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INTRODUCTION

In the end, it all came down to God.

Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of psychology, had accused President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers. The allegations were dire enough to result in the convening of a special Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, held publicly on September 27, 2018.

Dr. Ford’s testimony was wrenching. Judge Kavanaugh’s denials were forceful. And given the recent national consciousness-raising of the #MeToo movement, and the uncertain balance of the Supreme Court in terms of tilting progressive or conservative for the foreseeable future, as well as an impending midterm election that was predicted to possibly flip the House of Representatives from Republican to Democratic control, the political stakes were about as high as they could get.

The senators had to decide if they would believe the testimony of a woman claiming to have suffered a traumatic sexual assault by Judge Kavanaugh—and thus possibly reject him as a candidate for the Supreme Court—or if they would believe his vehement refutations of those accusations and vote to confirm him as a justice in the highest court of the land. Both the senators and the country were deeply divided; women were more likely to believe Dr. Ford, while men were more likely to believe Judge Kavanaugh;¹ those on the left were more supportive of Dr. Ford, while those on the right were more supportive of Judge Kavanaugh.

Which side, in this fraught case, held the moral high ground? The Democratic senators surely felt that they were in the right by supporting a woman who courageously stepped forward to speak publicly about a sexual assault she had experienced, while the Republican senators undoubtedly felt just as confident that the right thing to do was to support a man facing unsubstantiated accusations of a decades-old crime, sparing him from the derailment of his career and the sullying of his stalwart reputation.

Ultimately—and as is unfortunately often the nature of accusations of sexual assault—it was her word against his. Who was more believable, Dr. Ford or Judge Kavanaugh? Who was more credible? And beyond the credibility of these two individuals, what was the right thing to do for the country? A tense, troubling, and extremely difficult moment for the United States—both politically and morally.

And that’s exactly when God was brought to the fore.

At the very end of an arduous day marked by questions, answers, tears, recriminations, declarations, and pontifications, the final moments in determining the fate of Judge Kavanaugh rested in the hands of John Kennedy, the NRA-backed Republican senator from Louisiana. He was the last senator to hold the floor and the last member of the committee to ask any questions of Judge Kavanaugh. And for the senator, it would be the judge’s faith in God that would ultimately settle the matter.

Here are the key excerpts from their brief but potent exchange:

“Do you believe in God?” Senator Kennedy asked.

“I do,” Judge Kavanagh replied.

“I’m gonna give you a last opportunity, right here, right in front of God and country. I want you to look me in the eye. Are Dr. Ford’s allegations true?”

“They are not accurate as to me. I have not questioned that she might have been sexually assaulted at some point in her life by someone, someplace. But as to me, I’ve never done this. Never. Done this to her, or to anyone else . . .”

And then:

“None of these allegations are true?” the senator asked.

“Correct.”

“No doubt in your mind?”

“Zero. One hundred percent certain.”

“Not even a scintilla?”

“Not a scintilla. One hundred percent certain, Senator.”

“Do you swear to God?”

“I swear to God.”

“That’s all I have, Judge,” concluded the senator.

And that’s all he needed.

If Judge Kavanaugh believed in God, then that was that. If he could solemnly swear to a supernatural being, then he simply must be telling the truth.

For Senator Kennedy—and for many millions of Americans—a proclaimed faith in God is eminently significant when it comes to discerning the nature of truth or lies, good or evil, wrong or right. After all, God-believers are more apt to be more truthful, good, and moral than secular nonbelievers, right? As President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has publicly proclaimed, secular people are actually incapable of knowing truth, for “without God, there is no truth.”² Jeff Sessions’s replacement, Attorney General William Barr, has gone even further, declaring that social problems such as crime, drugs, and sexually transmitted diseases are the direct result of a “moral crisis” perpetuated by the “secularists of today.”³ For Senator Kennedy, Attorneys General Sessions and Barr, and so many other powerful people occupying key positions within Trump’s administration, God is the underlying bedrock of truth, goodness, and decency. Without God, according to their perspective, moral life simply isn’t possible.

It’s an oddly ironic perspective to be trumpeted by people supporting a president who is among the most morally bankrupt leaders we’ve ever had. But, nonetheless, it’s a perspective that rests on centuries of certitude.

