Commandments, but they were written by and for people whose culture and customs were so different from ours as to make them either irrelevant to modern peoples or immoral were they to be obeyed. As an exercise in moral casuistry, let’s consider them again in the context of how far the moral arc has bent since they were decreed more than three millennia ago, and then reconstruct them from the perspective of a science- and reason-based moral system.54

I. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. First, this commandment reveals that polytheism was commonplace at the time and that Yahweh was, among other things, a jealous god (see God’s own clarification in Commandment II). Second, it violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution in that it restricts freedom of religious expression (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”), making the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places such as schools and courthouses unconstitutional.

II. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. This commandment is also in violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of speech, of which artistic expression is included by precedence of many Supreme Court cases (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”). It also brings to mind what the Taliban did in Afghanistan when they destroyed ancient religious relics not approved by their Islamist masters. Elsewhere in the Bible, the word “idol” is synonymously used, with the Hebrew word pesel translated as an object carved or hewn out of stone, wood, or metal. What, then, are we to make of the crucifix, worn by millions of Christians as an image, an idol, a symbol of what Jesus suffered for their sins? The crucifix is a graven image of torture as it was commonly practiced by the Romans. If Jews today were suddenly to start sporting little gas chambers on gold necklaces the shocked public reaction would be as unsurprising as it would be unmistakable.

I the LORD thy God am a jealous God. That might explain the genocides, wars, conquests, and mass exterminations commanded by the deity of the Old Testament. These humanlike emotions reveal Yahweh to be more like a Greek god, and much like an adolescent who lacks the wisdom to control his passions. The last part of this commandment—visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me—violates the most fundamental principle of Western jurisprudence developed over centuries of legal precedence that one can only be guilty of one’s own sins and not the sins of one’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or anyone else, for that matter.

III. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. This commandment is once again an infringement on our Constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech and religious expression, and another indication of Yahweh’s petty jealousies and un-Godlike ways.

IV. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Again, freedom of speech and of religious expression mean we may or may not choose to treat the Sabbath as holy, and the rest of this commandment—For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy—makes it clear that its purpose is to once again pay homage to Yahweh.

 

Thus far, the first four commandments have nothing whatsoever to do with morality as we understand it today in terms of how we are to interact with others, resolve conflicts, or improve the survival and flourishing of other sentient beings. At this point the Decalogue is entirely concerned with the relationship of humans and God, not humans and humans.

 

V. Honor thy father and thy mother. As a father myself, this commandment feels right and reasonable, since most of us parents appreciate being honored by our children, especially because we’ve invested considerable love, attention, and resources into them. But “commanding” honor—much less love—doesn’t ring true to me as a parent, since such sentiments usually come naturally anyway. Plus, commanding honor is an oxymoron, made all the worse by the hint of a reward for so doing, as in the rest of that commandment: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. Honor either happens naturally as a result of a loving and fulfilling relationship between parents and offspring, or it doesn’t. For a precept to be moral, it must involve an element of choice between doing something entirely self-serving and doing something that helps another, even at the cost of oneself.

VI. Thou shalt not kill. Finally, we get a genuine moral principle worth our attention and respect. Yet even here, much ink has been spilled by biblical scholars and theologians about the difference between murder and killing (such as in self-defense), not to mention all the different types of killing, from first-degree murder to manslaughter, along with mitigating circumstances and exclusions, such as self-defense, provocation, accidental killings, capital punishment, euthanasia, and, of course, war. Many Hebrew scholars believe that the prohibition is against murder only. But what are we to make of the story in Exodus (32:27–28) in which Moses brought down from the mountaintop the first set of tablets, which he smashed in anger, and then commanded the Levites: “Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men”? How can we reconcile God’s commandment not to kill anyone with his commandment to kill everyone? In light of this account, and many others like it, the Sixth Commandment should perhaps read thus: Thou shalt not kill—not unless the Lord thy God says so. Then shalt thou slaughter thine enemies with abandon.

VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Coming from a deity who impregnated somebody else’s fiancée, that’s a bit rich. However, the bigger issue is that this commandment, like all the others, is a blunt instrument that doesn’t take into account the wide variety of circumstances in which people find themselves. Surely grown-ups in intimate relationships can and should negotiate the details of their relationship for themselves, and one hopes that they’ll act honorably toward their partner out of a sense of integrity, and not because a deity told them to.

VIII. Thou shalt not steal. Again, do we really need a deity to command this? All cultures had and have moral rules and legal codes about theft.

IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Anyone who has been lied to or gossiped about can explain why this moral commandment makes sense and is needed, so chalk one up for the Bible’s authors, whose insights here were spot-on.

X. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s. Consider what it means to covet something—to crave or want or desire it—so this commandment is the world’s first thought crime, which goes against centuries of Western legal codes. More to the point, the very foundation of capitalism is the coveting or desire for things and, ironically, it is Bible-quoting Christian conservatives who most defend the very coveting forbidden in this final mandate. The late Christopher Hitchens best summed up the implications of taking this commandment seriously: “Leaving aside the many jokes about whether or not it’s okay or kosher to covet thy neighbor’s wife’s ass, you are bound to notice once again that, like the Sabbath order, it’s addressed to the servant-owning and property-owning class. Moreover, it lumps the wife in with the rest of the chattel (and in that epoch could have been rendered as ‘thy neighbor’s wives,’ to boot).”55

A PROVISIONAL RATIONAL DECALOGUE

The problem with any religious moral code that is set in stone is just that—it is set in stone. Anything that can never be changed has within its DNA the seeds of its own extinction. A science-based morality has the virtue of having built into it a self-correcting mechanism that does not just allow redaction, correction, and improvement; it insists upon it. Science and reason can be employed to inform—and in some cases even determine—moral values.

Science thrives on change, on improvement, on updating and upgrading its methods and conclusions. So it should be for a science of morality. No one knows for sure what is right and wrong in all circumstances for all people everywhere, so the goal of a science-based morality should be to construct a set of provisional moral precepts that are true for most people in most circumstances most of the time—as assessed by empirical inquiry and rational analysis—but admit exceptions and revisions where appropriate. Indeed, as we have seen, as humanity’s concept of “who and what is human, and entitled to protection” has expanded over the centuries, so we have extended moral protection to categories once thought beneath our notice. Here are ten provisional moral principles to consider:

1. The Golden Rule Principle: Behave toward others as you would desire that they behave toward you.

The Golden Rule is a derivative of the basic principle of exchange reciprocity and reciprocal altruism, and thus evolved in our Paleolithic ancestors as one of the primary moral sentiments. In this principle there are two moral agents: the moral doer and the moral receiver. A moral question arises when the moral doer is uncertain how the moral receiver will accept and respond to the action in question. In its essence this is what the Golden Rule is telling us to do. By asking yourself, “How would I feel if this were done unto me?” you are asking “How would others feel if I did it unto them?”

2. The Ask-First Principle: To find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first.

The Golden Rule Principle has a limitation to it: what if the moral receiver thinks differently from the moral doer? What if you would not mind having action X done unto you, but someone else would mind it? Smokers cannot ask themselves how they would feel if other people smoked in a restaurant where they were dining because they probably wouldn’t mind. It’s the nonsmokers who must be asked how they feel. That is, the moral doer should ask the moral receiver whether the behavior in question is moral or immoral. In other words, the Golden Rule is still about you. But morality is more than just about you, and the Ask-First Principle makes morality about others.

3. The Happiness Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness through force or fraud.

Humans have a host of moral and immoral passions, including being selfless and selfish, cooperative and competitive, nice and nasty. It is natural and normal to try to increase our own happiness by whatever means available, even if that means being selfish, competitive, and nasty. Fortunately, evolution created both sets of passions, such that by nature we also seek to increase our own happiness by being selfless, cooperative, and nice. Since we have within us both moral and immoral sentiments, and we have the capacity to think rationally and intuitively to override our baser instincts, and we have the freedom to choose to do so, at the core of morality is choosing to do the right thing by acting morally and applying the happiness principle. (The modifier “force or fraud” was added to clarify that there are many activities that do not involve morality, such as a sporting contest, in which the goal is not to seek happiness with your opponent’s happiness in mind, but simply to win.)

4. The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty through force or fraud.

The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. What makes the Liberty Principle a moral principle is that in addition to asking the moral receiver how he or she might respond to a moral action, and considering how that action might lead to your own and the moral receiver’s happiness or unhappiness, there is an even higher moral level toward which we can strive, and that is the freedom and autonomy of yourself and the moral receiver, or what we shall simply refer to here as liberty. Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them to achieve that happiness.

Only in the past couple of centuries have we witnessed the worldwide spread of liberty as a concept that applies to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their race, religion, rank, or social and political status in the power hierarchy. Liberty has yet to achieve worldwide status, particularly among those states dominated by theocracies that encourage intolerance, and dictate that only some people deserve liberty, but the overall trend since the Enlightenment has been to grant greater liberty, for more people, everywhere (see figure 4-8). Although there are setbacks still, and periodically violations of liberties disrupt the overall historical flow from less to more liberty for all, the general trajectory of increasing liberty for all continues, so every time you apply the Liberty Principle you have advanced humanity one small step forward.

