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Christopher Hitchens famously claimed that “religion poisons everything,” and Steven Weinberg argued that “with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.” Here are six reasons those are silly arguments.
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So about 20 years ago, we saw the rise of what’s sometimes called New Atheism, although it’s not that new anymore. It was kind of the convalescence of a number of authors and thinkers, people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and they were focused on this idea that religion wasn’t just bad, but was a negative societal force. That religion poisoned everything.
Now, that language is coming from Christopher Hitchens in his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and he spends, of course, an entire book making that argument. I want to give a little bit of a summary of his views in his own words and then a couple other different takes from outspoken atheists and what are called anti-theists, people who are actively against religion, not just don’t believe in it, and then unpack what we could say in response to this.
As a Christian, as a believer, as a religious person, how does one respond to these claims that religion poisons everything? So first, here’s Hitchens in his own words. He says, “As I write these words and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I’ve touched upon. Religion poisons everything.”
And he repeats that mantra repeatedly throughout the book. And then a bit later he says, “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women, and coercive towards children. Organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.” There’s one more charge to be added to the bill of Indictment. “With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world.”
So that’s the claim. Religion is irrational. It’s intolerant. Maybe it’s not inherently racist to be religious, but it’s tied to racism and mistreatment of women and children and the like, that it poisons everything. Now, one of the most famous lines associated with this is with a lesser known but pretty important thinker by the name of Steven Weinberg. He was I believe a physicist. And in The New York Review of Books, he had a pretty famous quotation where he says, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil.
But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.” So that’s a good kind of I think one sentence summary of the religion poisons everything thesis. It’s not just religious people happen to do bad things. It’s not even just in its strongest form that some people do bad things in the name of religion. It’s that the influence of religion makes people worse than they otherwise would be. And I think on the religious side of that argument, there are really six things that we can say in response.
And I’ll give them to you in bullet point form and then we’ll unpack them one by one. So first, it’s meaningless to say that religion is bad or good. Religion is a genus, not a species. And so to say that religion is bad is to say that weather is pleasant or unpleasant. You got to be more specific. Second, we should be judging religions and religious claims based on their truth, not on niceness, not on how people behave and respond to it. Now, by all means, if a religion is turning people consistently wicked, that’s a red flag, something may be off about it.
But it’s possible for a claim to be both true and a motivator for evil. We’ll get there. Third, you don’t actually need religion to make good people do evil things. Weinberg is just completely wrong about this, and it’s shocking that someone could live through the 20th century and continue to make such an outrageous, outlandish claim in the face of millions, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions who’ve died for secular causes. Fourth, on the flip side, we’ll get really specific and not just say religion makes people good, but Christianity has a good track record of making people good.
And Weinberg actually tries to grapple with this I think unsuccessfully, and we’ll get into a particular case of this. Fifth, to say that with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil takes religion, you’re incorporating good and evil here. And so where are those ideas coming from, if not from something like God?
And sixth and finally, we’re going to touch on something called the law of conservation of religion basically to suggest that this 20-year-long crusade of New Atheists against religion has completely backfired if they’re trying to make the world a safer, more reasonable, more rational place, and that we can see that in a variety of ways. But we’ll get to all of those in due time. But let’s go with the first of those, that it’s basically meaningless to say that religion is bad or that religion is good for that matter.
There’s two reasons for this. One, as I already alluded to, religion is too broad of a term. If you say, “Oh, religious people are violent,” are you including the Mennonites, as well as radical Muslims? Are you including explicitly pacifistic religions like the Quakers? What does it mean to make any of those kinds of claims? In other words, to say that religion in this way is to make a claim at such a broad level, that’d be like responding to hurricanes by saying, “Oh, isn’t weather horrible?”
It’s like, well, some weather may be really bad, some weather may be really destructive, but other weather seems really pleasant. I was at the beach recently. It’s great. Weather’s really nice sometimes. Weather’s really not nice sometimes. Turns out you have to be more specific. Likewise, if you were to look at something like the Holocaust and say, “Oh, isn’t politics horrible,” well, some politics, some political ideologies have a really horrible track record, but you don’t just lump everything at the level of the genus, the broad category.