Theistic Morality

The insistence that morality depends upon God remains one of the most widespread, popularly held notions. As Ivan, one of the main characters in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov declares, if there is no God, then everything—including sexual assault—would be permitted.⁴ Or in the words of leading contemporary Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, “God himself is the origin of moral constraints. It is his will, his commands or approvals, that determine what is right and wrong, morally acceptable or morally objectionable.”⁵ Or in the even more definitive words of Donald Trump supporter and top Evangelical apologist William Lane Craig, “the concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. There can be no right and wrong . . . without God, good and evil do not exist.”⁶

Despite the fact that such an unequivocal, age-old, God-based view of morality continues to be shared by millions of people, its global popularity provides no cover for its intrinsic erroneousness. The deeply entrenched beliefs that there must be a God in order for morality to exist—and that we must believe in this God in order to be moral—are both problematic and, in many instances, pernicious. And while such a theistic approach to ethical behavior may have served humans well in bygone centuries, today—given our advanced understanding of human evolution, moral psychology, neurology, sociology, etc.—this God-based morality is at best unhelpful, and at worst maladaptive.⁷

Thus, while I can’t speak to the veracity of Judge Kavanagh’s denials of Dr. Ford’s accusations, I can confidently assert that his publicly purported belief in God during a United States Senate Judiciary Committee hearing should not, in any way, be accepted as some sort of ultimate guarantee of his truthfulness, his character, or his moral compass. And the pervasive premise that personal faith in the supernatural rests at the heart of moral living—a premise shared by our most powerful leaders—should not be accepted uncritically.

The brute fact is that morality based on belief in God—theistic morality—rests on untrue premises, limits our capacity for empathy and compassion, stymies our ability to take responsibility for our choices and actions, obfuscates the naturally evolved sources of ethical conduct, and ultimately thwarts moral progress, holding individuals and societies back from confronting the dire problems of the day and attending to the very real suffering they produce.

That said, my critique of theistic morality is not meant to impugn all people of faith. I happily recognize that many worshippers of God are moral and ethical and do a tremendous amount of good in the world. And not all religious people base their morality solely upon God, to be sure. Nor are all religious people irrationally fervent or dangerously dogmatic in their faith; many are humble in their religiosity, don’t think that their religion is the only true one, and don’t seek to force their religion on others. Such moderately religious people abound. But, unfortunately, other types of religious people—stronger, more fundamentalist—are also aplenty. For them, faith, ritual, and spiritual involvement are central, foundational aspects of their lives and identities. They are strident and vigorous in their religiosity. They are sure that they possess the One True Faith. They want everyone else to adopt their beliefs. They are dubious of other religious traditions, intolerant of other worldviews, and—above all—they are absolutely certain that without God, there can be no morality.

When confronting religion in the modern world, it is these more dogmatic fundamentalists that we must consistently contend with: Evangelical Christians, zealous Muslims, orthodox Jews, nationalistic Hindus, and so on. And it is these religious groups, and their traditional theistic beliefs, that comprise a loud and boisterous presence, an aggressive and antagonistic societal force, and—most importantly—a politically and culturally influential minority. As Chris Hedges explains in his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, while conservative religious fundamentalists may not constitute a majority of religious people out there, their societal impact is pervasive, demonstrably outweighing their numbers.⁸ As such, they continue to have an outsized role in shaping our world for the worse.⁹

After all, it was the resourcefulness and fortitude of people like Senator John Kennedy, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions—individuals supremely confident in a Bible-based morality—that brought us President Trump and his decidedly immoral political agenda.¹⁰

The Regressive Politics of Theistic Morality

In the United States today, conservative, Evangelical, and usually white Christians—and fellow travelers who subscribe to a similar theistic morality—wield a significant amount of influence on our school boards and city councils, in our military and state assemblies, on our radio waves and cable channels, and in our Congress, Supreme Court, and Oval Office.

The most obvious example of the Evangelical ethos and its unholy influence in America is the fact that 81 percent of white Evangelical Christians supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election.¹¹ That constituted a higher percentage of white Evangelical support than that which went to previous Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, John McCain, or George W. Bush. And according to a 2018 analysis conducted by American sociologist Andrew Whitehead, the single greatest predictor of who supports Trump is not their economic standing, not their demographics, not their views on race or gender or immigrants—nor a host of other possibilities. Rather, the most robust predictor is a particularly nationalistic form of Christian identity: those who think that the government should advocate Christian values, those who think that the United States is a Christian nation, and those who see the success of America as part of God’s plan, unambiguously constitute Trump’s sociopolitical base.¹²

These nationalistic, Evangelical Trump supporters are men and women who attend church more frequently than other Americans, who insist that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and who claim to be the most devoutly committed to Jesus. And yet the obvious paradoxical contradiction is that they overwhelmingly supported a presidential candidate who—in both word and deed—has violated just about every ethical precept Jesus ever preached.¹³ Jesus was quite clear that we can’t serve or worship both God and Mammon (wealth), that the meek and the poor are blessed, that we are to be charitable and merciful, that we are to open our hearts and doors to the despised minorities and immigrants in our midst, and that truth sets us free, and the Prince of Peace unambiguously preached that “he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.” And yet the vast majority of those strongly religious Americans who presumably know these things by heart—conservative, Bible-believing Evangelicals—rallied around a Republican presidential candidate who is the very embodiment of Mammon, publicly mocks the meek, is selfish and spiteful, corrupt and militaristic, refers to the poor as “morons,” incites racist xenophobia, stirs up nationalism and tribalism, shuts the door on poor refugees, rips immigrant children from their parents, bolsters authoritarianism, derides truth and despises facts, and loves the gun lobby.

