Neo asks “Is Religion Necessary for Morality?”, and answers thus:
When I ponder the question, I note – as I’m sure others have before me – that there are many believers who are amoral or even immoral in their actual behavior, and many non-believers who are moral. But I don’t know percentages. My guess is that more believers than non-believers live moral lives, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the differences were not enormously large. You can see some statistics on infidelity and religion here, for example.
A chart from the article:
Historically, it’s easy to show that religions and religious societies can become corrupt, and societies that are seemingly religious can wage religious wars or pogroms that are very murderous. The same is true of individuals. I’ve personally known a number of religious people with very shaky moral behavior, as well as atheists who are very upright.
Nevertheless, I think there’s something to the general proposition that a society in which most of the people throw religion away, and whose culture starts mocking religious belief, tends to be on the way to ruin. I don’t think that’s the only thing going on, though. Perhaps the loss of religion is a symbol of a decline rather than the main cause, but then it sets up a negative feedback loop a la Sodom and Gomorrah?
Just so.
Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking a few years ago at the dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College, quoted John Adams’s address to the Massachusetts militia in 1798:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thomas underscored the critical point, one that is missing from most lamentations about the failures of the educational establishment. “The preservation of liberty,” he said in his peroration, “is not guaranteed. Without the guardrails supplied by religious conviction, popular sovereignty can devolve into mob rule, unmoored from any conception of objective truth.” [“A Genuinely Transgressive Act: On the Dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College”, The New Criterion, November 2019]
As traditional social norms and civil society were (and are) being shattered by the left, the destructive results — spelled out here by Malcolm Pollack — have merely invited the further growth of the state and the enactment of yet more destructive policies. Failure breeds more failure because the left cares not about consequences of its agenda. Power — absolute power — is its golden calf.
The left’s war on traditional social norms and civil society is of a piece with its abandonment of religion:
A survey from Gallup shows that religious affiliations have decreased dramatically among Democrats over the last 24 years.
According to Breitbart, the Gallup poll reports that in 1999, the number of Democrats who identified as religious in some way was at 60%, compared to 62% of Republicans. In 2023, that percentage is now just 37%, a staggering 23-point decrease that amounts to an average decrease of 1% every year.
“During that time, the percentage of Democrats identifying as spiritual but not religious has increased 14 points,” the survey reports, “while the percentage saying they are neither has tripled.” Meanwhile, “there has been no meaningful change in Republicans’ self-identification as religious or spiritual.” The percentage of Republicans who identify as religious has decreased by just one point since 1999, at 61% today. In the same span of time, the number of Republicans who identify as “spiritual” rather than religious rose slightly, from 25% to 28%.
Among independents, the number of those who identify as “spiritual” has decreased slightly from 37% to 32%, while those who identify as neither religious nor spiritual has risen noticeably, from 13% to 21%.
The decline in religious observance by the left has fueled the displacement of religion, community, and a common culture by the regulatory-welfare state, abortion on demand, anthropogenic global warming, feminism, “choice”, and myriad other totems, beliefs, “movements”, and “leaders”, both religious and secular. As a result of this secular nirvana, are our minds less troubled, do we sleep better, are we happier in our relationships, is our destiny more secure? The answer to each of those questions is “no”.
The tale was told long ago:
[1] Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree of paradise? [2] And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: [3] But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. [4] And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. [5] For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil. [Book of Genesis, Chapter 3]
Thomas Sowell writes about the wages of leftist “intellectualism” in Intellectuals and Society:
One of the things intellectuals have been doing for a long time is loosening the bonds that hold a society together. They have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, have long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such as class — and more recently “gender” — have been projected as either more real or more important. [p. 303]
In my view, the
left’s essential agenda is the repudiation of ordered liberty of the kind that arises from evolved social norms, and the replacement of that liberty by sugar-coated oppression. The bread and circuses of imperial Rome have nothing on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and the many other forms of personal and corporate welfare that are draining America of its wealth and élan. All of that “welfare” has been bought at the price of economic and social liberty (which are indivisible).
Freedom from social bonds and social norms is not liberty. Freedom from religion, which is a key objective of the left, is bound to yield less liberty and more crime, which further erodes liberty.