So if you’ve got a problem with Christianity or with Judaism or with Islam, to just make that a generic claim about religion is to make what’s called a category error. And I think this is done for a pretty obvious reason. All of the major thinkers in the New Atheist movement are in the early 2000s in a lot of ways responding to a lot of the fear, especially in the United States, but it’s in the United Kingdom and other places as well, in the aftermath of 9/11. There were a lot of people who were very worried about what was viewed as the rise of militant, radical Islam, and you have groups like Al-Qaeda.
But it didn’t seem politically correct to just say like, “I’m afraid of Muslims,” or something stronger like, “I hate Muslims.” But if you say, “I hate religion,” that was totally socially acceptable. You can’t hate the Jews, but you can hate religion. And so this move away from a specific critique to a generic one was I think intentional, but it makes the critique basically meaningless. So that’s the first thing. It’s at the level of the genus, not the species. It’s generic, not specific as a critique.
The second reason it’s basically meaningless to say religion is good or bad is because what are we even meaning by the term religion? Now, this is going to become very important as we go. Because it turns out, anytime there’s a negative social phenomenon, the New Atheists want to call that religious, even if it’s explicitly secular. But when there are social phenomenons that they like, then they’ll want to claim those for secularism even when they’re explicitly religious. So what does it mean to say something is a religion?
Now, in some cases that’s pretty easy. We don’t have any problem saying Christianity’s a religion or that Islam’s a religion. But what about something like Buddhism? What about Confucianism? What about atheism? People debate whether those things should be considered religions at all. So it’s not just a problem that you’re dealing with a genus rather than a species. It’s also a problem that we don’t know what genus you’re even talking about. There’ve been a few attempts to try to define what religion is, and none of them I think have been completely successful.
Émile Durkheim argues that a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things. That is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions. Beliefs and practices that unite its adherence in a single moral community called the church. Now, you can tell even from that definition, this is very much a western kind of concept of religion. Because obviously if you’re to take some clear examples, even Jews and Muslims don’t have churches, they have synagogues and mosques.
You go to something like East Asian religious context with Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism and the like, what are we talking about here? Is a religion focused on reincarnation a religion or a belief system focused on enlightenment? Is that a religion if it’s not focused on something like eternal salvation? So hopefully you can see that it’s really a vague category. We have a kind of sense of what we mean by religion. But when you try to define it, you find that the definitions fail to meet all of the groups that we normally think of as religions.
Because if you’re going to say something like an enlightenment group, like some forms of Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism say, that counts as religion, then what about something like a wellness philosophy in a Western context like, “Oh, you should practice yoga because it’s good for your health and you’ll have a clearer mind?” Oh, is that desire for a clearer mind a religious claim? Or is capitalism a religion? Is communism a religion?
Hopefully you can see that the problem here in part when you attack or defend religion in a generic way is you’re not really clear about what it is you are attacking. Is the problem that people believe or disbelieve in God? Is the problem that people have a unified system of beliefs at all? What exactly is the problem? So I mentioned Durkheim’s definition. Vatican II, interestingly, has another angle at approaching what we mean by religion, by suggesting that religions consistently try to answer certain questions.
And so it lists several of those. What is man? What is the meaning, the aim of our life? What does moral good? What is sin? Where does suffering come from and what purpose does it serve? What is the road to true happiness? What are death, judgment, and retribution after death? What finally is that ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence? Where do we come from and where are we going? I know it sounds like the beginning of Cotton Eye Joe.
The point there is that Vatican II actually has I think a very clever way of approaching the question to not try to define what a religion looks like, but instead try to define what a religion is trying to answer. So if you’re trying to answer those ultimate questions about the meaning of life, then you’re in the realm of religion. If we define it that way, then attacking religion is attacking, trying to answer the ultimate questions about the meaning of life, trying to explain the meaning of suffering makes you religious.
And so it’s apparently bad for someone to try to answer life’s deepest questions. And I think if you think about it in those clearer ways, then you can say “No, religion is not the problem. Some religious answers may be a problem, but religion itself, the quest to understand the deepest parts of reality, that’s not a problem.” To give one more imperfect analogy, if you looked at something like the atomic bomb and said, “Well, don’t try to understand science. Don’t try to understand the natural world.
