But what about people who were raised without any religion at all, ever? How do they develop their morality, and what compels them to be good? These are important questions, given that the number of people raised without any religion whatsoever, although still quite small, has been steadily increasing in America for many years. Today, nearly 11 percent of American children are raised without any religious influence at home.
Are the children raised in such secular homes disproportionately criminal or malevolent? Absolutely not. No study exists that even suggests that kids raised in secular homes are disproportionately immoral, unethical, or violent. As Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has observed, “Having no religious affiliation is the best predictor of law-abiding behavior,” and “lifelong atheists have been found to be well-socialized … and nonviolent.”
Felix Campanella is twenty-nine years old. He’s from Maryland, but currently lives in Florida with his fiancée. He works as a waiter during the day, and at night he works on his dissertation, which is a critical treatise on the contemporary construction of ethics. His goal is to eventually become a professor. Although a nonbeliever in God for all his life, Felix doesn’t like to label himself an atheist. “It just makes it seem like my identity is formed in response to questions about the existence of God, and that’s just not true. It would be more accurate to call myself a backpacker or scuba diver or snowboarder—these are much more central to my identity than not believing in God.”
Felix explains that his understanding of morality came simply from living. “I lived life. I experienced other people. I’ve seen people get hurt by other people. I’ve seen family disputes. I’ve experienced turmoil. I’ve seen what not caring for other people can do. I’ve simply learned from experience that when you do genuinely care about others, more good comes from it. So my sense of morality comes from my experiences in life. And having good role models—my parents are good, genuine people.”
What would he say to those who insist that we need a divine, transcendent source of ultimate moral authority in the form of God?
“I think it’s pretty ludicrous. It takes all of the humanity out of it. It takes our experiences with other people out of the equation. If you’re just doing something or not doing something for the pure fact that you were told to do so, or not to do so—it completely ignores the experiences we have, and the pain and suffering that people experience as a result of certain actions. And if people don’t see that—if people don’t see those connections for themselves, that certain actions lead to certain consequences—then that cheapens our sense of what morality is. To just obey some rules put forth by an invisible deity? No. Morality must stem from our humanity, and from our experiences with other humans. That’s it.”
—
EVERY NOW AND THEN I interview people who are so completely secular that they literally have nothing to say about religion, let alone God. And even their being secular is such a nonissue for them that the topic itself elicits little commentary or reflection. For such individuals, religion and secularity have about as much importance, or take up about as much thought in their life, as the latest advances in furniture upholstery, or the political situation in Tajikistan. Whenever I sit down with such a person for an interview, we have our cups of tea steaming before us, the vibe is pleasant enough, and then I turn on the tape recorder, but when I start asking questions about being religious or irreligious, there just isn’t that much to say.
That’s how it was with Gwen Li. Gwen is twenty-two, and about to graduate from one of America’s top liberal arts colleges. Her major is molecular biology. Her senior thesis is on the aging process of hydra—microscopic freshwater organisms that appear to be immortal. After graduation, she’ll be attending one of America’s most prestigious graduate programs, and her ultimate goal is to do biomedical research in a university lab. Gwen grew up in Iowa, but when she was ten her parents got jobs in Minnesota, where she spent the rest of her childhood. Her mother is a cilia geneticist, and her father is a computational biologist.
Gwen’s family never went to church, temple, or mosque. They never prayed. They never did any religious rituals. They never discussed God. They never spoke of spirituality. They never talked about an afterlife. Nor did they ever criticize or speak against such things. Rather, they simply lived their lives without any reference to or discussion of religion—or secularity. Gwen was never told that she was secular, nor did her parents ever say that they were atheists. Thus both religion and its absence were simply nonissues. “One of my best friends in the third grade was Jewish, and that was the first introduction I ever had to people having religion—and all I really got was that they had some special kind of dinner every Friday night. But I didn’t know anything more than that.”
Today, Gwen has no qualms about identifying herself as an atheist. And for her, given her thoroughly secular, utterly godless upbringing, she understands morality as all boiling down to compassion. And she is quick to point out that she doesn’t think being moral is such a big deal or rare phenomenon—nearly everyone she knows, including all her friends and family members, are people whom she would describe as moral. “I don’t really know any horrible, immoral people.”
How does she feel about the idea that people need religion, or faith in God, to be moral? “I think that completely misses the point. You can easily teach children moral rules independent of such things. And I think that most moral impulses are just pretty intuitive. Even if you aren’t taught, you’ll figure it out by simply acting immorally—and soon everyone will hate you. Kids can pretty much figure out that they shouldn’t steal or lie. You don’t need God to make those things obvious.”
But if she doesn’t think the Eye of God is watching her at all times, what keeps her from doing immoral things, especially if she knows that she could get away with it? For example, if she was alone in the dorms one day, and she saw a purse on the ground with some cash sticking out, and no one was around, why not just take the cash? “I guess I just think that if it were my purse and my money, I would hope that someone would find it and then give it back to me with the money. I think there is just a way that people should behave if they want to be a part of society, and so I try to act that way in how I live. If I want people to help me, I should help them. I mean, it’s pretty basic.”
