The Moral Lives of Atheists

by Rebecca Baumgartner

A seat by the fire

I remember listening to President Obama’s first Inaugural Address fifteen years ago because of something Obama said which, according to the political pundits, had never been expressed in a Presidential speech before. This was the moment in question:

“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself…” (italics added)

I had never heard a politician mention non-believers before. Nor had the rest of the country. Obama was stretching the definition of American pluralism further than it had typically been stretched, certainly further than it had ever been stretched in a mainstream political speech. A few journalists commented on it in the days following the speech, but the nod to non-believers was hardly the most significant moment of that day. 

Unless, that is, you were one of those non-believers, inured to years of prayers and biblical references in every public speech and ceremony (including elsewhere in Obama’s own speech); inured to saying “One nation under God” in school; inured to all the ways that the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment are routinely violated in public buildings and by those in elected office. 

These speeches, buildings, and laws are for all of us, but in practice they are treated as belonging to only those Americans who hold specific religious beliefs. Here, at last, was a President explicitly welcoming non-religious citizens to a seat by the fire: my fellow Americans. 

Atheists, non-believers, and humanists – oh my! 

According to the Pew Research Center, about 28% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, but that group includes people who do believe in God; they just don’t identify with any particular religious sect. Of those so-called “nones,” nearly 30% actively reject a belief in a higher power. 

The term atheist carries a real stigma, and there are also problems with the more neutral term non-believer. For one thing, it defines difference solely in terms of a supposed default state of being a believer, and for another, it connotes a certain nihilism by implying that such people don’t believe in anything, when actually it is only the supernatural claims of religion we don’t believe in. (Technically, as has been pointed out many times, all of us are non-believers about many things: the Greek and Roman pantheon, aliens, ghosts, the god/gods of every religion that isn’t the one we subscribe to, etc.)

For this reason, I usually prefer the term humanist. This label can be used differently by different people, and there is significant overlap with terms such as atheist, non-believer, and so on. I will often use these terms interchangeably for the sake of avoiding repetition or to emphasize one particular connotation over another. What I like about the term humanist, though, is that it is a positive label, not defined by the absence of faith but by the presence of specific values. 

For me, calling myself a humanist means that I believe in the value and worth of human life and human concerns, and furthermore that it is not necessary to make recourse to religion as an external force that provides or justifies such worth. I also accept evidence that humans have an innate moral sense that has evolved to allow us to live cooperatively in social groups, and that religion, while it can sometimes ride on the coat-tails of this innate moral sense to encourage or shame adherents into behaving morally, is not required to live a moral and meaningful life.

Humanists like me don’t believe that meaning is handed down to us from a religious authority, but that doesn’t entail that we think meaning as a concept is empty or that the pursuit of meaning is futile. Quite the opposite. Humanists simply take on the responsibility of seeking meaning for themselves, in keeping with their evolved moral sense, the norms of the social group they have been raised within, and their own individual reason and ethical commitments. For the non-religious, the search for meaning in fact has an added urgency and importance, since this life is all we get. 

The most hated minority in America 

It won’t surprise anyone – whether religious or not – that being a non-believer is heavily stigmatized in American society. According to a 2006 study by sociologists at the University of Minnesota, 

“…atheists are less accepted than other marginalized groups [and] attitudes toward them have not exhibited the marked increase in acceptance that has characterized views of other racial and religious minorities over the past forty years.”

When asked to rank different minority groups in response to two statements (“This group does not at all agree with my vision of American society” and “I would disapprove if my child wanted to marry a member of this group”), survey respondents ranked atheists at the very top of the list of problematic groups. These other groups included a who’s-who of historically marginalized people, including homosexuals, Muslims, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, and recent immigrants. The authors concluded that “Americans are less accepting of atheists than of any of the other groups we asked about, and by a wide margin.” Notably, even in the fevered days of post-9/11 Islamophobia, rejection of atheists remained higher overall than rejection of Muslims.