Because when people do that, they do things like build the bomb.” It’s not a coincidence that the great minds of early quantum mechanics and quantum theory end up working at places like the Manhattan Project and risking the survival of the planet. But we don’t respond to that by saying, “Therefore science is evil.” No, we make good distinctions, don’t do this in the name of science, like as we can say, don’t do that in the name of your religion. So hopefully that’s clear. That’s the first objection, that this whole critique about religion poisoning everything is meaningless.
What do we mean by religion? Tell us what religion you’re actually upset about. Second, don’t judge a religion based on niceness. Judge the religion instead based on truth. Now, this is very obvious in the case of something like Christianity. It’s centered around historical claims. Jesus rose from the dead. There was a Jesus of Nazareth. He lived and he died in the first century. And significantly, he rose from the dead as he promised that he would. Those are all historical claims. Those are either true or false.
It doesn’t matter whether I’m nice or mean in response to that information. My being nice or mean doesn’t make Jesus rise or not rise from the dead. And so you could do this in any number of ways. Maybe if you found out that your spouse has a million dollar life insurance policy, you’re more likely to commit some active violence against them. But whether they do or not is not based on how you respond to that. Hopefully that’s clear. That saying, “Oh, religion is bad because it motivates people to do bad things,” is ignoring the important question.
Well, is the religious claim in question true or not? Because if it’s true, we should believe it. And if it’s not true, we shouldn’t believe it. Whether someone who believes it acts badly or acts well is really irrelevant, because religious people aren’t trying to get a placebo. It’s a pretty condescending view of religion that people are just telling themselves lies on purpose so they can behave better. That religion is just like a system to make you nice. No, there are nice atheists. There are nice people of all sorts of religious systems.
This is not about just being nice or being kind or anything like that. I’m happy if you’re nice, I’m happy if you’re kind, but the question of whether Jesus rose from the dead or not, of whether there is a God or not is not going to be determined based on whether you are nice or whether I’m nice. They’re just different questions. And so I don’t want to say it’s completely unimportant. But in terms of the truth or falsity of the religion, in terms of whether we should follow the religion or not, it is unimportant. It’s irrelevant to the question.
So that’s the second objection, that saying religion poisons everything doesn’t actually tell me whether religion is true and whether it’s something I should devote my entire life around. You could say money poisons everything, but I still need to earn money, right? Because it’s still a reality I have to grapple with in this world. And so if religion’s like that, oh well. But it doesn’t actually work as an argument against religion any more than saying, “There are greedy people out there who do bad things in the name of money,” works as an argument against earning money.
So is religion true or not should be the question, not is religion societally useful, or is it pleasant, or is it nice? Those are the wrong questions to be asking. Third, you don’t actually need religion to make good people do evil things. Remember Weinberg’s line, that for good people to do evil, that takes religion. That is preposterous and we have literally millions of examples to the contrary. I want to actually turn to a very funny instance of this. I don’t mean that the violence or anything is funny.
I mean, the attempt to make this argument against religion is funny. Sam Harris’ book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, has just this glaring, irrational beginning to it. So this is literally how the book begins. I’m going to play you a little bit of the audiobook.
Audio:
Chapter One: Reason in Exile. The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive.
He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles. With the press of a button, he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and 20 others on the bus.
The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Okay, so a guy commits a horrible suicide bombing on a bus, and Harris intentionally doesn’t tell you anything about his religion, and then he points this out to you.
Audio:
These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy then, so trivially easy you could almost bet your life on it easy, to guess the young man’s religion?
Joe Heschmeyer:
So that’s the argument, right? You don’t know if the guy is Muslim or not, but you kind of know he’s Muslim. And again, Harris is writing this in the early 2000s shortly after 9/11 where people were very much worried about things like suicide bombings, and he’s playing upon that fear. In a footnote, hilariously, he gives away the entire thesis as being ridiculous. This is I think it’s footnote two of the book. I mean, he does not make it long before he undermines his entire thesis.
