It's In the Code Ep. 67: "There's No Morality Without God"
“There’s no morality without God.” That is a claim made by many Christians. But it’s also a claim with a cultural hold that extends beyond card-carrying Christians. What does it mean? Why do people make this claim? Should we believe it? And why do people make this claim? Is it just a philosophical or theological claim? Or are their bigger issues at work? Dan tackles these questions in this week’s episode.
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Axis Mundi Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am the host of this series and welcome you all to it.
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Always look forward to that.
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I want to dive into today's episode.
And it might strike some people, as I'm sort of looking at my notes here, as more of an exercise in philosophy than an exercise in sort of cultural decoding.
But for me, these things are really closely related.
If anybody ever wants, by the way, I can give a much fuller account of why that is.
I could bore you for hours on my understanding of society and the philosophical approaches that I take and how they relate to things that might relate to decoding and things like that.
But I'm not going to get into that here because that's not what we're here for.
But what I want to hit, I want to hit a sentiment that I think is culturally widespread.
I do think it's more prominent within Christian circles, in particular, and within our context, within theologically conservative Christians, which of course is, you know, a primary focus of what we do here.
But it's not limited to them.
It extends beyond them.
And for example, in my coaching work, I encounter the sentiment among many people who no longer identify as Christians, who explicitly have sort of rejected Christianity.
And so here it is.
It's the idea that there is no morality without God.
And I've had a lot of people reach out about this.
This is another thing that I think tells me the resonance of this or The concern or anxiety that this sentiment can pose for people.
A lot of people have reached out to you.
This notion, my pastor says, my parents say, somebody says, some social commentator says that there's no morality without God.
Is that true?
To me, maybe that feels true, but I don't believe in God, so I don't know what to do.
I can't answer all those questions here, right?
That goes beyond the scope of what we're doing.
But I do want to sort of dive into it.
And the claim is, of course, that for morality to be possible, God must exist.
And for one to be a moral person, one must be, you know, kind of a godly person, that is, believe in God.
And, you know, if you're a Christian, the claim is you have to be a Christian, right?
As I say, this is a claim with a really broad scope, okay?
As I say, many Christians, particularly conservative Christians, make this claim.
And it's part of a broader argument for having a Christian society.
We're going to get to that later, right?
But it's not limited to contemporary Christians.
It is as old, not just as old as Christianity, but I think probably as old as theistic religion itself.
That as long as there have been religious traditions that say there is, especially monotheistic traditions, a divinity, and this divinity demands our worship and created things and so forth, and this divinity is what defines morality and so forth, this view has existed, right?
And again, it's not limited to contemporary conservative Christians who might say that.
It's a very traditional view.
We can think in the literary world of Dostoevsky, who said that if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted, right?
That you have to have God to have morality.
And I realize Dostoevsky's statement can be interpreted in lots of different ways.
Again, interesting discussions.
I'm all here for that, but not in this episode, right?
But this is a view that has also been held by critics of traditional Christianity and Christian morality, right?
There's a sense in which it's true of a critic like Friedrich Nietzsche, right, who celebrates what he calls the death of God But he was also acutely aware of the kind of cultural and moral disorientation that came with this, right, and what that required.
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that we are condemned to be free.
It was the notion that, you know, without Christianity and Christian morality, we have freedom, radical freedom, but that it's tough because we have to answer for our own actions and so forth, right?
It's also, as I say, this sense that without God you can't have morality.
It's also felt by a lot of my clients.
Again, I'm a practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, working with people dealing with religious trauma.
And I've talked to a lot of clients who have rejected the Christianity they grew up with.
They've rejected Christian morality as they understood it, as it was sort of put on them when they were younger.
But they fear that there's no longer any meaning or basis for morality or so.
They don't know what it is to be moral without God, right?
It's still something that is sort of internalized for them.
And sometimes this claim, the claim that there's no morality without God, it's broadened a little bit, becomes a little more inclusive, and it's the idea that there's no morality without religion, right?