The authors of the study make it clear that the people they surveyed did not refer to particular atheists they knew personally. They weren’t basing their distrust on actual interactions with a non-religious person. Rather, the authors say, respondents “used the atheist as a symbolic figure to represent their fears about those trends in American life – increasing criminality, rampant self-interest, an unaccountable elite – that they believe undermine trust and a common sense of purpose.” 

In the words of one Trump supporter from Ohio, “I think the moral compass is so out of whack right now. And we need religion and church back in here.” That woman’s fear, and her sense that something is “off” about her life or her society, seems to underlie much of the prejudice against non-believers. To be clear, her fear and sense of alienation are real and might even be valid; but she and others like her frequently use the idea of atheism unjustly as a scapegoat to vent, justify, or soothe those feelings. 

In the process, true understanding is skipped right over: The woman who thinks we need to get “religion and church back in here” doesn’t explain how a society in which the vast majority of people identify as believers developed such an “out of whack” moral compass in the first place, or how exactly more religion would improve the country’s problems, given that such a large majority of the populace is already religious (presumably they are not the “right” kind of religious, in her view). Nor does she manage to reconcile her professed Christianity with her support for a politician who exhibits none of the virtues of that faith (1). She seems to be telling us more about herself and her anxieties than about an actual group of people whose ideas she rationally disagrees with.

Indeed, the authors of the sociology study summarize their findings by saying that “attitudes toward atheists tell us more about American society and culture than about atheists themselves.”

The atheist as a symbol of otherness

Several years ago, my husband was working at an ethnically and culturally diverse tech company in a large city. One of his nosier coworkers asked him in the course of conversation one day whether he was a Christian. When my husband said no, the coworker asked him what religion he was then. When my husband clarified that he wasn’t religious, the coworker was genuinely shocked and said, “But you seem like such a good person!”

Because most people believe it’s rude to pry about someone’s beliefs in this way, and because non-believers and secular folks of all stripes can pass as “regular” people without drawing attention to themselves, it’s highly likely that my husband was not, in fact, the first “nice atheist” this coworker had ever met. Encounters like this can make for a funny story sometimes, in a head-shaking sort of way, but the bias and bigotry behind this kind of comment is very real and far from amusing.

One of the fascinating conclusions drawn by the University of Minnesota study is that people ascribe to atheists two different roles in society that seem to be polar opposites: atheists are thought to be both the criminal low-lifes on the fringes of society, as well as the arrogant, decadent elites occupying the ivory tower. The study authors resolve this paradox by explaining the symbolic function of “the atheist” as a cultural boogeyman in American society:

“We believe that in answering our questions about atheists, our survey respondents were not, on the whole, referring to actual atheists they had encountered, but were responding to ‘the atheist’ as a boundary-marking cultural category.”

In other words, atheists have the status of the cultural Other whose existence marks the boundary between the in-group and the out-group. They (not us) are the selfish ones, living lives of rampant consumerism and hedonism and blind to anything transcendent or sublime. “The atheist” as a concept rather than a person becomes a symbol of everything that distresses the average God-fearing American about the current historical moment and his own shortcomings. Similar to the psychological idea of projection, in which undesirable qualities are split from the ego and attributed to someone else, the idea of atheism has become a repository for all the ways that religious Americans feel uncomfortable with the distance between their professed beliefs and their actual lives.

I’m not interested here in arguing that religious belief is false or irrational. That is an enormous and worthwhile topic in its own right that has been elucidated by countless writers and scholars throughout history, at least as far back as Plato with the dilemma he posed in Euthyphro (2). 

Instead, what I find of particular interest is this idea that those outside religion don’t believe in anything at all, are uniquely immoral, or are unable to live a meaningful life. I think this mistaken belief is at the root of the atheist as symbolic Other and the associated bias against non-believers. If I can go some way towards showing why this belief is mistaken, perhaps that will also weaken the claim that non-believers live apart from the shared purpose that ties us all together – the “common humanity” that Obama referenced in his Inaugural Address. 

What non-believers do believe

As I said earlier, I prefer the term humanist because I do believe in something, despite not believing that there is a supernatural deity who created the world and is watching over us. Non-believers are not a monolith, so not all of them will believe in the same things I do, but I think it’s vanishingly rare to find someone who doesn’t believe in anything. Rejecting one source of value does not mean rejecting all values.

