My Surprisingly Brief Search for Morality
When I was growing up, I was taught that the Bible was the ultimate source for morality. It was given to us by God to teach us how to live morally. It was the foundation for our society’s laws, and it showed us how to treat those around us. The Ten Commandments, especially, were there to guide us to live moral lives. And Jesus’s commands that we love God foremost and love our neighbors as ourselves were the overarching principles that were to guide all of our actions and interactions.
Sure, people of other religions and no religion generally followed similar moral rules, but if you traced them back far enough, you were sure to find that the origins of those rules were somehow “Judeo-Christian.” Without God—our specific interpretation of this one particular god—there could be no morality. There would be no reason for anyone to act morally, and humanity would descend into chaos as we all ran around naked burning puppies and killing each other. (Which, aside from the nudity, isn’t that far off from what is said to have happened at Jericho.)
The words “Christian” or “godly” were often used interchangeably with the word “good.” If you told me someone was a Christian, I immediately formed an opinion about their morality. They were people that followed the same moral code that I followed and could be trusted inherently. If you had told me someone was an atheist, I would have assumed something very different. (If you’d told me someone was Jewish, I would have wondered how they could possibly have missed the very clear fulfillment of their messianic prophecies that had been recorded in the gospels.)
Having grown up surrounded almost exclusively by other conservative Christians, I was convinced that the Bible is the true (and only) source of morality. So when my faith crumbled and I realized that I no longer believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God, I worried about how I would know how to live my life. Many Christians have asked atheists where their morality comes from, or why, if they don’t believe in God, they don’t just go about robbing and murdering everyone they see. I had thoughts like this too, as I was leaving Christianity. My moral foundation had been based on the Bible, so I had been told, so without it how would I know how to live? It didn’t take long to find the answer; in fact, I’d already found it before I started looking. I realized that one of the major reasons I had left evangelical Christianity was because of my own morality, which was more developed and more refined than anything one could glean solely from the Bible.
It was my own sense of morality that made me question why God was ok with killing all the firstborn sons in Egypt just to make a point. That made me wonder what people could have done that was so bad to justify drowning all but 8 (or so) of them. That made it impossible to understand why God would have commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, even if it was only a test. My morality made me question why women weren’t allowed to be leaders in the church. It made me think it wasn’t right that “all sins are the same in the eyes of God.” Sure, they were all failing to meet his standard of perfection, but some clearly caused more harm than others. My own morality was the reason I was never comfortable with the idea of a hell that included eternal conscious torment.
And I’m not just bragging about myself; I believe the same is true of most of the Christians I went to church with. My church held that homosexuality and adultery were sins, but we weren’t executing anyone for them. Abortion was equated to murder, but we didn’t really treat it that way. Every church employee worked on what we considered to be the Sabbath, and we stoned very few, if any, of them to death.
It is their sense of morality that prompts Christians to come up with explanations about how some of the Old Testament laws no longer apply, and how some still apply but the prescribed punishments are no longer required. It is their own sense of morality, not the Bible, that makes (most) Christians oppose slavery. That prevents (most) Christian parents from beating their children with sticks or throwing rocks at the rebellious ones. That keeps (most) Christian men from purchasing the virgins they rape from their fathers for 50 shekels of silver.
At some point along the way, human morality developed to a point in which slavery, rape, and child abuse were considered immoral, so the biblical passages that condoned them had to be reinterpreted. Beating and stoning children was interpreted to mean spanking, and then just kind of quietly abandoned. They argue, “Slavery in the Bible wasn’t how we envision it today. It was temporary, more like an indentured servant,” or whatever. Bullshit—enslaved people could be bought and sold, beaten and raped. But over time these things became societally unacceptable, and people came up with different ways to interpret the Bible to support their preexisting beliefs.
The idea that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments is absurd. The first four relate exclusively to one’s relationship with this particular god, and (despite what the Christian nationalists would have you believe) they contradict one of the founding principles of our nation, the freedom of and from religion. The tenth, a prohibition against wanting things that other people have, is the foundation of our economy. The ban on adultery isn’t what modern readers assume, but instead a law strictly against one man having sex with the wife another man owns as property—rather archaic in the modern context. Honoring one’s father and mother is generally good, but there are certainly fathers and mothers undeserving of honor. And the remaining prohibitions against murder, theft, and purgery are fairly universal and predated by several other cultures.
But it isn’t just that the Bible is insufficient for developing a moral code; it’s a hinderance. Leaving evangelical Christianity didn’t change my morality; it liberated it. Instead of silently feeling uncomfortable with the patriarchal power structure, I could reject it. Instead of tacitly thinking that queer people might not be inherently sinful, I could affirm them. Instead of quietly believing there were times when abortion was the best solution and that it isn’t really equivalent to murder, I could view it from the perspective of harm reduction and bodily autonomy. I was able to move beyond just not being overtly racist to examining the history of systemic oppression of Black and Indigenous people and recognizing how my own whiteness has made life so much easier for me. I was finally able to see the world through a lens that didn’t frame poverty and substance abuse as personal moral failings and understand that many of our society’s problems require systemic solutions.
The search for morality I had anticipated was surprisingly brief. It was truly over before it started. I’ve done a lot of work since then to deconstruct my former worldview, but the foundation was solid, and it was in fact my own morality that pushed me away from evangelical Christianity. I work every day to replace what I tore down with something that is at the same time far more beautiful, and in need of so much repair. I’m not finished, and I hope I never will be. I no longer equate “Christian” with “good,” and with the number of public reports of abuse by church leaders, I don’t see how anyone still can. There are good Christians and bad Christians, good atheists and bad atheists, and good and bad people from every other religion. But if the only thing preventing someone from murdering people is Exodus 20:13, perhaps their moral foundation isn’t as strong as they believe it to be.