And he says, “Some readers may object. The bomber in question is most likely to be a member of the Liberation Tigers of Eelam, the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan separatist organization that has perpetrated more acts of suicidal terrorism than any other group.” In other words, if you listen to that story and you immediately jump to, “I bet that guy’s a Muslim,” statistically you’re wrong. He’s more likely at the time this is being written, this is no longer true because the Tamil Tigers don’t exist anymore, but he was more likely to have been a Tamil Tiger.
And that’s a problem as we’re going to see. Because as Harris points out, the Tamil Tigers are often offered as a counter example to any claim that suicidal terrorism is a product of religion. So why is this a problem? If you’re blessed not to have encountered the Tamil Tigers or are too young to know about their terroristic campaign, here’s some reporting from The Washington Post in 2005.
“The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, popularly known as the Tamil Tigers, is an avowedly secular rebel-minded movement of the country’s Tamil ethnic minority. It carried out scores of suicide bombings from the late 1980s until a ceasefire in 2002.” Let’s pause on that. This is an ethnic group, not a religious group. This is fighting on behalf of an ethnicity, the Tamils in Sri Lanka. And the Tamils are largely, but not exclusively Hindu. There are also Christians and Buddhists among the Tamils.
So are a lot of the suicide bombers members of a religion? Sure. Are they organized around religion? Not in their terrorist movement. They’re organized around ethnicity. It would be like saying the Black Panthers or the KKK are a religious group. You’re just wrong. It would, again, another category kind of error. And so The Washington Post goes on to say, “The conflict between the Tigers and the government, which is dominated by members of the Sinhalese, majority began in 1983 and claimed an estimated 65,000 lives.”
So massively bloody kind of conflict. And then it points out, “Though dominated by Hindus, the Tigers are predominantly ethnic and nationalistic in outlook with religion not playing a significant role in their actions.” So Harris has written an entire book in which he argues that religion is responsible for terror and that you can know from the fact that someone’s a suicide bomber what their religion is. And then has a footnote where he points out that that’s literally untrue, that you don’t know what their religion is or whether they’re religious at all.
Because at the time he’s writing it, most suicide bombers were not Muslim. The group most responsible for suicide bombing was secular. Now, I’m not defending Islamic suicide bombers by any stretch. I’m pointing out this critique makes absolutely no sense. You don’t need religion to motivate people to suicide bombing. You can become a suicide bomber in defense of Islam, but you can also become a suicide bomber in defense of your ethnic group or any number of other reasons.
And so Washington Post goes on to say that these suicide attacks reflected a pragmatic calculation of the need to level the military playing field against a larger and better equipped foe. In other words, this is what’s called asymmetrical warfare. The reason they were committing suicide bombings was because they couldn’t win a conventional war. It had nothing to do with anything inherent in their religion. It isn’t like Hinduism has a strong priority put on suicide bus bombings.
You can’t make that argument. It’s just not true. This was a religious, excuse me, a secular group, not a religious one. Now, Harris realizes this is a pretty fatal objection to his entire thesis, and so he tries to explain it away. He says, “Well, to describe the Tamil Tigers as secular,” and then points out that political scientists actually do this, he says, “to describe them as secular is misleading. We might say why?
While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, okay, that’s pretty important, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death.” He’s just defaulting to find assumptions about people in South Asia. They’re probably Hindu, and therefore they probably believe dumb things about life and death, and therefore even their secular actions can be used as an argument against religion. It doesn’t make sense, right?
You cannot get from point A to point Z like he’s doing here. You can’t say that suicide bomber may have also been a Hindu and therefore religion is to blame for his political violence, because he’s not making a religious claim in doing this. Hopefully that’s clear. Harris goes on to say, “The cult of martyr worship they, the Tamil Tigers, have nurtured for decades has many of the features of religiosity that one would expect in people who give their lives so easily for a cause.” Now, this is just a bad faith move, because he’s saying, okay, if you’re willing to die for your beliefs, then you’re religious.
