Secular Morality in American Society
In order to see the real-world benefits of secular morality in action, we need not rely on thought experiments. Many recent studies are available that reveal the tangible degree to which secular men and women harbor ideals and exhibit ethical orientations that evidence a deep valuing of life, empathy for the suffering, desire for fairness, and hatred of injustice and cruelty.
For example, consider racism. In a landmark paper published by then Duke University professor Deborah Hall and associates, fifty-five separate studies were carefully analyzed to reveal the relationship between religion, irreligion, and racism. The most interesting finding of this impressive meta-analysis was that strongly religious Americans tend to be the most racist, moderately religious Americans tend to be less racist, and the group found to be the least racist of all are secular Americans, particularly those espousing an agnostic orientation. As psychologists Ralph Wood, Peter Hill, and Bernard Spilka note, basing their assessment upon decades of research, “As a broad generalization, the more religious an individual is, the more prejudiced that person is.” Perhaps this helps explain why secular white people were more likely than religious white people to support the civil rights movement, and why secular white South Africans were more likely to be against apartheid than religious white South Africans.
How about feelings about torture? In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush began allowing for the torturing of prisoners suspected of terrorism. This decision to make government-sponsored torture legal was met with great debate. And in a national survey from 2009, it was found that those Americans who were the most supportive of the governmental use of torture were the most strongly religious, while those who were most opposed to the governmental use of torture were the most secular. The same holds true for support of the death penalty: the more religious tend to be the most supportive of it, favoring vengeance over forgiveness, while the more secular tend to be the most against it, manifesting a more merciful orientation.
Not only are secular people less likely to be racist or vengeful, on average, than religious people, but they are also less likely to be strongly nationalistic. And when we look specifically at militarism, we see that the more religious among us tend to be more in favor of attacking and invading other countries, such as Iraq or Vietnam, while the most secular among us are the least supportive of such military aggression. Secular people are also much more tolerant on all fronts than their religious peers, being more likely to support the civil liberties of people they strongly disagree with or even oppose politically. And as for protecting the environment, religious Americans (especially the most strongly religious) tend to be the least in favor, while atheists and agnostics are the most supportive, and secular Americans are more likely to understand and take seriously the catastrophic threat of global warming than religious Americans. They are also more likely to support women’s equality. In fact, secular Americans are much less likely than their religious counterparts to believe that wives should obey their husbands. And what about gay rights? As to be expected, the religious are most likely to be opposed, while the secular are most likely to be supportive. How about the hitting of children? Religious people are, on average, much more supportive of corporal punishment, while secular people are much more likely to be against it. As for the status of illegal immigrants in the United States, the secular are far more supportive of offering a path to legal citizenship status than the religious, who are more likely to insist that there isn’t any more room at the inn. The secular are also more likely to be concerned with the suffering of animals than the religious.
In sum, when it comes to a host of issues and positions—from torture to war, from global warming to the welfare of animals—secular people clearly feel that it is good to do good in this known lifetime.
Admittedly, secular men and women don’t outshine their religious peers in every way. For example, when it comes to generosity, volunteering, and charitable giving, secular men and women fall short, with religious people being more likely to donate both their time and their money. However, as for what is perhaps the ultimate indicator of moral behavior (or lack thereof), namely, violent crime, we know that atheists are grossly underrepresented in our prisons today, with some reports suggesting that atheists make up less than half of 1 percent of all Americans behind bars. A similar underrepresentation of secular folk in prison is found in the United Kingdom as well, suggesting that this is no fluke. As professor of psychology Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has concluded, “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.”
Brian and Paula: Good Without God
The findings of social science, when it comes to revealing the degree to which secular people can be moral without faith in God, are important—nay, essential. The survey data, statistical averages, and opinion polls summarized above provide concrete evidence concerning contemporary secular moral predilections and proclivities.
But in order to get a richer, deeper, and more personable sense of lived secular morality, I’d like to shift away from sociological averages and surveys and introduce you to two living, breathing individuals: Brian Mackelroy and Paula Hendricks. They are both ER nurses who spend their days caring for others in need. Their lives illustrate some profound truths and realities concerning the nature of secular morality.
I’ll begin with Brian, who works as an ER nurse at a hospital in one of Wisconsin’s larger cities. Brian is thirty-seven years old, married, and the father of twin boys. He was raised a Catholic but started having doubts about his faith in his late teens. And then, when he was twenty-one, he took a philosophy course on existentialism at the University of Wisconsin. At the heart of existentialism is the insistence that each individual, through her own consciousness, must create her own meaning in her life, and there is in fact no grand meaning to the world other than what we ourselves give to it. While it is certainly possible to be an existentialist and also a Christian believer, many people, like Brian, find existentialism to be inimical to traditional religion. “After reading this philosophy, I was, like, ‘Oh, wait a minute!’” he says, laughing. “I’ve been an agnostic with atheist leanings ever since.”
