Weinberg Was Too Kind: Religion Does Not Need Good People to Do Evil

Steven Weinberg's line is the most quoted sentence in the atheist repertoire: 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. It is a fine sentence and I have used it myself. I now think it is too generous to religion, and the reason is that it looks in the wrong place.

What the Quote Is About

Read it carefully and notice its unit of analysis. It is about persons. A good person, a bad person, and the thing that can flip the good one. Religion enters as a psychological force acting on an individual conscience: a belief that makes a decent man stone his neighbour because a book told him to.

That does happen, and it is worth saying. But it is the smallest part of the harm, and by putting it at the centre Weinberg lets the larger part go unmentioned.

The Part He Left Out

Religions do not stay in individual heads. They build institutions. Churches, priesthoods, councils of scholars, religious courts, seminaries, and the political parties that grow out of them. Every major religion has produced a hierarchy, and most have produced several competing ones.

And hierarchies have properties of their own, which I have written about repeatedly on this blog. They are worth restating here because they are the missing half of Weinberg's sentence.

A hierarchy has no conscience. It has interests, and the interests are those of the organisation and the people positioned to benefit from it. It will act against most of its own members when the organisation's survival requires it, and it will do so without anyone inside feeling that they have done wrong. It lies when lying serves it, and it does so through people who would not lie on their own account. The people who rise in it have been selected at every rung for putting the institution first. Taken as an agent, its personality is closer to a sociopath's than to any of its members'.

None of that is special to religion. Corporations and governments have the same properties. What is special to religion is that it produces such hierarchies as a matter of course, wraps them in the authority of the sacred, and hands them a population trained from childhood to defer to them.

Two Different Evils

So there are two ways religion produces bad outcomes, and they should not be confused.

The first is Weinberg's: a believer, sincerely, does something terrible because his faith tells him to. The mechanism is personal belief. The remedy, insofar as there is one, is argument, education, and time.

The second is organisational: a church or a clerical establishment does something terrible because doing it serves the institution. Concealing abuse to protect the institution's reputation. Opposing a public-health measure because it undercuts the institution's authority. Backing a tyrant because the tyrant protects the institution's privileges. Inflaming a conflict because conflict fills the pews.

In none of these cases does anyone need to be a good person doing evil. The people involved can be entirely ordinary, and the institution will produce the evil anyway, because that is what institutions with interests and without consciences do. Weinberg's formula does not touch this case. There is no individual whose goodness was overridden. There is a machine, and the machine ran.

Why the Distinction Matters

It matters because the two evils need different responses, and confusing them wastes effort.

If you think the problem is Weinberg's problem, you argue theology. You show that the book is wrong, that the miracles did not happen, that the moral commands are barbaric. This is worth doing and I do a great deal of it. But it does almost nothing to the second kind of evil, because the institution does not run on the truth of its doctrines. It runs on its interests, and it would defend those interests with any doctrine that came to hand.

Notice that the churches survived the collapse of nearly every factual claim they ever made. The earth moved, the species evolved, the flood did not happen, the scriptures were shown to be compiled and edited by men. The institutions absorbed all of it. Their power was never resting on the claims. It was resting on the structure, and the structure does not care what the sermon says.

So the second evil has to be fought as an institutional problem: by removing privileges, by opening records, by insisting that religious hierarchies answer to the same law as everyone else, and above all by dispersing the power they hold. That is a political programme, not a philosophical one, and it is the same programme that applies to any other unaccountable institution. I have made the general case in Dispersed Power Is More Moral; religion is one of the clearest applications.

The Corrected Sentence

If I were to rewrite Weinberg, it would be something like this: for a good person to do evil takes religion; for evil to be done without anyone needing to be good or bad at all, takes an institution, and religion is the oldest and most reliable manufacturer of institutions we have.

That is longer and less quotable. It is also the version that points at the larger problem. The personal harm of religion is real, and it is the part that makes for good debates. The organised harm is the part that fills history books, and it will not be argued away, because it was never an argument in the first place.