This is why I say it’s a category error because he’s just redefined even explicitly secular movements as religious if they do bad things. This is a fallacy. It’s called the no true Scotsman fallacy. You’re just lumping these people together based on, well, anyone who does a bad thing is in the religious category, and then I can point to religion as a problem behind everything. Well, sure, if you redefine religion to mean any belief system someone does a bad thing for. There’s the famous line in John Lennon’s song Imagine, nothing to kill or die for, no religion too.
So even John Lennon realize there’s a difference between religion and belief systems you might kill and die for. But Harris just says anything you would kill and die for is therefore a religious… It has features of religiosity. And so if you’re a radical atheist who decides to go shoot up a church because you hate religion so much, by Harris’ definition, that turned your atheism into a religion. If you’re say a Marxist, a fascist, fill in the blank, that becomes a religion. And so religion no longer means anything about God.
It no longer means anything coherent about the afterlife or salvation or enlightenment or anything like that, anything what any serious person means by religion, religion just becomes something like a unified belief system. Period. And if you redefine religion that way, then saying religion poisons everything, you might as well just say ideas are bad because that’s what you’ve reduced it to. Any idea worth fighting for is evil, so we shouldn’t have ideas anymore, because that’s what you’re left with.
So Harris goes on to say, “Secular Westerners often underestimate the degree to which certain cultures, steeped as there in otherworldliness, look upon death with less alarm than seems strictly rational.” So because they’re not afraid of death, that also makes them religious. Now, it might be that his fear of death is the problem, but he’s going to impose those kind of Western values and say, yeah, everybody else is the problem. That makes them irrational. They’re not afraid of death in the same way that he is, and so therefore that makes them religious.
And therefore if they kill themselves, that shows why religion is bad. It’s a ridiculous argument. He has this throwaway line about how bad Hindus are, where he just says, “Hindus, even those whose preoccupations appear to be basically secular, often harbor potent religious beliefs.” That’s part of his footnote trying to explain why the fact that secular suicide bombers were more common than religious ones wasn’t an argument against blaming all of this on religion. That many of them are Hindus, and you know how those Hindus are.
It’s a silly argument, right? And once you’ve redefined religion to try to save your bad thesis, you’re not left with anything coherent. Because if you look at the 20th century, you’ll see it does not take religion to make people do evil things, to make ordinary people and good people do evil things. They just have to believe in a cause, any cause enough that they find it worth killing or dying for, as I already said.
So the reason I say it’s ridiculous to still hold this view after the 20th century is that 20th century saw communism, to give just one example, that killed according to Professor Mark Kramer upwards of 80 million people. Now, Mariam Tupy of the Cato Institute wants to put those numbers in context. And so points out that the Spanish Inquisition kills maybe 1,000, 1,200 people, something like that, between 1478 and 1834, in comparison to 80 million. And then she gives the example of Bloody Mary during the Counter-Reformation.
The English Protestant’s name, Mary, Bloody Mary, because she sent 280 dissenters to the stake. No, I’m not defending religious violence, but let’s put it in context. As Tupy points out, between November 1917 when the communists came to power in Russia and the North Korean famine in the mid-1990s, just in that period, communists were responsible for the deaths of at least 154 people every hour. So the entire reign of so-called Bloody Mary, the communists had killed more people than that in two hours not in the name of religion.
In the name of a belief system, sure, but not religion. And again, the other problem with this is we’re looking at these examples that are largely outside of the US context. But let’s not forget that Christopher Hitchens was, as Mother Jones points out in 2021, one of the most prominent backers of the Iraq War. That Hitchens believed in his own vision of the evil of Islam so profoundly that he was incredibly outspoken in defending the promotion of the Iraq War, which killed untold numbers of people.
Now, whatever you may think of the Iraq War, it’s clear that his belief system motivated him to support a bloody war that got a lot of innocent people killed. You may think that’s good or bad. I think it’s bad, but you should notice that by Sam Harris’ definition, this makes Christopher Hitchens religious. It’s absurd to do that. So if you aren’t going to go to those absurdities and just say everyone’s religious, and we’ll get into that at the very end here, then you’re left with the fact that you don’t need religion, as most people use that term, to justify violence or to commit acts of violence.