Brian’s loss of faith did not result in feelings of alienation or despondence—quite the opposite. “It was actually very liberating, losing my faith. It made me want to seize the day more.” And his sense of responsibility toward others only strengthened. “We are social creatures. We are interdependent. I think it is just part of our evolved human nature to want to be with each other and to help each other.”
The other day at work, Brian tended to a woman who was so drunk that she was essentially unconscious; when she arrived at the ER, her pants and underwear were down below her knees and her body was covered in bruises. The day before that, a man came in with diabetes and advanced cancer—large tumors all over, including his liver and spine. The day before that, a man came in who had been shot by a shotgun at point-blank range; his left shoulder was gone, and his left lung was collapsed. The day before that, a woman came in who had been stabbed multiple times. Day in and day out, Brian helps and comforts people in literal life-and-death situations. “Just recently a woman came in—she had a history of ulcers and colitis. She came in with a perforated bowel—one of the ulcers in her colon ruptured … huge infection, lots of internal bleeding … and we said, ‘We’ve got to get you to the operating room immediately and we can save you… .’ And she said, ‘No, thank you.’ She was about fifty-five. Her sisters had come in, and they were just pleading with her to have the surgery. And she said, ‘No.’ So I watched this woman exercise her most profound right—the right to decide her own fate. She just kept saying, ‘I’ve had a good life. And up until recently it’s been really good. But now I am suffering. I don’t want to live like this. I’ve had a good life, and I am prepared to die
.’ So I watched her die. And it wasn’t a pretty death. Her two sisters were in the room just bawling—really freaking out. And when she died, she just threw up tons of blood—all through her mouth—it was an ugly situation. Fecal matter, blood, the whole thing. And I cleaned her up, gave her sisters as much time as they needed, checked in with them frequently, told them they could have as much time with their dead sister as they wanted. That’s really intense, right? But I actually feel privileged to experience such things. It’s life. It’s death.”
Yes, and it’s really heavy. It’s got to take a toll. How does he keep at it? What keeps him going?
“It gives me real job satisfaction to have positive interactions with people day after day, and I love the amazing sense of teamwork that takes place when someone comes in and they are in real dire need of care—when it is a life-or-death situation—and we’re on it and we help them. It can be really heated and really intense, and you can’t take things personally at those times—but the interdependence is incredible, and it all comes together. And of course, it seems sort of obvious to say, but it feels really good just working with and helping people. Just helping people. The helping aspect. I enjoy that.”
What underlies Brian’s personal morality? What’s the source?
“I don’t know the exact answer to that, to be perfectly honest. But I look at the world through the lens of evolutionary biology. I got my degree in biology. And if you’re asking how I can be ethical—how we can have ethics without religion, or without it all being handed down by the word of God—from a natural selection viewpoint, we are social creatures, and in small communities, way back when, people needed to work together and contribute to the greater good, to the group, which was the key to survival.”
But if there is no God—no ultimate divine being that establishes morality—then how do we live according to a moral system?
“I would argue that the Golden Rule prevailed long before we decided that it came from a God. And for me, I just look at it in terms of our human evolution. If you take a group of humans living in a situation where they need to work together, need to band together in order to defend themselves from predators and find food and water and shelter, and you throw in the mix someone who tries to manipulate the system for his own good and rob or steal, I think, sure, he may thrive for a little while, but if suddenly more such people emerge and grow and now you have a community of people who are only inclined to rob and steal from one another, well, that community is going to fail. They’re not going to be able to get their food, water, and shelter. And they’re going to be preyed upon. So natural selection has selected for humans who believe ‘I’ll watch your back if you watch mine and I’ll do unto you as I want you to do unto me and if we don’t, we’re fucked.’ To me, that’s how human morality started and that’s what we’ve inherited. Being a moral person means not screwing over my fellow tribe members, because I wouldn’t want them to screw me over. It’s that simple. I don’t need to complicate the issue with the notion of a God.”
When Brian speculates about the natural, adaptive evolutionary underpinnings of human morality, he is in good company: a growing number of developmental psychologists, evolutionary biologists, historical anthropologists, and primatologists are discovering more and more evidence that bolsters just such a perspective. For example, Matt Ridley, in his book The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, shows how human trust, mutual aid, and ethical cooperation naturally evolved over time and that such primal instincts helped early humans survive, both as individuals and in groups. In his book Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Frans de Waal similarly argues that primate morality, both among humans and our closest primate relatives, is indeed a naturally evolved trait, and that cooperation and humane behavior have been evolutionarily key to our success as a species. De Waal adds more depth in his latest book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, arguing that human morality does not come down to us from the heavens, but develops within us naturally as a product of evolution.