Far from being selfish, angry low-lifes, all the atheists and humanists I know (allowing for minor individual differences in family situation and personality) hold down 9-to-5 jobs, have stable marriages, are devoted and involved parents, spoil their pets, value education, pay their taxes, join the PTA, tip generously at restaurants, bring food to the Thanksgiving potluck, exchange gifts at Christmas, help their friends and family when hardship strikes, donate to charitable causes, vote, volunteer, attend jury duty, support local businesses, host meaningful weddings and funerals, feel passionately about several political and social issues, get along with religious coworkers and neighbors, support and provide for elderly parents, and maturely navigate existential crises and tragedies like cancer and unexpected loss. 

A life without God looks pretty much like any other modern American life, complete with all the civic duties that unite a pluralistic society into a functional whole. The only difference between the religious people and atheists I know is that the religious folks sometimes go to church and are more likely to be sports fans, for some reason. I feel more different from my religious peers during the Super Bowl than I do at Christmas. 

Obviously anecdotes are not data, but my point is that there is no a priori moral gulf or cultural disconnect that would render a non-believer and a believer mutually incomprehensible to each other. (Unless football really is that important.) 

As a matter of fact, the list of activities above shows that all the core moral touchstones are shared: the rule of law, the norms of politeness and orderly behavior, social etiquette, a love of family and community, a desire to help the less fortunate, an interest in world events, a celebration of holidays and traditions, a desire to be a good friend and a loyal spouse, overwhelmingly similar ethical instincts, a desire to find fulfilling work, a commitment to personal growth, a desire to respond to crises with maturity and wisdom, an appreciation of art and nature, a need to mark and honor milestones like weddings and funerals, and much more besides. 

To equate atheism with nihilism is to assume that the primary source of a life’s meaning rests with religious belief, such that when this belief is absent, so too is life’s meaning. On the contrary, I believe that a recognition of the finitude of our lives actually encourages us to invest more meaning into our lives, not less. If there is no afterlife, then the only reward to be had is the one we create here, by making our lives and the lives of those around us as secure and fulfilling as possible with the time we have. Philosopher Martin Hägglund uses the term “secular faith” to describe this awareness that everything we create in our finite lives stands to be lost, and that such projects persist only by dint of our belief that they are worth our limited and precious time (3).

If an atheist’s civic, cultural, and ethical life is so similar to a religious believer’s life, why are people surprised when they meet a “nice atheist?” Where is the lack of trust coming from? There are a few common misconceptions and irrationalities about what it means to be non-religious that come up over and over again, and I hope to dispel some of them here.

“Atheists think we’re just automatons without souls” / “No one will have a reason to be good without religion”

Some variation of “What would keep people from murdering each other without religion?” is one of the first gambits in discussions of good without God. The short answer is the obvious one: the threat of being punished by our communities and our own consciences. Humanists recognize the existence of a capacity for moral reasoning that can guide our actions. Just because that moral sense doesn’t have any mystical properties doesn’t make it any less reliable as a guide to moral behavior. As Steven Pinker says in The Blank Slate: 

“The brain may be a physical system made of ordinary matter, but that matter is organized in such a way as to give rise to a sentient organism with a capacity to feel pleasure and pain. And that in turn sets the stage for the emergence of morality.” (4)

Since we all share the same biology, this means our moral sense is largely universal. A 2022 meta-analysis of studies exploring the innateness of our moral sense concluded that “the moral sense is a complex construct of an evolutionary and social nature that evolves under the influence of interpersonal relationships.”

Anthropological research into the moral codes of different cultures backs this up. A 2019 study based on more than 60 different cultures around the world showed that there are at least seven moral principles these cultures have in common: help your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others’ property. Although different societies might prioritize these values differently, they are all present. As the authors of the study explained:

“People everywhere face a similar set of social problems, and use a similar set of moral rules to solve them. As predicted, these seven moral rules appear to be universal across cultures. Everyone everywhere shares a common moral code. All agree that cooperating, promoting the common good, is the right thing to do.”