It is impossible to not be both disturbed and alarmed by the reality that such Evangelical Christians—who claim to know and love Jesus more than anyone—remain the demographic most eagerly supportive of ongoing political agendas that go against nearly everything Jesus ever taught. These same men and women who claim to most faithfully worship God, and claim that their worshipping of God makes them moral, are simultaneously the ones who condone and support the most immoral leaders, exhibiting the most unethical attitudes. That is, those publicly pious individuals, groups, and movements across this nation who most proudly promulgate a shiny breastplate of moral righteousness are simultaneously the men and women who most vigorously aid, abet, and advocate immoral, unethical social regression.

When it comes to aiding and abetting such Christ-cloaked social regression, we can obviously look to the most popular pious pundits out there, individuals such as Sean Hannity, a staunch Catholic who produces conservative Christian films while simultaneously cheering on President Trump’s most repressive and undemocratic policies, or Baptist-turned-Catholic Laura Ingraham, a Trump apologist who mocks the victims of school shootings and justifies taking immigrant toddlers away from their mothers, or Jesus-loving Ann Coulter, who drools hatred and vitriol upon the crucifix always nestled between her clavicles, or Catholic Bill O’Reilly, who delights in fanning racism and militarism with an arrogant gloat, or Baptist Mike Huckabee, who sends out racist tweets and fights against equal rights with his Gomer Pyle smile, or conservative Christian duck hunter Phil Robertson, whose Christ-based jihadism is mired in homophobia, or Jewish Dennis Prager, who peddles fear and falsehood ever so politely while championing Trump’s agenda—and all of them doing so while proudly proclaiming to be people of faith. But these celebrities are merely the most well-known profiteers of a flagrant hypocrisy that runs very deep and wide in this nation, a particular form of holy hypocrisy predicated upon a long-standing contradiction: that those who are the most religious among us—those who claim to be the most devoted to the Lord—generally tend to advocate the most immoral policies and platforms, and are often the most inhumane in their opinions and worldviews.

Pious Politicians

Consider the Christian politicians who constantly claim to be doing the good will of God as they advocate for laws and policies that only serve to cause harm and suffering. For instance, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, is a Rapture-ready Evangelical who works to limit the rights of gays and lesbians, actively thwarts attempts to stop global warming, cozies up to murdering dictators, and fights to inundate America with lethal weapons. Evangelical Republican Scott Pruitt, who was Trump’s first pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, packed his office with industry shills and did all he could to undermine regulations that protect our land, water, air, and the ozone layer; Pruitt claimed to take a “biblical view” of our planet’s circumstances, publicly arguing that global warming is good for humanity.¹⁴ And former Texas governor Rick Perry—an Evangelical Christian and the current head of the Department of Energy—openly denies the science behind global warming,¹⁵ thereby allowing planetary degradation to proceed unhindered. Tim Walberg, the Christian congressman from Michigan, publicly fights against attempts to stop climate change, insisting that “if” climate change is really a problem—which he denies—then God will surely come in and fix it.¹⁶ North Carolina representative Larry Pittman, a Christian man who once compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler, continues to craft and push legislation that actually increases global warming.¹⁷ Additionally, the current governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, is another Evangelical who fights hard to dismantle laws that protect the environment. Of course, no danger is more pressing than climate change, and the Evangelical goal of allowing it to continue will cause unimaginable pain and suffering in the decades ahead.

The Evangelical senator from Oklahoma Jim Inhofe not only disregards climate change as a hoax, but actively fights against gay and lesbian civil rights, fights against even the most minimal gun safety legislation, and strongly supports the Israeli destruction of Palestinian national life because he believes God mandates such oppression. Tennessee congressman Scott DesJarlais, a churchgoing, outspoken Christian, doggedly fights against providing affordable health care to the poor—not to mention the fact that he pressured his girlfriend to have an abortion, even though he claims to be antiabortion.¹⁸ Evangelical Republican Jim Banks, a congressman from Indiana, works hard to stop stem cell research¹⁹ despite the fact that such research could alleviate countless cases of suffering and fight the battle against ailments such as juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, strokes, etc. The Christian governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, denigrated students publicly demonstrating for safe schools as “shameful” and offered up “prayer” as the only solution to gun violence;²⁰ he’s also signed legislation allowing foster care agencies to discriminate against non-Christians.²¹