Additionally, Cristopher Boehm, in his book Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame, asserts that while selfishness certainly has its evolutionary advantages, so too does cooperation. Boehm analyzes the evolutionary role of altruism, arguing that selflessness and mindfulness of others’ needs have most definitely played positive roles in the evolution of human thriving. Such research is mushrooming at the moment, and as scientists J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer sum up, this new research indicates that human morality developed as “an adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.” For as psychology professor James Waller explains, since the small social group has been one of the few constants in our evolutionary history, that means that we “have evolved in the context of group living… . What are some of the psychological adaptations that enhance the fitness of individuals within a group … ? Love, friendship, cooperativeness, preferential and reciprocal altruism, nurturance, friendship, compassion, communication, a sense of fairness … in short, the things that hold society together.” For any social species, be it early humans or bonobos, the rewards of being part of a group that shares, cares, and looks out for one another generally outweigh the benefits of selfishness.
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WHEN IT COMES to caring and looking out for one another, Paula Hendricks is as good a human specimen as they come. Paula is from New Jersey; she is fifty-three years old, divorced, with one daughter. She has worked as a trauma and ER nurse for more than twenty-five years. Like Brian, Paula was raised with religion and definitely believed in God as a child, but by the time she was in her early twenties she wanted nothing more to do with faith, church, or religion.
Working at a hospital in a large city in New Jersey with very high rates of crime and poverty, Paula has seen her share of traumatic cases: stabbing victims, shooting victims, rape victims—and she’s seen lots of people die. Sometimes those deaths are peaceful, but sometimes they are painful, prolonged, and gut-wrenching. The many years of such work, however, have not in any way sapped Paula’s passion for what she does. “I love being a nurse. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t love being a nurse. And I feel like every patient is a gift, every interaction is a gift, every experience is a gift. It is a gift about learning about myself and learning about what it means to be human. And that happens, as a nurse, every day, all day long… . I’m grateful for the moments I have helping people, that I am able to share with people, every day.”
If Paula is ever depressed or distressed about anything, it is the inability of the large hospital she works at to help more people. She feels terrible about the current inadequacies of the American health care system, and how so many people are left unassisted or poorly handled. “We are so overwhelmed—just the volume. Some days I am just so overwhelmed—because what is happening is that people, because they’ve lost their jobs and they’ve lost their insurance—we often just can’t handle the load of people coming to us for treatment. And some days we have ambulances lined up at the door—and we don’t have enough beds. And I always feel like I am fighting to give each patient the very best care, and there’s always someone pushing me to move quicker, move on to the next one, that you don’t get to give care. You’re just quickly performing tasks. I hate those days. Because being a nurse is not just about performing tasks. It’s about being there for people, talking to them, listening to them. You know, the best thing I can hear is when a patient says to me, ‘I just feel so safe in your care.’ I want people to feel safe.”
Perhaps the hardest times for Paula are when children come in who have been the victims of violence. “I’ve seen a lot of children—sodomized, abused—just bad, bad things. Just bad. And there’s nothing you can appreciate, there’s no ‘silver lining.’ It’s just bad.” Sometimes, when several such cases come in a given week, she takes a day or two off in order to deal with the sadness and feel good again. But these times are uncommon. Generally, she feels wonderful about wh
at she does, even though it involves encountering so much suffering and death. “I appreciate life so much after I see people die. It is always just such a reminder that every moment—this is all we have. This is it. I don’t know if there is anything before or after, but this is what we do know. This is it. There are no guarantees for anything else. So we have to always, always appreciate.”
Paula’s career—her very life’s purpose—is deeply moral. It is about tending to those in need. What could be more loving?
So if she doesn’t believe in God, where do her morals come from?
“I can’t really answer that and I don’t think about it that much because, well, I guess I just don’t know any people who say things like that or think like that. Yeah, I hear it on the news, and it scares me: ‘God says that this is how things should be!’—I can’t stand that. I mean, seriously? For me, morality is just about being human. I don’t know how else to account for it. It is about people. It is about dignity. It is about pulling up a blanket on someone who is cold. You don’t need God for that. You just look at people and think, ‘What if this was your mother? Your father? How would you want them to be treated?’ I don’t know. I guess I just don’t really think about it that much. It’s just the right thing to do. And I would say that in my entire life this has never come up as much of an issue.”
Felix and Gwen: Religionless
Both Brian and Paula were raised with religion. And so perhaps their admirable devotion to others, and the underlying orientation that propels this devotion, were largely shaped or caused by the religion they experienced as children, even if they rejected that religion as adults.
Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions Page 3