The Myth of Christian Morality

In a religious debate, one point that the religious often bring up is that without religion, we would have no morality. They maintain that religion is the source of our understanding of how to treat other people. That things like, the Ten Commandments provide us with a moral compass, without which we would be largely ignorant of right and wrong, and basically all of civilization would fall apart, cats and dogs would be sleeping together, everyone would be killing or raping or stealing from each other. In short, they maintain that religion is the moral duct tape and bubble gum that keeps our makeshift raft of humanity from exploding and generally ruining this whole metaphysical MacGyver episode.

I've given this some thought and I think that this is a fascinating position to take, because for the most part most religious persons do not, in fact, take the position that everything in their religious texts are to be taken literally or are to be used as moral teachings. For instance, most Christians would agree that the Bible has a strong stance against, for example, murdering someone. There is even a commandment against this (I'm using "murder" because this appears to be the best translation of the Hebrew word "rasah", but "kill" works equally well for my purposes here); however, they apparently choose to ignore verses of the bible that specifically direct them to murder others, such as:

If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives. (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death. (Exodus 21:15 NAB)

If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death. (Leviticus 20:10 NLT)


The list of capital crimes in the Bible is huge and exhausting. God himself appears to murder a lot of people indiscriminately for almost no reason at all. Lot's wife, for instance, was murdered for literally just looking the wrong way.

This same thing holds true for other moral teachings as well. For instance, a Christian might say that the teachings of the Bible would clearly not condone rape, yet there are many stories of rape in the bible in which those who are doing the raping are considered the heroes of the story (Lot, offering his virgin daughters to the mob of men in Sodom so that the angels in his house would not be harmed, for example.) Which Christian today would offer up their virgin daughters to be raped by a mob under any circumstances?

So we come to my point: my observation is that "Christian Morality" is a myth. It is my observation that the morality that people get from the Bible is really the exact same morality that they already possessed and nothing more. That people use their own inherent understandings of morality to decide what parts of the Bible to follow and which are moral, and base their faith on those verses that support their own personal view of God, their own personal interpretation of God's teachings. In a sense, they are creating their own God whose intentions match their understanding of morality. Every Christian denomination does this to some degree. In fact, choosing which parts of the Bible to focus on is basically the defining characteristic of any given offshoot of Christianity.


Now, I am purposely limiting my opinions here to what I know best, Christians and Christianity. However, I think that it stands to reason that much of my argument may still apply to other religions. Though I do know that some fundamentalist religious groups do hold to their religious texts very rigorously and to them, perhaps, this argument does not apply. I would submit to you though, that those who do consider their religious texts as absolute moral authorities and who do try to follow these texts to the letter of the laws prescribed are extremely rare, and when extant, are considered by most outsiders to be extremely immoral, fanatical, and in many contexts, outright dangerous. So again, the concept of religion as a moral authority seems highly suspect.

To close today, I think that it seems clear that morality can be understood outside the context of religion and that, indeed, if anything, religion only muddies the waters. To me, I feel that this strengthens my resolve that morality is best understood in the context of reason and intellect, which is the path upon which I seem to find the best footing. Your mileage may vary.