The idea that religion is the source of morality.
So maybe here we're not talking narrowly about Christians, we're talking about religion as such.
That idea reflects what I think is a really commonly held intuitive idea that religion and morality are basically the same thing, that religion is the source of morality.
When I teach the Intro to World Religions class at my college, the first assignment I give students is to come up with a definition of religion, right?
And I just sort of grade them on whether they do it, not whether it's right or wrong, because, newsflash for folks, there's no completely, you know, universally shared definition of exactly what religion is.
But when I get those responses from them, typically...
They come down to morality, right?
Religion is a set of rules that you live by to be moral or to be ethical or so people can get along or whatever it is, right?
I've also encountered this in people who are not religious, they're not churchgoers, but like when they have little kids or something they want them to go to like a church school, a sectarian school, or a church daycare or something like that.
Or maybe they actually take them to Sunday school because they have this sense that they should grow up to be good moral people and that religion is a good place for that, right?
So, I'm going to focus on Christians, but I don't think it's limited to Christianity, and I think that other, in our contemporary context, other committed monotheists make this claim.
There are certain kinds of Jewish people who might make this claim, certain kinds of Muslim people who might make this claim, okay?
So, that's the idea.
There's no morality without God.
It's an old idea.
It's, I think, a culturally widespread idea.
For many people, it's just sort of intuitive.
It seems to make sense, right?
Unsurprisingly though, this won't shock anybody listening, I don't agree with it.
And I didn't, I've never agreed.
Well, I shouldn't say never, I guess.
In my adult life, I have not agreed with the notion that one has to be a Christian or even religious to be moral, that there has to be God for morality to exist, and so forth.
I disagreed with this even when I was an evangelical pastor, and there are lots of reasons for this, right?
And a lot of them to go—I can't go through a full range of this.
I can't develop any of them in adequate detail.
It just goes beyond the scope of what this episode is, right?
But here's the most obvious reason why I disagree, especially with Christians who say this, right?
Without God, there's no morality, by which they mean you can't be moral if you're not a Christian, is that there are obviously non-Christians Non-Christian religious people, also non-Christian irreligious people, who act morally, and not only act morally, not only just do good things, or act right, or treat other people well, or whatever, they can articulate sophisticated and principled reasons for doing so.
They can explain why So it's just simply false to claim that everyone who isn't Christian or even everyone who isn't religious is fundamentally immoral, right?
That's just a mistake.
It's just categorically, empirically, easily, demonstrably false, okay?
And I want to press this point that it applies even to non-religious individuals or thought systems, right?
Maybe when people are thinking of a non-Christian quote-unquote religious ethic, I think a lot of people might be drawn to something like Buddhism, right?
Or maybe I should say a non-theistic, right?
Especially within sort of popular American or Western understandings.
Buddhism might be the most obvious example.
It's known for the depth of its moral reflections and its moral claims and so forth.
But what I'm going to say, and I can't articulate all the reasons for this.
If this is something that's interesting to you, you can let me know.
But for lots of reasons, there's been a long debate about whether or not Buddhism is a quote-unquote religion in the same sense as, say, Christianity.
I noted a few minutes ago there is no broadly agreed-upon definition of religion.
The long and short of it is it really is hard to come up with a definition of religion that can incorporate phenomena as different as Christianity and Buddhism.
And not incorporate so much that we're defining a bunch of stuff as religion that we don't think of as religious or whatever, right?
So, for many people, on a technical sense, Buddhism could be an example of a non-religious, certainly a non-theistic, And when people say you can't have religion without God, I mean, they're claiming the theism is right there, right?
So Buddhism, obvious example.
But let's set aside Buddhism, right?
There are other examples.
Aristotle articulated one of the most enduring visions of the ethical life in Western history, and it's not religious in any straightforward sense.
It makes its way into Western religious thought through people like Thomas Aquinas, but Aristotle and Aristotelian ethics was called deontological ethics, and he's sort of the preeminent example.
comes from a very different perspective.