Hitchens supported violence in the name of whatever it was he thought the US was defending or just in the name of how bad he thought Saddam Hussein was, the Tamil Tigers, the communists, any number of groups you can find with a lot of bloodshed on their hands without any clear reference to a religion or a creed or anything like that. Okay, now, on the flip side of that, let’s talk about the positives of religion, more specifically Christianity, because I think it’s ridiculous to say religion is good.
But Christianity makes bad people good. Now, that’s clearly not the only thing that’s possible to Christian system, but it has this real effect. So to argue that religion poisons everything is to look at costs without the benefits. So Steven Weinberg, who we’ve already saw, he’s the one who said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well, bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.”
In that same essay, he acknowledges, it is certainly true that the campaign against slavery in the slave trade was greatly strengthened by devoted Christians, including the evangelical layman William Wilberforce in England.” So we’re going to actually focus on him particularly. I’m going to take just this one example. John Mears in his biography of him called The Bible in the Workshop talks about how Wilberforce had wasted his youth in frivolity and then had become a politician and had a public career of some years that any noble object or valuable result.
But then he has a religious conversion. He becomes an evangelical Christian and is pretty profoundly moved by the fact that God really is true, is real, and Christianity is true. And he decides to remain in parliament. But he then begins to look for how he can better serve God. And he comes upon two causes. The first, as he records in his journal, he says God Almighty set before him was the suppression of the slave trade and the second was reformation of manners.
Now, I’m not particularly interested in the reformation of manners part, but notice that Wilberforce who had not been profoundly anti-slavery or anti-slave trade comes to that conclusion after a religious conversion. If he’d come to the conclusion that we should commit acts of amazing violence, of course, the New Atheist would seize upon this and say, “Oh, look at how religion made him a worse person.” Well, here becoming Christian makes him a markedly better person.
He starts becoming an advocate against the slave trade and an incredibly successful one. Now, how would someone like Weinberg respond to that because it shows that you can make an ordinary person do good things, not just do bad things with the right religious motivation. Well, Weinberg says, “Well, Christianity, like other great world religions, lived comfortably with slavery for many centuries, and slavery was endorsed in the New Testament.” Now, slavery wasn’t really endorsed in the New Testament, but whatever.
So what was different for anti-slavery Christians like Wilberforce and Channing. I mean, not even touching on Channing, just Wilberforce. He said, “There’d been no new discovery of new sacred scriptures, and neither Wilberforce nor Channing claimed to have received any supernatural revelations. Rather, the 18th century had seen a widespread increase in rationality and humanitarianism that led others, for instance, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, also to oppose slavery, on grounds having nothing to do with religion.”
Now, that is simply moving the goalposts. Because in the particular case of Wilberforce, it’s clear he was motivated by religion. The fact that someone else might’ve opposed slavery on other non-religious grounds is literally irrelevant. If I said OJ Simpson was motivated by jealousy to allegedly murder his wife, you could say, well, other people kill their wives without it being jealousy. It doesn’t matter. That’s completely irrelevant non sequitur. Likewise, if you said some jealous people don’t kill their wives, again, that’s a non sequitur.
The question is why did this person act in this way? And here the motivating factor was religion in a positive way. So Weinberg wants to say some people are motivated by religion to do bad things. Fine. Some people are motivated by religion to do good things. The fact that not all people are motivated to do good things by religion does not answer that question. Likewise, you could say, as we just saw, plenty of people do bad things without religion and plenty of religious people don’t do crazy violent things.
So he’s trying to both eat his cake and have it too. And so he’s not applying the same standard for the positives of religion as for the negative. So if someone does a good thing in the name of religion, he says, “Well, they could have done it for some other reason. Even if they tell you they did it for religious reasons, they could have done it for secular reasons. So that’s not a point for religion. But if they do a bad thing, even if they say it’s because of their Tamil nationality and not their religion, well, that’s for religious reasons and that shows why religion is bad.”
That is an incoherent and completely bizarre illogical critique, and it’s worth acknowledging that. All right, I believe this is the sixth point. How do good and evil fit into this critique? I’m going to go back one more time to Weinberg’s critique. He says, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil.” So you’ve got good people and you’ve got people who do evil. “But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.” And so this is a much bigger point than I’m going to spend a lot of time articulating here, but what do good and evil mean here?