Implementing these principles, which are based on empathy, cooperation, and respect, does not require a divine edict. As Sam Harris has put it, “Anyone who does not harbor some rudimentary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by reading – and, indeed, most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony to this fact in any case.” (5) Primatologist Frans de Waal has expressed it this way: “It wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.”

To be sure, there is a place for moral education and growth. What we call personal development is often a process of directing our inborn moral understanding into deeper channels or redirecting and combining different moral priorities in ways that are personally meaningful to us. This growth and development can come from religious instruction, but it doesn’t have to. We all have a moral code that evolved to help us live in groups, combined with the responsibility to make our own individual judgements about how to act. This is just as true for religious believers as it is for secular humanists. As anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas puts it: “…the reason religion has been so successful in the course of human history is precisely its ability to capitalize on those moral intuitions.”

Atheists and believers may disagree on how precisely to define the concept of a soul, but atheism certainly does not require the denial of a moral instinct or the disregard of its pokes and prods. We do have good reasons to be good without religion – many of them, in fact, most notably the ethical sensibilities common to all human beings, to say nothing of the legal and judicial system. Non-believers take their ethical commitments as seriously as believers do; threats of earthly punishment and the ravages of one’s own conscience are sufficient deterrents for the vast majority of people. 

“Everything got terrible once people stopped believing in (my) God” 

I recently heard a Christian man say that the second coming of the messiah was the only thing that could save America from the “wolves and serpents of secularism.” While his way of expressing this idea is rather forceful, he’s not alone among religious believers in thinking that secularism is a recent phenomenon and that it is dooming our society to ruin. Recall the Ohio Trump supporter who said “we need religion and church back in here” to fix our “out of whack” moral compass. Many religious apologists see a correlation between a decline in religious adherence and a decline in societal morality and assume the former caused the latter. Things aren’t like they were in the good old days, the argument goes, and people also seem to be less religiously devout these days; the latter must have caused the former.

Let’s put aside all the examples of the ways in which our society is more moral now than it was in the golden era of your choice. This would include the fact that we’ve abolished slavery and Jim Crow laws, outlawed child labor, expanded the social safety net, and expanded rights and opportunities for women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ people.

Even if we accept that society now is worse off in some ways compared to a golden era (for example, through an increase in violent crime), this doesn’t prove that religious belief was what made the era better in that respect. As philosopher Stephen Law points out, “while violent crime is up since 1950, it is actually hugely down (50 times less) compared to a couple of centuries ago, when our society was very religious indeed.” (6) 

We can take this logic one step further by comparing crime rates between highly religious and highly secular societies today. According to Law:

“When we look across the world’s developed democracies, we find that those that are most religious – including, of course, the United States (where 43% of citizens claim to attend church weekly) – tend to have the highest rates of homicide, sexually transmitted disease, abortion, and other measures of societal health, with the least religious countries, such as Canada, Japan, and Sweden, among the lowest. If declining levels of religiosity were the main cause of such social ills, we should expect those countries that are now least religious to have the greatest problems. The reverse is true.” (7)

This same principle holds within the U.S. as well: states with the highest homicide rates tend to be highly religious (Louisiana, Alabama), while states with the lowest homicide rates tend to be among the least religious in the country (Vermont, Oregon). Furthermore, a 2014 study in Science concluded that non-religious people were no more likely to commit immoral acts than religious people.

What we can conclude from all of these statistics is that it’s hard to prove that declining religiosity is the cause of social ills, since the most religious periods in human history were also some of the most violent, and since some of the eras in which we’ve made the most social progress have seen declining rates of religious belief. The religiosity of a society doesn’t cleanly predict how moral that society is, as the many highly successful secular democracies around the world demonstrate. 

Belief in divine retribution clearly is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure a peaceful and stable society. The threat of hellfire simply doesn’t seem to hold much sway in preventing the commission of evil acts. True, as Steven Pinker points out, “if nonbelievers thought they could elude the legal system, the opprobrium of their communities, and their own consciences, they would not be deterred by the threat of spending eternity in hell.” But, he continues, “they would also not be tempted to massacre thousands of people by the promise of spending eternity in heaven.” (8)

“Non-religious people are freeloaders benefitting from the moral capital of religious values”

The data above, particularly the bit about how the Swedes, Japanese, and Canadians seem to be behaving themselves despite not having a highly religious populace, is rather inconvenient if you’re trying to prove that people need religion to behave morally.