And I just misstated that.
His is not deontological ethics.
Virtue ethics is Aristotle.
Or a kind of natural law ethics that gets developed more fully in Catholic thought, but doesn't necessarily originate there.
Virtue ethics, natural law, comes from Aristotle, right?
Pre-Christian thinker.
Coming to the later European context, Immanuel Kant develops a famous ethical theory.
He's the thinker of so-called deontological ethics, if you want fancy philosophical words.
His ethical theory was widely applauded by some and criticized by others for not being theistic.
Now, yes, I know that A weird kind of appeal to Christianity makes its way into his ethics in complex ways, and there's lots of debate about the significance of that, right?
People who want his ethics to be theistic will try to say, ha ha, see, he's really being Christian, but those who want to press the point that Kant provided a non-theistic, philosophical vision of ethics will say that religion was subsidiary to that.
Kant himself does not say God has to exist for us to do moral things or to know what's right or whatever, okay?
Those same philosophers who recognize the kind of cultural disorientation that comes with throwing off supposed Christian morality, people like Sartre or Nietzsche, they also articulated, in my view, positive visions of the moral life, right?
And again, on a more just kind of common, everyday level, there are millions of people all around us, every day, who are not religious in an unidentifiable sense, who do live principled, moral lives.
Okay?
So it just doesn't work.
It doesn't line up, the notion that you can't be moral without God, or something like that.
Okay?
Here's another problem, and this is for me maybe the more significant problem, with the claim that there's, you know, quote, no morality without God, especially when it comes from Christians.
And I pick on Christians all the time.
Sometimes people ask, like, how can we talk about Christians so much?
How come you're always picking on the Christians?
Because I'm on firmer ground picking on the Christians.
I know more about Christianity and Christianity and culture and so forth, and so I'm more confident critiquing or making comments on Christianity and culture than I am other traditions, okay?
But especially when it comes from Christians, and especially when it comes to conservative Christians, here's my other big problem, right?
And it's this, if we're defining quote-unquote Christian morality as, say, that which is evident in the Bible, or what we find in historical Christian teachings or practices, or certainly if we just find in looking at Christian history, we're going to find an awful lot, arguably a majority, that we would reject, and I would say rightfully reject, on moral grounds.
Folks, I don't have the time to lay all of that out.
That would be like a whole separate series, I guess.
There are lots of people who write about this, right?
All this stuff about slavery in the Hebrew Bible or like executing people for crimes that we would simply not say, that we would simply say do not demand execution.
Genocide of, you know, the people in the quote-unquote promised land.
On and on and on and on, okay?
Don't have time for all of that.
If you listen to this series, if you listen to our weekly roundups on Straight White American Jesus, right, you know what we have to say about a lot of the claims to quote-unquote morality on the part of contemporary American conservative Christians.
So it's just the claim that, like, if you're the ones who are supposed to be the moral ones because you believe in God, yeah, you can keep it.
It's just that simple.
You can keep it.
The simple fact of the matter is, and again, I think it's a fact, is that we don't need religion to be ethical.
It may take more work to figure out what it means to be ethical, what it means to treat people well, what it means to have a vision of human flourishing, or however else you want to define it.
It may take more work, but I would argue this is nothing new.
What I would say is that the illusion of the necessity of religion for morality The reason that that illusion can hold is because it arises or arose in a largely religiously homogeneous society, right?
If you have a society wherever happens to believe the same religious stuff, Then you can articulate an ethical vision, say it's drawn from that common religion, and you get a sense of commonality that is maybe pretty superficial and was never even that deep.
Even in Christian societies, you had disagreements about moral demands and so forth.
But once you start having a greater awareness of human diversity, right, where I'm not even talking about contemporary multiculturalism in a particular society, I'm just talking about humans being aware that there are other humans in other places who think and do really different things, who have different religions and so forth, it becomes much more difficult
To have this idea because you're going to be confronted with the reality of divergent ethical claims, people that we might recognize as ethical or moral or good who are not the same religion we are, and so forth.
