Does Religion Make People Moral?

A column in the New York Times asks the question which is the caption of this post.  As regular readers might expect, I would answer the question with a resounding "No."  Indeed, typically in my experience it is those who sanctimoniously claim that they are moral and parade their religiosity  who are the most lacking in basic morality when it comes to compassion and empathy for others and who are only too happy to trample on the rights of others to stamp out anything or anyone who might challenge their Medieval beliefs that trace back to the writings of ignorant, uneducated authors.  While the column looks at the question in the context of Islam and developments in Turkey, the parallels with conservative Christians is all too stark.  One need to only look at evangelical Christian support for racism and morally bankrupt individuals like Roy Moore and Donald Trump to see that evangelical claims of morality are empty.  Here are column excerpts:

Over the past 15 years, my country, Turkey, has gone through a colossal political revolution. The traditional secular elite that identifies with the nation’s modernist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has been replaced by religious conservatives who, until recently, were largely powerless and marginalized. The religious conservatives have by now come to dominate virtually all institutions of the state, as well as the media and even much of the business sector. In short, they have become the new ruling elite.

This political revolution has had an inadvertent outcome. It has tested the ostensible virtues of these religious conservatives — and they have failed. They have failed this test so terribly that it raises the question of whether religiosity and morality really go hand in hand, as so many religious people like to claim.

The religious conservatives have morally failed because they ended up doing everything that they once condemned as unjust and cruel. For decades, they criticized the secular elite for nepotism and corruption, for weaponizing the judiciary and for using the news media to demonize and intimidate their opponents. Yet after their initial years in power, they began repeating all of the same behavior they used to condemn, often even more blatantly than their predecessors.

This is a familiar story: The religious conservatives have become corrupted by power. But power corrupts more easily when you have neither principles nor integrity.

Notably, some of the more conscientious voices among Turkey’s religious conservatives criticize this ugly reality. Mustafa Ozturk, a popular theologian and a newspaper columnist, recently declared that religious conservatives are failing the moral test miserably. He wrote: “For the next 40 to 50 years, we Muslims will have no right to say anything to any human being about faith, morals, rights and law.

Such discussions may look specific to contemporary Turkey, but they raise a question that is globally, timelessly relevant: Does religion really make people more moral human beings? Or does the gap between morality and the moralists — a gap evident in Turkey today and in many other societies around the world — reveal an ugly hypocrisy behind all religion?

My humble answer is: It depends. Religion can work in two fundamentally different ways: It can be a source of self-education, or it can be a source of self-glorification. Self-education can make people more moral, while self-glorification can make them considerably less moral.

Religion can be a source of self-education, because religious texts often have moral teachings with which people can question and instruct themselves. The Quran, just like the Bible, has such pearls of wisdom. . . . . A person who follows such virtuous teachings will likely develop a moral character, just as a person who follows similar teachings in the Bible will.

But trying to nurture moral virtues is one thing; assuming that you are already moral and virtuous simply because you identify with a particular religion is another. The latter turns religion into a tool for self-glorification. A religion’s adherents assume themselves to be moral by default, and so they never bother to question themselves. At the same time, they look down on other people as misguided souls, if not wicked infidels.

For such people, religion works not as cure for the soul, but as drug for the ego. It makes them not humble, but arrogant.

In legalistic religious traditions, like Judaism and Islam, this problem occurs when religion is reduced to the practice of rituals. Abiding by a legal code makes the believer feel upright in the eyes of God, even if she or he is immoral when dealing with fellow human beings.

An exceptional Jewish rabbi who lived two millenniums ago, Jesus of Nazareth, spotted this problem. Those practicing Pharisees who are “confident of their own righteousness and look down on everybody else,” he declared, are not really righteous. Sinners who regret their failures, he said, are more moral than the pious who boast.

Stripping morality from religion can also occur when a belief system is reduced to a simple group identity. This kind of “us vs. them” mentality can corrupt and radicalize any religious community — Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike can become hateful militants when they see themselves as righteous victims. That trend is visible everywhere from the Buddhist monks cheering ethnic cleansing in Myanmar to the Hindu majoritarians who dominate Indian politics to the violent Muslim extremists in the Middle East.