The nation’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is a hard-core Evangelical who actively seeks to undermine and underfund public education, using her office’s power instead to “advance God’s kingdom.”²² Republican and Christian fundamentalist Greg Gianforte, the congressman from Montana arrested for body-slamming a reporter against a wall and then onto the ground, argues against retirement—because if Noah was still working at the age of six hundred, why should older Americans stop working?²³ So much for compassion for our elderly. Republican and born-again Christian Abigail Whelan, a state senator in Minnesota, fights to allow wealthy corporations the opportunity to avoid paying taxes, further increasing the unfair tax burden on working-class people, all in the name of loving Jesus.²⁴ Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama has committed himself so strongly to building a giant border wall to separate Mexicans and Americans that, if his plans are not fulfilled, he has promised to filibuster the Senate by reading the King James Bible.²⁵ Iowa congressman Steve King, a Christian Republican, retweets white supremacist and Nazi posts and openly mocks the student survivors of the Parkland mass shooting and condemns their push for sane gun laws; he also fights against stem cell research, humane animal rights laws, equality for gays and lesbians—he even voted against providing aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

What all of these powerful men and women have in common is that they claim devotion to Jesus and fealty to God and insist that they are moral and proclaim that those who don’t believe in Jesus or God are immoral—and yet their political agenda is flagrantly unethical, in that they seek to destroy mother nature, flood our cities and towns with ever more lethal guns, deny individuals the right to marry who they love, seek to imprison more poor people, seek to turn away refugees in need of safe harbor, and so on.

The bizarre reality is that—aside from the notable exception of churchgoing African Americans—most of the people who fight against structural relief for those in poverty, who fight against equality between men and women, who fight against fairness for gays and lesbians and transgender people, who fight against providing a haven to refugee families fleeing violence, who fight against paid family leave and subsidized health care for the poor, who fight against ending cruelty to animals, who fight against efforts to keep our planet healthy, who fight against stem cell research, who fight against effective sex education, who fight against accurate scientific school curricula, who fight against rehabilitative endeavors in our prisons, who undermine Native Americans’ ability to protect the little bit of land they have left, who are the quickest to downplay or ignore racial injustice and disparage movements such as Black Lives Matter, and who fight for the proliferation of semiautomatic weapons, for the governmental use of torture, for increased use of the death penalty, and ongoing militarism at home and abroad—these folks tend to be the very same Americans who claim to nurture the closet relationship to God.

These are also the very same people who indignantly claim to be the moral beacons among us.

Hating on Atheists

In their sanctimony, God-believers such as Sean Hannity, Jeff Sessions, Oliver North, and Mike Pence not only support regressive policies, but they do so while simultaneously asserting their moral superiority. They insist that they are the ethical ones. Indeed, their supporters are widely known as “values” voters.

Values voters? Talk about a semantic bamboozle—as if the secular men and women among us who fight for human rights, who support marriage equality and protecting the environment, who seek to limit the proliferation of semiautomatic assault weapons in our society, who are troubled by racism and sexism, who think the death penalty is barbaric, who recognize the prison industrial complex as inhumane, who worry about increasing income inequality, who support a woman’s right to control her own body, who advocate peace, who seek universal health care, and who are horrified by the animal-slaughtering industry—have no values?

But you see, such rhetoric shouldn’t surprise us. It’s an old trope of religion, and one of the most successful falsehoods promulgated by the strongly devout: that values and morals are something that only godly folks can have.

“Unbelief,” proclaimed eminent thirteenth-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, “is the greatest of sins.”²⁶

Got that?

Not murder, not child abuse, not sexual assault, not lying, not destroying nature, not slavery, not torturing animals. Rather: failing to believe in God. That is the height of immorality, or rather, the very wellspring—according to one of Christianity’s most brilliant minds.

This idea that one needs faith in God in order to be moral—and that atheism and immorality are thus intertwined—has roots much older than Saint Thomas Aquinas. According to the Bible, as declared in Psalm 14 of the Old Testament, those who don’t believe in God are not only fools, they are not only corrupt, but they are incapable of doing good. In the Christian scriptures of the New Testament, atheists are explicitly associated with wickedness and darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14). Similar sentiments can be found in that most holy of Hindu texts, the Bhagavad Gita, which links the absence of religious belief with immorality, stating that secularity leads to destructive tendencies, and that those who lack religious belief have no way of knowing good from bad or right from wrong.²⁷ And according to the Quran of Islam, those who do not believe in Allah have a diseased heart; they are hell-bound liars²⁸ who are so evil that they deserve to have their heads and fingers cut off.²⁹