Weinberg seems to take for granted that there is a moral law, and a moral law is basically incoherent without a moral lawgiver. Now, in saying this, I don’t mean all atheists go around doing evil things all the time. As St. Paul says in his epistle to the Romans, there’s a law written on the human heart, and atheists feel that law, experience that law, can know that law. You don’t need the 10 Commandments to tell you thou shalt not kill, to know that you shouldn’t be murdering people.
So that’s not the critique. The critique is that the fact that there are universal laws of good and evil only is coherent in light of a universal moral lawgiver. That you can’t just say good and evil are feelings based on something like biological disposition or social morality or anything like this. For Weinberg to be saying anything worth even considering, he must mean more than that sometimes people do things that are transgressive of the societal values that they find themselves in, because that’s not a moral critique.
Martin Luther King behaved in a way that was frowned upon by the Jim Crow Society of his day. That doesn’t automatically make Martin Luther King wrong. We then have to ask, well, who is right, King or Jim Crow? And we can’t be judging them by the standards of society because which society? Do we just mean our society has different values today than Jim Crow’s South in the 1960s? What does that even mean? It’s a meaningless kind of critique. And so Weinberg is relying upon you having an idea that there’s good and evil and that these are universally applicable moral standards.
And the point I would make here is that is actually an incoherent position to have as an atheist. You can say some things are violent or not violent. You can’t say whether they’re good or evil. Was Hitchens supporting the Iraq War evil? By what standard? Because I think there are some standards you can clearly show that it is. But by other moral standards, you wouldn’t come to that. So to even talk about good people doing evil, you’re smuggling in this language of universal morality that doesn’t make sense if you don’t believe in universal morality or a moral lawgiver.
Okay, the final thing I want to touch on is the law of conservation of religion. Now, this is going to get into this question of what do we mean by religion, but it’s also I think going to expose why the whole New Atheist project was a failure from the start and why we’re seeing the fruits of its failure 20 years on. Ross Douthat in Bad Religion makes the argument that at the deepest level, every human culture is religious. And I’d suggest there’s even an etymological root to this.
Culture comes from cultus, which is religious is where we get words like cult. So culture comes from cultus. Every human culture is religious. It’s defined by what its inhabitants believe about some ultimate reality and what they think that reality demands of them. This is why people are willing to fight for it. And that can be scary and dangerous, but that’s also the stuff that makes life worth living. Now, Douthat points out that reality doesn’t have to be a personal God. It could be the iron laws of Marxism.
It could be the religion of blood and soil like the Nazis. It could be the Gaia hypothesis, the Church of the Free Market, The Cult of the Imperial Self. But Bob Dylan had it right, you got to serve somebody. And so Douthat argues that America’s problem isn’t too much religion or too little of it. That is an incoherent critique. It’s bad religion, what he calls the slow motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.
Now, Bad Religion is another older book from the early 2000s, but Shadi Hamid had an article in The Atlantic back in 2021 that I thought captured this really well, because he’s looking at really the intervening two decades since the rise of the New Atheists and today.
And he says, “Over the past two decades, the number,” he means the number of churchgoers here, “has dropped to less than 50%, the sharpest recorded decline in American history. Meanwhile, the nones, atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion, has grown rapidly and today represent a quarter of the population.” But he says, “If secularists hoped the decline in religiosity would make for more rational politics drained of faith’s inflaming passions, they’re likely disappointed, as Christianity’s hold in particular has weakened ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen.”
It isn’t that once Christianity starts to wane and influence, everybody just got super rational and everybody got along better. If you’ve followed political movements in the United States in the last 20 years, you’ll know that the exact opposite happened. And now, was that just a coincidence? Hamid argues no. He says, “American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever. It’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled in two political belief. Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations.
This is what religion without religion looks like.” And then he says, “The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated religion is not new.” Now, this is an important difference. Harris is going to describe basically all deeply held conviction, at least all that you’d be willing to kill or die for as religion. Shadi Hamid, drawing upon Abraham Cooper, is going to say that it’s sublimated religion, meaning it’s a religious impulse that’s targeted in a non-explicitly religious direction. So it’s a slightly different claim.
