Can a person be moral without being a member of a religion? I would say that yes, a person can be moral without being religious; the two are not mutually inclusive, but neither are they mutually exclusive.
History is littered with examples of people and societies committing acts of genocide, torture and what we now consider immoral behavior. Examples include the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.
In each of these examples, religious leaders told the masses that what they were doing was not only good and right, but imperative to spreading and defending the faith. Never mind the fact that these acts flew in the face of the teachings of their religion. Religion clearly has no monopoly on morality.
So then why should the election of religiously non-affiliated persons to one of the highest positions of authority matter?
Dennis Prager, in his article titled “Why Young Americans Can’t Think Morally,” states that the current generation can’t be moral because they were brought up outside of the Judeo-Christian belief system. His core belief about morality—and secularism in general—is this: “If moral standards are not rooted in God, they do not objectively exist.”
While I disagree with his premise that only if one believes in God can one be moral, he does make a point that the current younger generation doesn’t have a comprehensive moral belief system. Instead, they seem to have been raised with the individualistic approach that they decide what is moral and what isn’t.
While most of us could agree that certain things like murder, theft and dishonesty are inherently immoral behaviors, there’s far more ambiguity about less concrete scenarios.
Prager cites a study conducted by Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, who found that “moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner.”
What does this mean for society? Are we moving away from one built upon a moral foundation to one based upon individual feelings of right and wrong? Or are we redefining what moral behavior is?
To answer these questions: On Jan. 2, Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, swore in the first of 11 religiously “non-affiliated” representatives, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.
While this may turn out to be a mere side note in the grand scheme of history, it’s significant to me that only now are people who do not actively subscribe to any religion being voted into positions of significant power.
Obviously, 11 representatives in Congress don’t make a majority or even a significant enough bloc to be able to push an agenda. But it does signal a turn in the thinking of some large swaths of our society.
No longer is the religious affiliation of a candidate as important, at least in some districts. Instead of relying on some abstract higher being to dictate what’s right and wrong, some people in power will now be able to freely rely upon their on reasoning and the laws of our country to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong.
Instead of placing her hand on a Bible, Sinema chose to place her hand on the Constitution. While the gesture did take place in ceremony, it signaled what I believe to be her line of thinking: As a representative of her district, she swore to execute her duties to the office and the law of the land.
Ultimately, the real problem isn’t that our leaders don’t follow their own religious codes of morality—one need look no further than the multitude of sex scandals for evidence—but rather that society no longer values moral and conscious decision-making.
Instead our society is more focused on getting whatever it wants, as long as it doesn’t have to personally pay the cost. This Nietzschean philosophy isn’t conducive to building the Great Society we’re supposed to have.