How Can People Be Moral and Good if They Don’t Have Religion?
Dwight Eisenhower once said “People need religion—and I don’t care what kind.” He was expressing a common insight: that people’s deeply-held moral beliefs shape their behaviors and make them better, more ethical beings. Eisenhower was right that our beliefs about the nature of good and evil matter. But equating “morality” with “religion” is problematic, at best. The people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9-11 were profoundly religious. Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was conspicuously pious, and indicted former Majority Leader Tom DeLay frequently claimed divine inspiration for his policy preferences. Domestic policy advisor Claude Allen was a self-proclaimed Christian conservative and was arrested for felony shoplifting. We all know less prominent people who are or claim to be religious, whose behavior is neither moral nor good—and we all know wonderful, highly moral people who are not religious in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, religion is increasingly bein
