Religion and Moral Identity

“Can we be good without God?” is a difficult question to ponder. It is not difficult because I have a wavering faith or strong doubts, but rather because it is nearly impossible to contemplate the idea. What I mean by this is that what we in Western Civilization believe to be “good” or “moral” is primarily based upon century-old ideas which, in turn, are centered upon Christian ideals. Thus, I fully concur with Dr. Tinder in his article “On the Political Meaning of Christianity” when he speaks of the Enlightenment saying, “It has translated certain Christian values into secular terms…” (Tinder 70). What Dr. Tinder is asserting is that in a movement which many people consider to be a period where religious teachings were traded in for the scientific theory was not truly secular. Rather, Christian ideals were applied to new fields and ideas that had previously been relatively unexplored. It is this very notion, one in which so-called secular realms are actually closely tied to the religious world, that I agree with.

Hence, what I am proposing is that the question posed in this prompt is not possible to answer. That is, Christianity has played such a prominent role in history since it was first adopted by the Roman Empire under Constantine that there is no way to separate it from modern-day thinking. The very country that we live in was founded upon Christian thinking (hard work, the individual, etc). The laws of our country are based upon those laws first presented in religious text. For example, “Thou shalt not kill” become “murder is a criminal act.” If, from the beginning, we did not believe in the Christian notion of God, then our moral system as we know would not exist. For evidence of this, we can look to the beliefs of tribes that have had very little interaction with Westerners. In some of these tribes, members who have raped another member are not sentenced to exile, but rather pay the family of the victim a pig or other material good. To us, this seems ludicrous and unjust; but why is that? It is because in Christian-centered Western morality, rape is an egregious crime and physical punishment viewed as acceptable.

So then the question to me becomes: Are these tribes; practices, and others like theirs, moral? Most of us would sound a resounding “no” but that is because of our engrained notions of right and wrong. In fact, it is these very concepts that are a product of the heavy influence of Christianity upon American culture. So, if as this prompt suggests, we are to attempt to discern whether we can be moral if we do not believe in God, there is no true answer. This is because our views on morality are Christian-centered and it is this very element that we are being asked to remove. If it is removed, then we have no idea of what is moral to go off of, and are then unable to judge anything as being moral or immoral. So, in short I say both yes and no. Yes, we could possibly consider ourselves to be moral without God, but our moral system would not exist as we know it. Conversely, no we could not consider ourselves moral without God because what are believed to be his teaching have been the foundations of our moral system for millennia and there is no changing it.