When religious people face a moral dilemma, they can pray about it. They can turn to God for direction. But not secular people like Gwen. So I wondered, has she ever faced a real moral quandary? And if so, who or what did she turn to, if not God?
“One time I had a good friend tell me something that she didn’t want me to tell other people. She had confided in me, and begged me to keep it a secret. But I felt like I needed to tell other people. She had an eating disorder. It was pretty bad, and could have been really dangerous. I was worried about her. But I had also sworn to her that I wouldn’t tell anyone about it. But I felt like she needed help. So I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want her to feel betrayed by me, but at the same time, she needed serious help. So I ended up going to another friend that I trusted, and I told her, and then we just tried to figure it out together. We ended up, the two of us, going to this friend together and talking to her and urging her to tell someone, and she eventually went and got help.”
As Gwen has gotten older, she’s met more and more people who are religious. And she’s lived with various religious people in fairly close quarters in the dorms at her college. The question of morality has come up now and then. And this has, on at least one occasion, presented Gwen with a problem. “I just didn’t know what to say when this Christian girl asked me where my morals come from. Her answer to that question was really straightforward. She said, ‘I get my morals from God.’ Or maybe she said, ‘I get my morals from the Bible.’ Something like that. And that was it. But when she asked me where I get my morals from, I didn’t—I was sort of stumped because I didn’t have a quick, you know, simple answer.”
Secular Morality, Simply Put
Man
y nonreligious men and women have faced the same dilemma as Gwen. I’ve heard it from numerous people I’ve interviewed that when they have been asked where they get their morals from, they’ve suddenly found themselves tongue-tied. I myself have been questioned by earnest students in class, or I’ve gotten into it with a colleague, or I’ve been in public debates with religious believers, and this question of “Where do you get your morals?” has sapped my ability to reply with any sort of aplomb. Where does one even begin to start to answer that? How does one reply to such a query with as pat, succinct, and staunch an answer as the one typically offered by the religious?
The bald truth is, secular morality doesn’t have a simple, observable, obvious origin. Secular men and women don’t get their morals from some singular, readily citable source or supernatural deity. Rather, our morals are complex creations. They are the outcome of numerous forces, factors, and influences working simultaneously—many of which we aren’t even fully aware of, at least most of the time.
Social science is quite insightful—if not downright stubborn—on this front, revealing just how much our morals are the inevitable result of intrinsically dynamic and often obfuscated processes. For example, we know from the discipline of psychology that our ability to manifest empathy or feel sympathy, shame, guilt, trust, or honor is heavily determined by our early childhood experiences, not to mention innate aspects of our personalities, which can be to varying degrees genetically or hormonally based. From the discipline of neuropsychology, we know how fundamental the intricacies of the brain are in our developing the ability to possess any sense of morality at all. The neuronal wiring of our brain has evolved to give us the capacity to learn, remember, understand, imagine, and thus be empathetic, kind, concerned, and altruistic. But when this wiring is damaged, dysfunctional, or atypical, our ability to employ moral reasoning is hindered, destroyed, or functionally disabled.
From the discipline of sociology, we know that socialization—the informal, often unconscious process of learning how to be, based on what we experience and observe while young—is fundamental to our development as thinking, caring, and loving human beings. The people who raise, nurture, feed, and love us, and all of the experiences we have and the people we interact with and observe as we grow up, shape us to an undeniably strong degree, in both conscious and unconscious ways, so that our very sense of self—and that includes our morality!—is inexorably tied to these unavoidable dynamics of socialization.
From the discipline of anthropology, we know that culture shapes us, defines us, and confines us at all times. Culture is to humans what water is to fish: essential, ever present, and yet all too often invisible. But culture molds much of how we see, interpret, label, and experience the world: our goals and aspirations, our fears and worries, our loyalties and loathings are intrinsically cultural things. And thus no development of individual morality is even possible without culture. And we know that different cultures exhibit different norms, mores, and values—sometimes dramatically different—and thus our own sense of wrong and right is exceedingly, excessively, unavoidably determined by the cultural water within which we swim, whether we like it or not.
From the discipline of criminology, we know that systemic poverty, violence in the home, alcohol and drug abuse, access to firearms, poor nutrition, lack of employment opportunities, and a host of other institutional, economic, and societal factors can all crack a person’s moral compass. And finally, from the discipline of history, we know that constructions of morality change and develop over time quite significantly, so that simply when a person lives can have an incredible influence on their sense of good and bad, right and wrong, justness and evil, morality and immorality.
