What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

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