There’s an interesting argument that some supporters of religion have advanced to explain away this troubling fact. It’s the concept of moral capital: the idea that secular societies and individuals, even if they aren’t drawing directly from religious teachings in their own lives, are drawing from a bank of “moral capital” that was deposited by religious believers over the centuries. Maybe, the idea goes, atheists only behave morally because they have been steeped in religious traditions their whole lives, whether they like it or not. According to this claim, atheists are co-opting religious values, effectively living off the dividends that religious people worked hard to deposit in our cultural institutions, and that capital will eventually dry up. (9) 

This account of things tugs at our moral sense of fairness, but the analogy is deceptive. To start with, human culture is not a resource like money or water that can be used up. When I listen to highly religious choral pieces by Bach and experience a state of reverence and spiritual refreshment, I have not diminished that resource for anyone else. His music, and the values it embodies, are eternal and infinitely shareable, as long as we have the means and desire to preserve them. Atheists who enjoy works of religious art or benefit from institutions with a religious history are not in debt to anyone.

Furthermore, just because an artist or creator was motivated to acts of creation by their religious beliefs, as Bach certainly was, does not mean that religion as a whole owns that work of art. This is the same mistaken understanding of culture that makes arguments about cultural appropriation so problematic. (10) Lutherans do not have exclusive ownership of Bach’s work, and although Lutherans may have particular pride in his work, it is nonsensical to suppose that an atheist who enjoys Bach’s music is depleting the cultural capital of the Lutheran community or that they are “cheating” by unfairly using his music to assist their own moral development. An atheist and a religious devotee will undoubtedly enjoy Bach’s music in different ways, but this is the nature of all encounters with art. Virtues and values are fungible; their expression in certain religious contexts doesn’t preclude them from being independently discovered, appreciated, and expressed in other contexts.

Additionally, religious people themselves also draw from “secular capital” in many ways, whether they’re aware of it or not. Perhaps most obviously, many of the world’s moral codes and teachings, such as those from ancient China, India, and Greece, pre-date the Abrahamic religions (which are the ones usually assumed by those advancing the moral capital argument). Any religious person who has enjoyed the fruits of secular labor – including many of the innovations of science – is drawing from a storehouse of culture created by humanists, atheists, agnostics, and religious dissenters and skeptics of all kinds. 

It has traditionally been extremely dangerous to criticize religion or profess any sort of atheism, so we’ll never know just how many institutions, cultural artifacts, and works of art were created by closeted non-believers keeping their heads down in religious societies over the centuries. But we do know of a few, and as the world has gradually grown more secular and tolerant, we now know of even more openly non-religious people in the modern era. The fact that many cultural products and objects of beauty prior to a certain era were mostly created by religious believers is what we would expect from a time when the vast majority of people were (outwardly) religious under threat of death, ostracism, or other harsh penalties. 

The point is not to see which side has the best stuff or to keep track of who is allowed to use what in some sort of metaphysical bookkeeping, but to show that the tributaries of culture are impossible to dam or redirect once they have entered the larger stream of human cultural inheritance. Once a value or cultural product enters that stream, it’s available to everyone. That is one of the benefits of a pluralistic, diverse society like the United States. Political scientist Yascha Mounk refers to this as “the joys of mutual influence.” (11)

Another problem with the moral capital idea is that it assumes all religious people share the same morals from which that capital is formed. Two people, both from the same religious tradition, can arrive at different conclusions about a moral issue such as, for example, the abolition of slavery. Surely religious slaveholders dragged the balance of moral capital into the red by as much as, or more than, the religious abolitionists brought it back into the black. And what is guiding their different interpretations other than their own sense of right and wrong? We can’t look to religious teachings as the source of their decisions because these are the same in both cases (the Bible endorses slavery anyway, so it can hardly be said to consistently support the beliefs of an abolitionist). If these two believers each have an individual sense of right and wrong that predates what their religion taught them, or is axiomatic, then others can directly use that sense of right and wrong without needing to pull from the moral bank account of religion at all.