5. The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.

This is based on the philosopher John Rawls’s concepts of the “veil of ignorance” and the “original position” in which moral actors are ignorant of their position in society when determining rules and laws that affect everyone, because of the self-serving bias in human decision making. Given a choice, most people who enact moral rules and legislative laws would do so based on their position in society (their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, political party, etc.) in a way that would most benefit themselves and their kin and kind. Not knowing ahead of time how the moral precept or legal law will affect you pushes you to strive for greater fairness for all. A simpler version is in the example of cutting a cake fairly: if I cut the cake, you choose which piece you want, and if you cut the cake, I choose which piece I want.

Figure 4-8. The Moral Arc of Political Freedom

The percentage of countries throughout the world that are free has been on the rise since the 1970s, while the percentage of those that are not free has been on the decline.56

6. The Reason Principle: Try to find rational reasons for your moral actions that are not self-justifications or rationalizations by consulting others first.

Ever since the Enlightenment the study of morality has shifted from considering moral principles as based on God-given, divinely inspired, holy book–derived, authority-dictated precepts from the top down, to bottom-up, individually considered, reason-based, rationally constructed, science-grounded propositions in which one is expected to have reasons for one’s moral actions, especially reasons that consider the other person affected by the moral act. This is an especially difficult moral principle to carry out because of the all-too-natural propensity to slip from rationality to rationalization, from justification to self-justification, from reason to emotion. As in the second principle, to “ask first,” whenever possible one should consult others about one’s reasons for a moral action in order to get constructive feedback and to pull oneself out of a moral bubble in which whatever you want to do happens to be the most moral thing to do.

7. The Responsibility and Forgiveness Principle: Take full responsibility for your own moral actions and be prepared to be genuinely sorry and make restitution for your own wrongdoing to others; hold others fully accountable for their moral actions and be open to forgiving moral transgressors who are genuinely sorry and prepared to make restitution for their wrongdoing.

This is another difficult principle to uphold in both directions. First, there is the “moralization gap” between victims and perpetrators, in which victims almost always perceive themselves as innocent and thus any injustice committed against them must be the result of nothing more than evil by the perpetrator; and in which perpetrators may perceive themselves to have been acting morally in righting a wrong, redressing an immoral act, or defending the honor of oneself or family and friends. The self-serving bias, the hindsight bias, and the confirmation bias practically ensure that we all feel we didn’t do anything wrong, and whatever we did was justified, and thus there is no need to apologize and ask for forgiveness.

As well, the sense of justice and revenge is a deeply evolved moral emotion that serves three primary purposes: (1) to right wrongs committed by transgressors, (2) as a deterrent to possible future bad behavior, and (3) to serve as a social signal to others that should they commit a similar moral transgression the same fate of your moral indignation and revenge awaits them.

8. The Defend Others Principle: Stand up to evil people and moral transgressors, and defend the defenseless when they are victimized.

There are people in the world who will commit moral transgressions against us and our fellow group members, either through the logic of violence and aggression in which perpetrators of evil always feel justified in their acts or through such conditions as psychopathy, in which a non-negligible portion of a population will commit selfish or cruel acts. We must stand up against them.

9. The Expanding Moral Category Principle: Try to consider other people not of your family, tribe, race, religion, nation, gender, or sexual orientation as an honorary group member equal to you in moral standing.

We have a moral obligation not only to ourselves, our kin and kind, our family and friends, and our fellow in-group members; we also owe it to those people who are different from us in a variety of ways, who in the past have been discriminated against for no other reason than that they were different in some measurable way. Even though our first moral obligation is to take care of ourselves and our immediate family and friends, it is a higher moral value to consider the moral values of others, and in the long run it is better for yourself, your kin and kind, and your in-group to consider members of other groups to be honorary members of your own group, as long as they so honor you and your group.

10. The Biophilia Principle: Try to contribute to the survival and flourishing of other sentient beings, their ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole.

Biophilia is the love of nature, of which we are a part. Expanding the moral sphere to include the environments that sustain sentient beings is a lofty moral principle.

If by fiat I had to reduce these ten principles to just one it would be this: Try to expand the moral sphere and to push the arc of the moral universe just a bit farther toward truth, justice, and freedom for more sentient beings in more places more of the time.