Why the Religious Right Believes People Are Bad

Ask a religious conservative whether he would behave morally if there were no God, and he will very often say no. He would steal, cheat, and hurt people, he says, and only the knowledge that Someone is watching holds him back. I do not think this is true of him. I think he would behave much as he does now. But I have come to believe the answer is not a lie either, and that tracing where it comes from explains a surprising amount of right-wing politics.

The Answer Is a Move in an Argument

Start with why the believer gives that answer. He is not reporting on his own psychology. He is defending a doctrine.

The doctrine is that morality requires God. It is a central plank of religious apologetics, one of the few arguments that still gets traction with people who have given up on the miracles. And it has a corollary that the believer cannot avoid: if morality requires God, then a person without God has no morality, and that must include the believer himself in the counterfactual where God is removed.

So when asked would you be immoral without God, the honest theological answer is yes, not because he has examined himself and found a monster, but because saying no concedes the argument. It admits that morality can stand without its divine support, which is exactly the point the atheist was making. The answer is a defensive move, and the man making it may be a perfectly gentle person who would not harm a fly under any theology.

Repetition Becomes Belief

Here is where it gets interesting. A move made often enough in an argument stops being a move.

Say for thirty years, in every discussion of ethics, that people without God have no restraint. Hear it from the pulpit and repeat it to your children. At some point the statement stops being a debating position you adopt when challenged and becomes a description of the world you actually inhabit. You come to believe that the natural condition of human beings is depravity, and that the only thing standing between a society and chaos is the fear of divine punishment.

That is a view of human nature, and it is a dark one. It was not arrived at by observing people. It was arrived at by defending a proposition about God, and it hardened through repetition into a background assumption about everyone.

I want to stress that this is not a claim about insincerity. The believer is not pretending. The process I am describing is how most deeply held views are formed: something is said for one reason, repeated for the same reason, and eventually held for no reason at all except that one has always held it. I have written about how our stated reasons are produced after the fact; this is a case where the stated reason came first and the belief grew up behind it.

What the Dark View Does Downstream

Once you believe that people are naturally bad and held in check only by fear, a whole set of political positions follows, and they are recognisably the positions of the religious right.

Against state support for the weak. If people are inherently inclined to cheat, then any system that gives out help without harsh conditions will be exploited by most of those who apply. The welfare recipient is presumed to be gaming the system, not because of evidence about welfare recipients but because of a prior about humanity.

For harsh punishment and the death penalty. If most people would commit crimes but for fear, then deterrence is the main thing keeping the peace, and the harsher the deterrent the better. The argument for the death penalty as a deterrent has weak empirical support and strong support from the premise that people are wolves who need to see other wolves hanged.

Against trusting government. There are excellent reasons to distrust government, and I hold most of them. But the religious right's version rests on a different foundation: the people in government are people, people are fallen, therefore government is a den of thieves. This is a general suspicion of human beings wearing the clothes of a political theory.

For authority in general. A population that cannot be trusted needs to be controlled, and control needs a hierarchy of the trustworthy: the church, the father, the traditional order. The dark view of human nature is the standing justification for every authority that claims to restrain it.

Each of these positions has secular defenders too, and each can be argued on other grounds. But notice how naturally they cluster around a single premise, and notice that the premise was not a political discovery. It was theological collateral.

The Evidence Runs the Other Way

The premise happens to be false, or at least badly overstated, and this can be checked.

Societies that have largely abandoned religion did not descend into the war of all against all. The least religious countries on earth are, by most measures of violence, corruption, and social trust, among the best places to live. Their citizens do not steal more because nobody is watching from above. Cooperation among humans predates every scripture, has clear evolutionary roots, and is maintained by reputation, reciprocity, and institutions, none of which require a deity. Morality is largely reputation management, and reputation works whether or not anyone believes in heaven.

None of this is news. What is news, or at least underappreciated, is why a large political movement holds a view of human nature so at odds with the data. The answer is not that its members have observed something the rest of us missed. It is that they were obliged to say something in defence of a doctrine, and the something became a worldview.

Why This Matters for Argument

If I am right, then arguing with the religious right about welfare or the death penalty on the merits is arguing downstream of the actual disagreement. The disagreement is about whether people are basically decent, and that belief was installed not by politics but by a theological necessity.

Which suggests where the lever is. The claim that morality requires God is not just a bad argument about ethics. It is the seed of a whole politics of suspicion, and every time it goes unchallenged, the politics grows a little. It is worth challenging for that reason alone, quite apart from its being false.