“Atheists are just angry nihilists who don’t believe in anything”

It’s common to hear of people who are turned off by the idea of atheism because of how angry all atheists supposedly are. The popular portrayal is that atheists are filled with self-righteous rage and will slaughter as many sacred cows as it takes for them to get the attention and notoriety they crave. This understandably can make people categorize atheists as moral Others. On the flip side, though, it’s just as common for atheists to be portrayed as nihilists who don’t care about anything at all, who are skeptical to the point of moral emptiness. This presents a contradiction: those who don’t care about anything have no reason to get angry. It’s the atheist as a boundary-marking symbol all over again.

Othering atheists because of their anger is a puzzling claim for another reason: Religious believers are some of the angriest people in the world today, any way you slice it. Atheists have a somewhat deserved reputation of writing angry screeds that alienate those who don’t already agree with them. But the occasional smugness and snark of writers like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is trivial compared to the destructive anger of religious zealots. This point is often missed when critics claim that atheists are just as fundamentalist as some religious believers. Who’s more of a threat to the stability of the moral order: a cognitive scientist mounting a scathing critique against religion using unkind language, or a white supremacist who shoots people because they don’t share his ethno-religious vision of a Christian America?

The presence of religious imagery, rhetoric, and scriptural justification in some of the most destructive events of recent memory – from fatwas and suicide bombings to hate crimes, mass shootings, and never-ending wars over scraps of desert – is not arbitrary or coincidental. The common denominator is anger fueled by religious belief and the dehumanization of those who hold different beliefs. One of the scariest things someone can announce is that they’re “doing the Lord’s work.” (12) “The recurrence of evil acts committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions,” as Steven Pinker said. (13)

The atheists-as-nihilists argument is on equally shaky ground. A large quantity of social scientific research has reliably demonstrated that non-religious people believe a lot of things; they just don’t necessarily line up with what their religious peers believe. For instance, studies have shown that, compared with their religious peers, non-religious people are more supportive of gender equality, decriminalization of recreational drugs, doctor-assisted suicide, and reproductive rights, and less supportive of torture, draconian legal sentencing, the death penalty, and foreign military intervention. (14)

In addition, one recent research study found no difference between atheists and Christians on measures of sociality, joviality, emotional stability, happiness, compassion, or empathic concern. (15) The same study found that atheists and Christians both have similar abilities to find meaning in life experiences, develop a sense of purpose, and feel “at one with the universe.” There is simply no evidence that atheists as a group are more nihilistic than religious believers. (16) This is precisely what we would expect from the fact that all humans have innate moral and meaning-making faculties.

“America was founded as a Christian nation, so atheists can’t be patriots”

Perhaps another potential cause of atheists’ cultural otherness, especially in the U.S., comes from a perception that they are less patriotic or loyal to their country than religious believers are. Studies have shown that non-believers do tend to be less nationalistic and less supportive of military intervention in foreign countries than religious believers are. (17) But while non-believers may be less likely to believe “My country, right or wrong!” this is not equivalent to being unpatriotic. Many atheists would agree with Thomas Paine – unquestionably a patriot if there ever was one – who said, “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” (18)

But the stereotype of the America-hating atheist makes more sense when you consider that many religious believers claim that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. If true, this would lend credence to the idea that Americans who reject Christianity or religion overall are fundamentally different from other Americans. However, it is simply not true that America was founded as a Christian nation. A state-sanctioned religion is precisely what the founders of the country did not want; the separation of church and state has been a core American value from the time the Constitution was drafted. Freedom of religion – which includes the freedom to practice no religion – is guaranteed by the First Amendment. All of the religious rhetoric that clings to our institutions today represents relatively recent efforts to violate the Constitution – often successfully, unfortunately. 