Complicated indeed. And as my colleagues within the various disciplines of the social sciences can attest to, what I’ve just offered above is actually quite cursory, truncated, underdeveloped, and woefully insufficient. For trying to adequately account for “where humans get their morals” is an almost endless endeavor, given the complexity of the sources and processes involved, which are social, psychological, neurological, anthropological, evolutionary, historical—and then some.
But if I could offer a suggestion to Gwen, or any other secular individual out there who’d like a pat, simple answer to the question at hand, I’d offer the following: “I get my morals from the people who raised me, the culture within which I live, the kind of brain that I have, and the lessons I have learned from things I experience as I navigate life.”
Of course, in the end, where an individual “gets” his or her morals is of less importance than how those morals are enacted in daily life. If religious people develop their morals through believing in a god, and the result is compassion, kindness, honesty, and altruism, that’s wonderful. For secular people, no such deity is necessary, or even intelligible. The Golden Rule—in all its simplicity and universality—suffices.
—
DEBATES ABOUT the costs or benefits of secular versus religious morality have always gotten a lot of lively play in the academic halls of philosophy. And related considerations, or loaded insinuations, frequently flare up within just about any culture war, be it over gay marriage or abortion. But what is new here is the social significance of secular morality, because for the first time in history huge chunks of large modern societies are affirmatively secular, with millions of men and women navigating their lives without religion or faith in a divine source of moral guidance.
How are such highly secularized societies faring? Does the existence of more and more secular people in society result in societal decay? Is increasing secularization a menacing threat to the social order?
The answers to these questions may surprise you.
Chapter 2
The Good Society
Several years ago, my best friend got stabbed and my mother-in-law fell down half a flight of particularly hard stairs. As you can imagine, these two unfortunate events caused me a good deal of worry and concern. But they did more than that. They provided me with a clear opportunity to reflect upon the underlying relationship between personal life occurrences—be they good or bad—and the wider societal context within which they occur.
Put simply: when bad things happen to people living in dysfunctional, poor societies, those bad things are, well, really bad. Or worse than they need or ought to be. But when bad things happen to people living in well-functioning, affluent societies, those bad things can be dealt with and responded to in such a way that they often aren’t as bad as they might have been. So if you happen to suffer a violent assault in a struggling society with underfunded medical facilities, then your chances of being well tended to are obviously less than ideal. But if you happen to take a tough tumble down a cold stairway in a prosperous society with an excellent health care system, well, then your chances of being well tended to and enjoying a speedy recovery are obviously quite good. My best friend’s stabbing and my mother-in-law’s fall made all of this readily observable.
Let me start with the stabbing. Ami (short for Amatzya) has been my best friend for some twenty years. We met at the University of Oregon, where we shared an office as graduate students in the sociology department. In addition to his love of Bob Dylan, hummus, and bike riding, Ami has always had a deep crush on Jamaica. He’s worked and lived there on and off for several years in the northeastern part of the island, and the extensive friendships that he’s established there are rich and true.
During one of his more recent trips to Jamaica, while visiting friends in Port Antonio, Ami went to a small bar after dinner. That’s where he got stabbed. This is his version of what happened: A woman there, whom he didn’t know, kept asking him to buy her a beer. He continually and politely refused, knowing full well that such an act in a rural Jamaican bar can come with strings. But she was persistent. She kept imploring. Finally, just to get her to stop, he bought her a Red Stripe. And that’s exactly when her boyfriend entered the bar. When he saw Ami handing her the beer, he assumed that Ami wa
s making moves on his woman. He rushed at Ami from behind and stabbed him in the lower back, aiming for—but fortunately just missing—his left kidney. Blood was quick to spurt, and the entire bar exploded in rage at Ami’s assailant, whom they instantly attacked, beating him with their fists and feet and pounding him with metal folding chairs. Although lightheaded and in a state of shock from his profuse bleeding, Ami was of sound enough mind to know that he didn’t want to witness a murder; it was actually his pleading and imploring on behalf of his own attacker that got the angry crowd to let up.
Once the mini-riot was quelled, attention turned to Ami’s wound. It looked serious. Normally one would call 911 in such a situation, but this is Jamaica. Someone tried to call for an ambulance, but they had no luck; they couldn’t get through, and when they finally did, they were told that there were no ambulances available. A friend of a friend said he knew someone with access to a car, so after about an hour, Ami was driven to the closest hospital. After waiting in the overcrowded and less than pleasant waiting room for some time, he was finally able to see a doctor. The doctor examined the wound and said, “You’re going to be fine, but you’re going to need stitches.”
“Okay,” Ami replied, relieved.
“But you’re going to need stitches,” the doctor repeated.
“Yes, okay,” Ami again replied. “Go right ahead.”
“You don’t understand,” the doctor continued. “I am telling you that you will need stitches because we don’t have stitches at this hospital. We’re all out of suture supplies. My deepest apologies.”
Ami ended up just covering the wound with some duct tape. Fortunately, no infection ensued, and he recovered without any serious complications. But he was certainly left with a nasty scar.
Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions Page 4