Fast-forward through the centuries, and Aquinas’s viewpoint echoes into our contemporary world. For example, in the twentieth century’s first Christian bestseller, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that the very concept of justice requires belief in God; without God, there can exist no urge to do right and act responsibly. Lewis’s better-selling heir, Evangelical pastor Rick Warren, claims in The Purpose Driven Life that people lacking Bible-based religious beliefs have no motivation for being good or moral—their lives are characterized by selfishness and a cold indifference to others. According to convicted felon, accused wife-beater, Twitter racist, Trump ally, and leading conservative Christian Dinesh D’Souza, atheism is “cowardly moral escapism”³⁰ and, as “the opiate of the morally corrupt,” constitutes a delusion promulgated and imbibed by the sexually unrestrained, who insist that there is no God so that they can be free to live lives of sin and depravity.³¹ Irish American professor of the New Testament John Dominic Crossan suggests that atheists are akin to sociopaths and psychopaths.³² American professor of philosophy and religion James Spiegel writes that atheism is “the suppression of truth by wickedness, the cognitive consequence of immorality.”³³ Leading American rabbi Shmuley Boteach rants through one YouTube video after another that atheism and immorality are one and the same. Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has declared that “the logical result of atheism . . . is severe moral decay.”³⁴ Former Republican presidential candidate and governor of Ohio John Kasich has argued that when people are secular, they have no sense of right and wrong.³⁵ The Evangelical Christian that Trump briefly replaced Jeff Sessions with in the position of attorney general, Matt Whitaker, has declared that he takes a “Biblical view of justice” and that any judges who take a secular view are inherently problematic.³⁶ The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia made such a view explicit, stating that atheists favor the “devil’s desires.”³⁷ And Newt Gingrich said—oh, hell, you get the idea. Claims made by pundits, politicians, and pastors about atheists having no morals and religion being the only thing capable of providing values are a dime a dozen.

And sadly, most people buy it.³⁸ As stated earlier, millions of people are convinced that without belief in God, one cannot be a moral person, one cannot know right from wrong, one cannot be ethical. In fact, an international Pew study from 2014 found that most people around the world subscribe to a decidedly theistic morality in which it is accepted that one must believe in God in order to be a good person. For example: 53 percent of Americans, 56 percent of Mexicans, 70 percent of Indians, 74 percent of Tunisians, 79 percent of Kenyans, 80 percent of Venezuelans, 86 percent of Brazilians, 87 percent of Turks, 91 percent of Nigerians, 93 percent of Filipinos, 95 percent of Egyptians, 98 percent of Pakistanis, and 99 percent of Indonesians believe that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral.³⁹

Fortunately, ample social scientific evidence soundly refutes this mistaken belief.

Good Societies Without God

Societies in the world today with the lowest rates of belief in God and church attendance—such as Sweden, Japan, and the Netherlands—are among the best-functioning and most humane societies on Earth. As has been amply documented by contemporary economists, criminologists, and sociologists,⁴⁰ the nations with the lowest murder rates, violent crime rates, infant mortality rates, child abuse fatality rates, incarceration rates, etc. are among the most secular, while those nations with the highest rates of corruption, murder, violent crime, inequality, political repression, and violence—such as Colombia, El Salvador, and Jamaica—are among the most God-worshipping and church-attending. Granted, this is merely a correlation, but it is a powerful correlation that handily knocks out the knees of the claim that only God can provide morals and values for humanity.

It’s pretty fascinating, actually: in the Pew study cited above, you can see that 93 percent of Filipinos think that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral, but that same study found that only 19 percent of those in the Czech Republic think as much—and yet, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Philippines’ murder rate is nearly ten times higher than the Czech Republic’s.⁴¹ If belief in God kept people moral—and given that the Philippines is one of the most God-believing countries in the world, while the Czech Republic is one of the most atheistic—then theses nations’ murder rates should be reversed. But they aren’t. Granted, the dramatically differing rates of murder in the Czech Republic and the Philippines is not solely a result of the former’s atheism and the latter’s theism. There are numerous other factors at play. But that’s the point: these other factors are all secular in nature—economic, cultural, historical, political. What they are not is divine, spiritual, or supernatural.

And the same correlation between secularity and societal well-being is also found when comparing states within the United States. States with the highest levels of belief in God, like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama, have much higher rates of violent crime and other social pathologies than those states with the lowest levels of belief in God, such as Vermont, Massachusetts, and Oregon.⁴² If widespread belief in God kept people moral and a widespread lack of belief in God led to immorality, then we should expect to see an opposite correlation; we should find that those states (and nations) wherein God-belief is strong and popular have the lowest levels of violent crime, while those states (and nations) wherein God-belief is weak and marginal have the highest. But we find just the opposite.