Okay?
So that's all.
The long and short, no sort of cultural decoding in there, just observations about society are that it's just simply, to me, demonstrably false that only Christians can be moral.
Which is what I think the claim, you have to have God for morality, means.
Okay?
Got deeper philosophical reasons, theological reasons for those arguments, fine.
Let's set those aside.
I want to move on, though, because there is some decoding to be done here, right?
And this is where, I guess, the philosophical interest I have meets the decoding sort of focus.
And again, as always, I'm interested not just in what does the claim mean and does it work, but why do people make this claim?
What is going on?
When a conservative Christian says, you have to be a Christian to be moral, you have to have God for morality.
And for me, this idea of a homogeneous society, that's the key.
This idea of a society where everybody's the same religion and they are all fundamentally the same in key ways, that's the understanding that I need to make sense of this claim that you have to have God for morality.
Because I think what conservative Christians make this argument when Uncle Ron says something like, well, you know, you got to have God for morality.
He's not making an argument about philosophy or theology, right?
He's not even making an argument.
What he's doing is expressing the longing and desire for a more homogeneous society.
People who make this claim are expressing nostalgia for a time largely imagined, but a time when everybody was Christian and shared a common morality.
They are casting a vision back to this kind of golden age in the past when everything worked out well.
The things were never that simple, the society was never that homogeneous, that we never had this shared morality, all that stuff.
That's not really the issue, right?
What they're expressing is the myth of a previously moral Christian society, and they leverage that myth to try to enact a more homogeneous, properly, quote-unquote, Christian society now.
And that implies everything we talk about on this podcast all the time, because I think when you dig down, the people who say you have to have God for morality, which means you have to have a Christian society to have a moral society, Christian there is itself a code.
It's a code for being straight and white.
I guess straight is what I was coming up with.
Straight and white and a patriarchal society, all the stuff we talk about all the time.
Right?
That's what they mean.
So, when they say we have to have a Christian society based on a Christian morality, all of that is what is encoded.
What they are saying is, what they are expressing is a longing and a desire for a society that is straight and white and Christian.
That's what they're after.
And that, aside from the fact piece of it, right, the more abstract, that's just not the way the world actually is, peace, that's the other reason that I oppose this way of thinking, right?
So when Christians claim there's no morality without God, at least in our context, they're not just making, again, philosophical or theological claims that might be up for debate, right?
What they're really claiming is that morality requires some sort of ultimate transcendent ground.
Some entity that exists outside culture, outside time, outside our limitations, and so forth.
For the record, philosophically, I don't think it does.
Okay, but that's what they're claiming.
And what I talk about all the time, what we explore all the time in this series, is that claims to transcendent authority, they're never really about transcendent authority.
We never get to that supposed transcendent authority.
All we ever encounter are people in this world Who claim to speak for that authority, who claim to embody that authority for us here, and it is no different now.
So when Christians claim to be the arbiters of morality, and therefore the arbiters of God, they're making a claim intended to legitimize the social hegemony that they are currently fighting for.
They are making a claim that they should have the privilege, the social and political privilege, That they demand with their so-called religious freedom exemptions and so forth.
When they stand up and say that the government should legislate Christian morality, this is their claim, that it's based on some sort of transcendent authority that they speak for and therefore their actions are justified.
That's what's at work here, right?
It's a claim that for them, because they're Christians, what they do is moral or right by definition.
So, if you oppose them, you oppose not only them, but God.
If these are familiar themes, it's because we talk about it all the time, and we see it over and over and over in so many different ways.
All right?
I gotta wrap this up.
The theme, there's no morality without God.
I disagree for complex philosophical reasons we can't really get into.
I think it's just empirically false, but maybe more important and more central to this series.
I also think that when people make this claim, it's actually leveraged by the people who want to enact a kind of Christian vision, as they understand it, of what society is.
And I oppose it for that reason as well.
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