Religious Belief & Moral Action
by David Geelan | 19 April 2024 |
Talking with friends and family, both in person and online, got me thinking about the relationship between a person’s religious beliefs and the moral tone struck by their actions in the world.
Such discussions tend to be anecdotally driven, and to line up on “party lines”: my atheist friends will point to immoral actions by megachurch pastors; my Christian friends will equate lack of religious belief with lack of a moral foundation. This tends to lead to more heat than light, since it’s so easy to cherry-pick cases and examples, but we don’t know how typical those examples are. Are they radical outliers, or are they the norm in a particular group?
I need to clarify at this point that my aim in this discussion is not to offer a definitive, evidence-based answer to the research question “Is religious belief strongly correlated with more moral life choices?” I suspect there are research papers that do seek to address that question, but I also suspect that, peer review included, there’s a solid chance that those papers are just more sophisticated versions of the same motivated arguments.
Instead, what I want to do is give us some tools and ways of thinking about the question that I hope might be useful in at least communicating more clearly – and perhaps being less dogmatic where the evidence isn’t particularly strong.
Believing & moral life choices
In any activity like this, it’s important to (at least attempt to) define our terms.
So, I’ll take “religious belief” to be an internal mental state in a person who genuinely believes in some form of supernatural involvement in the world. That’s pretty vague, isn’t it? But it helps us distinguish real belief from, say, someone who goes to church regularly to please a partner or family member, but doesn’t truly believe. This definition also excludes someone who believes in a purely natural karmic balance where good people get good things and vice versa in the long run, but there are no gods or spirits involved.
So religious belief is understood as an internal mental state, but beliefs can also be thought of as “dispositions to act”: if we genuinely believe something, we behave as though it is true.
Defining “moral life choices” is much more challenging, since our society very tightly entangles morality with religious dogma. So, for example, I personally would consider a couple who live together in love and harmony, care for one another, care for other people in the world, make the world a better place by being in it, to be making moral life choices, even if they haven’t yet walked down the aisle (and even if they never do), while other people might consider their “living in sin” to be the height of moral turpitude. And so on.
For my purposes, I’m going to define “moral life choices” as those that minimize harm and maximize benefit to other human beings (and by extension, because everything in our ecosystem is connected, the natural world). I know that’s potentially controversial with believers, but I think defining moral life choices in religious terms – e.g., “a life lived in accordance with Scripture” or equivalent – would make the question we’re asking circular: “Is religious belief strongly correlated with religious belief?”
Now we have to digress a little bit into statistics, but no equations, I promise! On most human things, human beings fit on a “normal curve” or “bell curve”—so much so that some places use the bell curve to moderate grades in a course of study. Take height: most fully grown adult humans who do not have a medical condition that impacts their height are somewhere between about 4 ft (1.2 m) and 7 ft (2.1 m) tall. The majority of us are near the middle of that bracket, and fewer and fewer people are very short or very tall. Some humans are outside that bracket, but not very many.
The same applies to a wide range of other human characteristics. IQ is somewhat controversial as a measure, just because intelligence is more complex than a single number can capture, but most of us are near the middle, and fewer and fewer people are at the extremes. (There is also an awful book called The Bell Curve that attempts to equate intelligence with race, but that needs to be left in the trash.)
Moral action on the curve
I’d argue that human beings probably also fall on a bell curve in relation to moral life choices: most of us are decent; fewer are saints or serial killers. Some are a little below average in terms of the choices they make, some a little above, but there’s a spread, and the great majority of people are near the middle. Most of us, with the apostle Paul, aspire to be better than we are.
Of the studies that have been done, most find little significant difference between religious believers and members of the population as a whole on the measurable dimensions of moral action. Things such as spousal and child abuse occur at about the same rate in communities of believers as they do in the population at large. The same applies for positive things, with some exceptions: volunteering seems to happen at about the same rate— but American believers do contribute more to charity than the average citizen.
There doesn’t seem to be a large effect size (going there would require some equations, so we won’t, but we can get into it in the comments, if you like) for religious belief’s influencing moral behavior. The mean (average score) for religious believers (of whatever stripe, not just Christians) is very close to the mean for the whole population.
Correlation
Another way of thinking about this is correlation: the way two different variables vary in relation to each other. Correlations can be strong or weak (or absent) and can be positive (as one variable increases, so does the other) or negative (as one increases, the other decreases). As we often hear, “correlation is not causation.” The fact that two things vary together doesn’t necessarily mean one caused the other. Some third factor may have caused both, or they may be unrelated but have randomly changed in similar ways. (My favorite example is that skirt lengths in fashion are strongly correlated with the stock market: when the markets are up, so are the hemlines, and vice versa. I don’t think either of those directly causes the other.)
So, now that we have all this machinery in place, which of these graphs do you think best describes the current, right here right now, answer to our question: “Is religious belief strongly correlated with more moral life choices?”
If the answer is “Yes,” then one of the two leftmost graphs above will apply: in general, as the degree of religious belief increases, both in an individual and in a population, the degree to which people make moral life choices and engage in morally positive actions will increase. The relationship might not be perfect, but it might be quite strong. On the other hand, if my comments above about the fairly limited differences we observe between religious communities and others on particular measurable moral and immoral actions are accurate, one of the middle three graphs is more likely to capture the situation.
In philosophy we talk about the “is-ought”distinction. How something is does not always offer a good guide to how it ought to be. Christianity has the model of Eden as what ought to be, and the Fall to explain why our world is at it is, and many other religious traditions have similar explanatory frameworks.
So, above I asked how you currently see the world: is the correlation between religious belief and moral action strong or weak, positive or negative? The next question is “How ought it to be?” Which of the graphs above represents the ideal?
Dr. David Geelan is Sue’s husband and Cassie and Alexandra’s dad. He started out at Avondale College, and is currently Professor and National Head of the School of Education, within the faculty of Education, Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia.
