Chapter 3: Morality from Religion? Nah.

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This episode is about where morality actually comes from—and to tell you that, I have to start with my own family. My father was born in Soviet Ukraine during Stalin’s forced famine. My mother spent her childhood under Nazi occupation, a short walk from a Versailles draped in a Nazi banner. Neither of them trusted the Church, and yet both felt an obligation to belong. The certainty it offered was powerful enough to overcome the distrust. I recognized that same pull in myself—which is why I’m not describing a weakness I watched from a safe distance.

There’s a claim at the center of almost every argument for keeping religion embedded in public life: without it, we have no morality. That claim is precisely backwards. I make the case carefully, because it’s easy to make it carelessly. Religion has produced real moral goods—abolition, the civil rights movement, the Catholic Worker movement. But the moral content of those movements is reachable by secular reasoning too, and the deeper story is that morality evolved rather than was revealed. Drawing on Michael Tomasello, Jonathan Haidt, and Derek Parfit, I show that our ancestors were already governing themselves by mutual aid long before they had a word for any god.

Then the harder part: what religious institutions have actually done with morality over the centuries when they held the most power. The record is not encouraging. I look at the secular societies that score highest on nearly every measure of human flourishing, at Martin Luther King’s social gospel, and at the moral disengagement that lets otherwise decent people vote for harm.

I’ve been told that as an agnostic parent of a trans child my moral standing here is limited. I reject that completely—and I explain why. Morality before religion. Evidence before revelation. Democracy before theocracy. When an institution tells you your son’s dignity is up for a vote because a doctrine says so, the appropriate response is the one Rosa Parks gave the bus driver. Nah.