So, we can compare nations to one another and see that where God-belief is lower and religiosity is weaker, so too are violent crime and other societal pathologies. And we can also compare states within our country and observe the exact same correlations. And yet still a third way to debunk the “God-belief is necessary in order to have a moral society” canard is simply to look at a single society over the centuries and note that, in many instances, a precipitous drop in religiosity does not result in an increase of day-to-day violent crime—but just the opposite occurs. Consider the Netherlands: the homicide rate in the capital city of Amsterdam has dropped from forty-seven per one hundred thousand people back in the mid–fifteenth century⁴³—when religiosity was strong and pervasive—down to around two per one hundred thousand today,⁴⁴ a time when there are more atheists than ever before in Dutch history and church attendance has been plummeting for decades to all-time lows.⁴⁵ And the homicide rate in medieval England—a deeply pious time—was on average ten times that of twentieth-century England,⁴⁶ a time of rapid secularization. That is, contemporary England—now one of most irreligious societies in the history of the world—is 95 percent less violent than it was back in the Middle Ages,⁴⁷ when faith in God and religious devotion were deep and wide. And while all societies have experienced a notable decrease in daily violence over the course of the last several centuries, that decrease has been most acute in those societies that have experienced the greatest degrees of secularization.

Good Individuals Without God

All of this information—correlational as it is—does not prove that secularism or atheism, in and of themselves, automatically result in markedly moral societies. But the fact that highly secular nations and states fare so well compared to religious nations and states, and the fact that many nations have seen violent crime and other social pathologies decrease over time as secularity has simultaneously increased, does prove that morality clearly doesn’t hinge upon the existence of God, or require belief in God. Which is why atheists such as myself, and my wife, and my kids, and hundreds of millions of others all over the world, are not the immoral monsters that the likes of Saint Thomas Aquinas—or Ted Cruz—make us out to be.

As American professor of psychology Ralph Hood has concluded—based on an extensive survey of relevant research—there exists no empirical support for the myth that religious people are more ethical than their secular peers.⁴⁸ Claremont Graduate University researcher Justin Didyoung and his colleagues concur, finding that “the longstanding stereotype that non-theists are less moral than theists is not empirically supported.”⁴⁹ In addition to their own study comparing atheists with theists—which revealed that the former are no less moral than the latter—there is also the work of various other social scientists, such as Catherine Caldwell-Harris, professor of psychology at Boston University, who has found that atheists exhibit robust levels of compassion or empathy.⁵⁰ Or the research of American political scientist Matthew Loveland, who found that secular people are actually more trusting of others than religious people.⁵¹

And then there’s the matter of violent crime—perhaps the most overt manifestation of immorality. Not only have various studies found that secular people are, in fact, less likely to commit violent crimes than religious people,⁵² but researchers from both the United States and the United Kingdom have reported that atheists are underrepresented in prisons.⁵³ Indeed, atheists currently make up an infinitesimal 0.1 percent of federal prison inmates in the United States.⁵⁴ As University of Haifa psychology professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has observed, “ever since the field of criminology got started and data were collected of the religious affiliation of criminal offenders, the fact that the unaffiliated and the nonreligious had the lowest crime rates has been noted.”⁵⁵

Additional studies have shown that atheists and agnostics, on average, exhibit lower levels of racism and prejudice than their more God-believing peers,⁵⁶ as well as lower levels of nationalism and militarism,⁵⁷ greater levels of honesty,⁵⁸ more robust tolerance for those they disagree with,⁵⁹ as well as higher acceptance of women’s rights.⁶⁰ Secular individuals are also much more likely to support death with dignity than religious individuals,⁶¹ as well as the rights of nontraditional couples to have and adopt children.⁶² Secular humanists are also significantly less likely to support the use of torture than their religious peers.⁶³ And while it is true that liberal, moderately religious people tend to share similar moral values along these same lines as atheists and agnostics, this is largely because they themselves have become secularized in their tempered, modest religiosity: they don’t think scriptures are inerrant or infallible, they don’t think that their religion is the only one true faith, they don’t believe in a literal heaven or hell, their concept of God is creatively metaphorical, they are dubious of supernaturalism, and they have rejected nearly all traditional religious dogma.⁶⁴ Such liberal, moderately religious people have adopted much of a secular, naturalistic orientation—in stark distinction to strongly, fervently, wholeheartedly religious people whose worldviews are theistic and supernatural. And it is these more strongly devout, more fundamentally faithful religious people who prove themselves to be markedly less caring, less altruistic, and less humane on a host of socially relevant moral matters.