Conscientious believers in every tradition need to stand against the toxic urges that turn religion into a hollow vessel of arrogance, bigotry, hatred and greed. Otherwise, more and more evil will be done in their faith’s name. And more and more people will ask, as many young Turks are asking these days, what religion is really good for.

 Here in America in the midst of the Christmas holiday season one is witnessing the Republican Party which claims to be the champion of "Christian values" striving to pass a tax bill that will harm the poor, throw millions off of health care coverage and deliver a huge windfall to the already obscenely wealthy.  And their conservative and evangelical Christian supporters are cheering this effort.   Add to this the contempt, if not open hatred, that the GOP base holds towards others who are different, and if anything, one has proof that religion with its tribalism all too frequently makes one immoral, not moral. 

How the Christofascists Invented a White Supremacist Jesus

If one follows the websites of the leading "family values" organizations all of which constantly proclaim their allegiance to the Bible as I have done for many years now, one that quickly becomes apparent is that these organizations are shockingly lily white and seem to reach out to minorities only when they want black pastors in particular to act as their water carriers and perform as trained circus dogs.   The other thing that quickly becomes apparent is that most of these "family values" Christians have white supremacist roots and truly are open to white, conservative Christians who look and think like themselves.  Blacks, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities are not welcome.  This same mindset is now the norm for the Republican Party in the wake of the Christofascists' cancer like growth in the GOP.  A piece in Salon looks at how these "godly folk" have turned Jesus into a white supremacist savior.  Here are excerpts:

Just in time for Holy Week, the State of Indiana has passed a new Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The law explicitly permits for-profit corporations to practice the “free exercise of religion” and it allows them to use the “exercise of religion” as a defense against any lawsuits whether from the government or from private entities. The primary narrative against this law has been about the potential ways that small businesses owned by Christians could invoke it as a defense against having to, for instance, sell flowers to a gay couple for their wedding.

Any time right-wing conservatives declare that they are trying to restore or reclaim something, we should all be very afraid. Usually, this means the country or, in this case, the state of Indiana is about to be treated to another round of backward time travel, to the supposedly idyllic environs of the 1950s, wherein women, and gays, and blacks knew their respective places and stayed in them.
And given our current anti-Black racial climate, there is no reason to trust that these laws won’t be eventually used for acts of racially inflected religious discrimination, perhaps against Black Muslims or Muslims of Arab descent, for instance. Surely this kind of law in this political climate sanctions the exercise of Islamophobia.

As a practicing Christian, I am deeply incensed by these calls for restoration and reclamation in the name of religious freedom. This kind of legislation is largely driven by conservative Christian men and women, who hold political views that are antagonistic to every single group of people who are not white, male, Christian, cisgender, straight and middle-class.
Nothing about the cultural and moral regime of the religious right in this country signals any kind of freedom. In fact, this kind of legislation is rooted in a politics that gives white people the authority to police and terrorize people of color, queer people and poor women. 

This white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, gun-toting, Bible-quoting Jesus of the religious right is a god of their own making. I call this god, the god of white supremacy and patriarchy. 

The Christian lawmakers seeking to use the law to discriminate against gay people are indicative of every violent, unrighteous, immoral impulse that organized religion continues to represent in this country. I have said elsewhere recently that it is a problem to treat racism as if it will simply go extinct. But as I watch the religious right engineer pain and obstacles for queer people in America’s heartland, I find myself wishing that this particularly violent and vicious breed of Christianity would die off.

What this vocal contingent of the religious right is seeking to restore is not religious freedom but a sense of safety in expressing and imposing dangerous, retrograde and discriminatory ideas in the name of religion. I continue to support the free and unimpeded expression of religion.

We need to reclaim the narrative of Jesus’ life and death from the evangelical right. They have not been good stewards over the narrative. They have pimped Jesus’ death to support the global spread of American empire vis-à-vis war, “missions,” and “free trade,” the abuse of native peoples, the continued subjugation of Black people, and the regulation of the sexual lives of women and gay people.