What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman
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