Consider, for example, the issue of helping refugees fleeing war and persecution—a humanitarian crisis all the more pressing in recent years given the tragic events in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq. According to a 2018 Pew study, only 25 percent of white Evangelicals felt that the United States has a responsibility to help refugees in need, only 43 percent of mainline Protestants felt that way, and only 50 percent of Catholics. The percentage ticked up to 63 percent among Black Protestants—but the “religious” group in America most likely to feel a responsibility to help refugees was those without any religion at all: 65 percent of secular Americans expressed such a moral sentiment.⁶⁵ Another Pew study, also from 2018, found a similar correlation in Europe: even when controlling for things like educational attainment and occupation, the most religious Europeans were the least in favor of helping immigrants and refugees and the nominally religious were more in favor—but it was the affirmatively secular who were most in favor.⁶⁶

Finally, there’s social-psychological research specifically illustrating atheist morality in action, such as the recent international study that looked at children and their likelihood of being generous or selfish.⁶⁷ In 2015, a team of researchers headed by Dr. Jean Decety of the University of Chicago went to six different countries—China, Canada, Turkey, Jordan, South Africa, and the United States—and did an experiment with children between the ages of five and twelve; some of the kids had been raised Christian, some had been raised Muslim, and some had been raised without religion. Each child met individually with an adult who had a bunch of different stickers. The boy or girl was then told that he or she could choose any ten stickers to keep. However, after picking their favorites stickers, they were told by the adults that the researchers didn’t have time to give out the rest of the stickers to other kids in a different (fictitious) class, but if he or she wanted, the boy or girl could put some of his or her ten stickers in an envelope to be given away to other kids. Well, the nonreligious kids were the most generous—giving away, on average, a higher number of their stickers than the Muslim or Christian kids, who tended to be more selfish.

Sure, it was just one study involving kids and stickers. But it effectively points to a much larger and important reality: that the vast majority of atheists the world over are decent and humane. Goodness without God is not only possible but pervasive. And in one of the more optimistic indicators of secularization in our society, more men and women are coming to accept that religion does not have a monopoly on morality: a growing majority of Americans (65 percent) now say that they rely primarily on things like practical experience, common sense, philosophy, or science for guidance regarding right and wrong—not religion.⁶⁸ And in Canada, a whopping 82 percent of adults agree that “it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values.”⁶⁹

The Promise of Secular Morality

The fact that so many North Americans currently rely on nontheistic sources in their moral deliberation is really good news—because religious ethics are brittle, and as British philosopher Derek Parfit makes clear, belief in God can actually prevent the free development of moral reasoning.⁷⁰ After all, any ethical system that ultimately depends upon faith in a nonexistent, magical deity who issues commands that one must obey for fear of punishment is inherently unsound.⁷¹

But aren’t there admirable moral teachings in the world’s leading religions? You bet—but those admirable moral teachings did not originate with those religions. Rather, those religions merely wrote down and codified what was already emergent in human civilization.

But aren’t there wise, just, and humane precepts and tenets found within the world’s leading religions? Absolutely—but they are wise, just, and humane for natural, secular reasons, not supernatural, theistic reasons.

But don’t many religious movements fight the good fight, working on behalf of the betterment of humanity? Yes, but usually it is secular movements that pave the way on these fronts, with religion only joining up later in the game. As leading American skeptic Dr. Michael Shermer has noted, “once moral progress in a particular area is under way, most religions get on board—as in the abolition of slavery . . . women’s rights . . . and gay rights . . . but this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.”⁷²

Still, aren’t there millions of religious people out there doing good in the world as a result of their faith? Yes, and they should be lauded and abetted in their good works. But more and more people are losing said faith, so alternative understandings of ethics and morals must arise and, ultimately, prevail.⁷³

Despite all the good that one can find within certain corners of religious life—and the countless ethical people out there who do believe in God—theistic morality remains inherently problematic, tending to thwart human progress, both at the individual and societal level. Whatever religion’s moral attributes or ethical benefits may have been thousands or hundreds of years ago, today they now largely serve to hold humanity back. Thus, we need to look elsewhere as we strive to grapple with questions of wrong and right, good and bad, just and unjust. Not to the clouds, not to the priests, rabbis, or imams—and most importantly—not to imagined deities. Rather, we need to look to ourselves.⁷⁴ It is this secular, humanistic approach to morality that we need not to not only embrace but to rely upon and hang our hopes on.

Fortunately, secular, humanistic, and atheistic approaches to and understandings of morality are sound and solid and, on most if not all fronts, intrinsically superior to what God-based morality has had to offer.⁷⁵ In the words of British philosopher A. C. Grayling, secular people who don’t believe in God are among “the most careful moral thinkers, because in the absence of an externally imposed morality they recognize the duty to examine their views, choices, and actions and how they should behave towards others.”⁷⁶