Abraham Cooper, the theologian who served as Prime Minister of The Netherlands at the start of the 20th century, while the nation was in the early throes of secularization argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively faith-based, and that no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that ultimate loyalty didn’t derive from traditional religion, it would find expression through secular commitments such as nationalism, socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel Goldman calls this the law of the conservation of religion.
In any given society, there’s a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed. I know that’s a long passage, but I wanted to give that as a closing thought, that you have people who are more fervent in their political ideologies now, whether that’s on the left or the right or whatever, woke, Trump, whatever, all of that are religious impulses being directed at things that aren’t worthy of the name of religion. That’s the argument of the law of conservation of religion.
That you don’t really get rid of religion, you simply get rid of particular religions. So maybe Christianity is on the decline and New Age spirituality is on the rise. That same religious itch is being scratched, but in a different way. That’s what Douthat’s point is, that this is not about too much or too little religion. The amount of religion is going to stay basically the same. But now your religion is being really passionate about politics or really passionate about fill in the blank. It could be an economic system.
It could be some other unifying system of how you view life, but this is based on this core idea that you have to serve somebody. You have to build your life around some belief in reality. That there’s no version of this where you just say, “I’m not going to ask the deeper questions,” because even to choose to do that, it’s to give a sort of answer to life’s deepest questions, which is they’re not worth exploring. That’s a belief system, right, as much as answering the question is a belief system. And so it’s this inescapable part of human reality.
Now, 20 years ago, I could tell you this and people like Ross Douthat were telling us this, but now 20 years on, we see in the data that this is true, fragmentation and everything have arisen. That you have something like religious sectarianism, only it’s not around explicitly religious bonds, it’s around the lines of politics and other non-explicit religious kind of ideas. So all that’s to say though the whole critique that religion poisons everything is based on a pretty naiveness misunderstanding about what religion is in the first place and of the absolute necessity of having something like religion.
And I would suggest you see this even in the people who are outspokenly anti-religious, that Sam Harris with his promotion of things like Eastern spirituality and meditation, or Christopher Hitchens with his promotion of US imperial foreign policy in places like Iraq, they’re expressing a sort of worldview and living according to that worldview and hoping other people will live according to that worldview as well. They’re even trying to evangelize others for their worldview. All the things that they disdain about religion they’ve replicated without the label of religion.
So where does that leave us? To say that religion poisons everything is, as I alluded to before, like saying weather is bad. It’s a meaningless critique. It has nothing to offer us. It’s intellectually bankrupt because it doesn’t seriously grapple with the reality of what religion is in the first place or what would replace the decline of traditional organized religion. And so it also ignores, as we’ve seen, all the positive things done explicitly because of organized religion and all the negative things done from other non-religious totalizing systems.
Though it’s simply a false critique as well as an intellectually bankrupt one and it has a 20-year track record of pretty bad outcomes. We haven’t seen this great new post-religious world. As we’ve seen organized religion decline, the results have been bad for society, I would argue, bad for the world. So again, that doesn’t actually prove or disprove religion.
But if you’re going to judge religion based on the nice or not nice outcomes, whether things are good or bad based on whether religion’s at the center of society, which is I think, again, the wrong way to judge a religion, they failed in this critique. The world certainly seems to be worse with the decline of organized religion and the rise of things like political religion. But I think we should ignore all of that critique and instead ask some more critical question, not is religion good or bad, but is this religion?
Is Christianity true or false? If it’s false, I don’t care how nice it makes me. If it’s true, I don’t care what evils have been done in its named by other people. That’s the critical question. Did Jesus Christ rise from the dead or not? And no amount of social posturing where you look at one half of the balance and not the other is answering that question or coming any closer to answering it. All right, so there you have it.
Obviously much more can be said and much more has been said in the last 20 years, but that I think are six or seven of the major arguments to raise against this idea that religion poisons everything. Be interested in your thoughts and your comments below. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Thanks so much, and God bless you.
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