The West Lost Its Religion and Was Handed Nothing to Think About Instead

The West is the first society in history that can fairly be called atheist. Not in what people say when asked; many still say they believe in God. In what they do. For all practical purposes, the religious restrictions that governed daily life for millennia are not observed. Nobody arranges a week around the Sabbath, a diet around the dietary laws, or a marriage around the priest. Belief survives as a sentiment. Observance is gone.

I regard this as progress and have said so often. But there is a complaint about it that I think deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal, and the complaint is this: a society that has shed religion has shed the thing that made its members think about right and wrong, and has replaced it with nothing.

Take the Complaint Seriously

Strip the complaint of its usual packaging and there is something in it.

Religion, whatever else it did, made people contemplate moral questions on a schedule. Every week there was a sermon about how to live. Every day there were rules to follow or break, and the following and breaking kept the question present. Communities formed around the practice and enforced norms through it. Children were taught, badly and with a great deal of false content, that their conduct mattered to something larger than themselves.

Remove all of that and what takes its place? Consumption, entertainment, work. None of these asks anything moral of anyone. A person can go from birth to death in a modern city without once being required to consider whether a course of action is right, and a good many people do.

The critics call this the loss of moral fibre. I dislike the phrase, but I accept that something has been lost, and that the something was a habit of moral attention that religion used to install.

The Answer the Critics Want

The critics have a remedy: bring religion back. Restore observance, restore the sermon, restore the community bound by shared belief.

This does not work, and cannot be made to work, because it runs against everything else the modern world is. You cannot restore religion without restoring the beliefs it rests on, and the beliefs are false, and a population that knows they are false will not hold them for the sake of the side effects. You cannot have a plural society with a single established faith. You cannot have science and a book that contradicts it taught as truth.

The critics know this, which is why the complaint is usually made in a tone of lament rather than proposal. They want the fruits of religion and cannot supply the root. That is not a position; it is a mood.

The Other Source of Moral Attention

There is another way to make people think about how to live together, and it is one the critics never mention, because it does not flatter tradition.

Bind people to the decisions. Give them the war to decide, and the tax, and the question of whether the state should run a lottery, and whether a dying person may choose to die, and what is owed to the poor. Not as an opinion to be polled and ignored, but as a vote that settles it.

Look at what that does. It makes moral questions unavoidable, on a schedule, for everyone. It forces contemplation, because the question is real and the vote is yours. It produces emotion, because these are the questions people feel most strongly about, and the emotion is attached to a decision rather than discharged in an argument. It builds responsibility, because you cannot blame the outcome on a representative you did not choose and do not trust.

That is precisely the list of things religion used to supply, and it supplies them without a single false belief.

Why Representation Cannot Do This

Under representative government the public is asked one question every few years, and the question is which person to send. Every moral question is folded into that choice and disappears in it. The voter does not decide whether to go to war; he decides which of two men will decide, and both of them will say afterwards that the decision was forced on them.

This is exactly the arrangement that starves moral attention. The system takes the questions away, then wonders why nobody is thinking about them. The sermon is gone and nothing replaced it, because the one thing that could have replaced it, participation in the decisions, was reserved for a few thousand people, who then complain about the moral fibre of the rest.

What Direct Democracy Promises Here

I do not claim that a population deciding for itself will decide well. Publics are as capable of cruelty as legislatures, and sometimes more.

The claim is narrower. A society that has stopped believing in God has lost the mechanism that kept moral questions in front of ordinary people. Religion cannot be restored to do that job, and the critics who say the fibre is gone have no honest way to bring it back. Direct decision-making can do the job, and it is the only candidate I know of that does it without asking anyone to believe anything untrue.

The West did not lose its morals when it lost its religion. It lost the occasion to exercise them. Hand the questions back and the exercise returns.