While theistic morality forces us to look outside ourselves for ethical guidance, secular morality forces us to look within—consulting our conscience and our reason. Whereas God-based morality is ultimately founded upon obedience, human-based morality is founded upon empathy and compassion. While religious ethics have required ever-contested interpretations of obscure or contradictory formulations of supposedly divine will, humanistic ethics depend squarely upon ongoing debate and forthright argumentation with and among our fellow human beings. Christianity and Islam—the two largest religions in the world—have taught that our time in this world is fleeting and insignificant and that the really important eternal realm awaits us after death. But secularism forces us to live in the here and now, focusing our energies on this world: the only plane of existence we’ll ever inhabit. While the world’s leading religions—Christianity and Islam—construct ethical life as a juvenile game of heavenly reward and hellish punishment, which infantilizes morality to a matter of self-centered prudence and fear, nonreligious ethics emphasize rationality and understanding as more mature ways to address and minimize malevolence. And rather than terrorize children with the fear of eternal torture, nonreligious orientations cultivate reflective understanding of actions and consequences among children, employing love and explication over scare tactics. Whereas theistic ethics have ultimately been predicated on a principle of “might makes right,” secular humanist ethics are predicated on how best to alleviate the suffering of sentient beings. Christocentric ethical systems have hinged upon the notion that we are born sinners who must actively choose to be moral—a willful choice that goes against the grain of our fallen selves—but secularism embraces the growing body of scientific evidence illustrating the degree to which a proclivity toward cooperation and sociability, care and concern, and altruism and love are the observable outgrowth of our evolved natures.

As more and more of us let go of God, so too must we counter and ultimately reject the notion that our morals come from said God. They don’t.⁷⁷ Morality and ethics grow out of the human experience: our genes, our minds, our emotions, our evolutionary history, our experiences, our communities, our cultures, and our societies.

I should note here that the very terms “morality” and “ethics”—terms that I’ll employ throughout this book—are virtually synonymous in everyday usage. As American philosopher Ryan Falcioni notes, “moral” and “ethical” basically mean the same thing,⁷⁸ both having to do with how we treat others, whether our actions are helpful or harmful, and the degree to which we reduce or increase suffering. That said, I generally use the term “moral” to refer to personal values and behaviors that increase the well-being of sentient beings, while “ethical” signifies principles and orientations that aim to increase justice and fairness in society. Again, the terms are nearly interchangeable. And both function better when there’s no God in the picture.

But how does godless morality work? How can people be moral if they don’t believe in God? How does morality even function if there is no Supreme Overlord issuing forth moral edicts and ethical commandments, watching over us all, judging, rewarding, and punishing? Can objective morality exist without God? And what specific moral precepts, ethical imperatives, and cardinal virtues do nonbelievers actually live by?

In the pages that follow, these questions will be answered as thoroughly and as thoughtfully as possible. First, in Part One, the traditional, hegemonic ethical framework for thousands of years—theistic morality of religious faith—will be debunked and deconstructed. Although most people the world over continue to think that morality begins and ends with God, it doesn’t. In Part Two, the nonreligious sources of secular morality will be explored and explained, and the core virtues of atheist ethical living—what I call the “secular seven”—will be presented. Part Three will consider challenges to secular morality, along with respective solutions.

“One is often told,” British philosopher Bertrand Russell quipped nearly one hundred years ago, “that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.”⁷⁹

In a world where many of those in top positions of power are strongly religious or are supported by the strongly religious—from Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., to Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Vladimir Putin in Russia, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to Ali Khamenei in Iran, from Recep Erdoğan in Turkey to Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, from Viktor Orbán in Hungary to Iván Duque Márquez in Colombia, from Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed in Somalia to Narendra Modi in India, and well beyond—it is not wrong to attack religion, at least not its most destructive and oppressive manifestations. Skeptical criticism, given the power religion wields, is morally obligatory.

And as for Professor Russell’s noting that religion doesn’t actually seem to make people virtuous, he’s spot-on. When the world’s largest Christian organization, the Roman Catholic Church, claims to possess a monopoly on morality while at the same time commanding people not to use condoms—and also aiding and abetting thousands of child molesters—the link between religion and morality cries out for suspicion. When Evangelical Christians insist that the Bible is the sole source of moral guidance, while at the same time championing the proliferation of guns, the ripping apart of refugee families at our borders, and the active thwarting of efforts to halt global warming, the relationship between religious faith and ethical living begs for scrutiny. When orthodox Jews insist that God’s commandments form the foundation of moral society, while at the same time denying women in abusive relationships the right to divorce, engaging in ritualistic animal cruelty, and championing the violent oppression of the Palestinian people, the insistence that God is necessary for a moral existence necessitates deconstruction. And when Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia or Iran champion themselves as the divinely mandated arbiters of moral law, while at the same time beheading enemies of the state in public squares, imprisoning homosexuals, and denying democracy, the connection of theism to ethics demands debunking.

While there is much good within religious life—such as supportive community, strengthened family bonds, meaningful rituals, and charity—the stubborn fact remains that supernatural beings do not create morality and the worship of almighty gods is not the source of ethical living. Rather, the alpha and omega of moral life is us, warts and all.