To take the two most prominent examples, the phrase “one nation under God” wasn’t part of the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954, and the phrase “In God We Trust” wasn’t associated with the United States until 1956, when Congress declared it the new national motto and put it on our money (the original, secular motto is E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one”). These religiously-motivated changes were part of the Red Scare in the 1950s that equated any form of non-theism with Communism. In other words, the lineage of those phrases is short, and they do not represent something foundational in the bedrock of our country. Most of our parents and all of our grandparents grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance with no mention of God.

The U.S. was not founded as a Christian nation. The fact that it has frequently operated like one over the past several decades is only due to several unconstitutional practices that often go unchallenged, such as prayer at public school functions and taxpayer-funded events, blue laws, religious tests for public office (19), attempts to put the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, inserting Bible teachings into the K-5 curriculum in public schools, and government subsidies for religious organizations. The fact that it necessitates violating the Constitution for the U.S. government to act like a Christian state is not a point in favor of religion and does not speak highly of the historical awareness of its followers. 

It should go without saying, but non-Christians and non-believers are not any less American, less civically minded, or less worthy of the protections guaranteed by the Constitution than Christians. The fact that our Constitution is a secular document that upholds the separation of church and state means that religious belief (or the lack thereof) is patently irrelevant when judging someone’s patriotism or loyalty to their country. To quote Thomas Paine again:

“I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy…I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” (20)

“Without religion, people become hopeless in the face of suffering”

When Karl Marx stated that religion was the “opium of the masses,” he wasn’t being as mean-spirited as people often take him to be. His point was less about religion as an illusion, and more about religion as a coping mechanism, the way that opium is a comfort to someone in pain. He wasn’t primarily calling out religion; he was calling out the unfair system that drove so many people to religion for consolation in the first place. In context, he says:

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

Philosopher Martin Hägglund states this idea even more clearly and forcefully:

“That those who are enslaved or live in poverty may need faith in God to carry on with their lives is not a reason to promote religious faith but a reason to abolish slavery and poverty.” (21)

It may be true that religious beliefs and the sense of community provided by places of worship provide comfort to people whose lives are miserable, desperate, or out of control. However, this means we should work on making those lives less miserable in practical terms, not that we should countenance a religious narrative that helps them get through their miserable lives. 

Even less should we take this as evidence that a life without religion is void of all comforts and consolations. The fact that religion provides comfort to some does not mean that those who reject religion are living lives of terrible emptiness, alienation, or despair. Comfort and reassurance – and even transcendence – can be found in many places, of which religion is only one.

Transcendence and humility as atheist virtues

I mentioned earlier that I feel a sense of reverence when I listen to Bach’s music. I often feel the same way when enjoying other works of art that depict religious themes or rituals that have a religious purpose. 

For example, I find certain Christmas carols and religious hymns deeply moving (I defy anyone to listen to a choir singing “Veni, veni, Emmanuel” in a cathedral without getting the aesthetic chills, regardless of their beliefs about Jesus). Staring up at the ceiling of St. Paul’s Cathedral transported me to a completely different emotional landscape, as did attending a Passover Seder. When I was in college, attending candlelight services around Christmastime was one of the most meaningful and uplifting experiences of the year for me. Singing religious songs in choirs over the years has been intensely fulfilling. Seeing illuminated manuscripts and imagining the monks who bent over them for hours is mind-bendingly awe-inspiring. And the undergraduate courses I took on Hinduism, Buddhism, and the philosophy of religion – which included a lot of amicable and intellectually fulfilling debates with religious believers – were some of the most fascinating and culturally rich learning experiences of my entire college career.

But I have also had this feeling of transcendence when looking at Hadrian’s Wall and the ruins of Roman outposts, standing where Roman centurions stood. I’ve felt this way in massive libraries and when looking at abstract art and particularly majestic sunrises. I also get this feeling while visiting cemeteries and war memorials, reflecting on how short our time is and how lucky we are to have lived at all. I have felt reverence and awe while playing a duet on the violin and walking through a forest of giant redwoods that boggled my sense of scale. 

I felt this way when I saw scraps of paper containing handwritten Beatles lyrics at the British Library and when I learned about the different types of mathematical infinity. I’ve experienced profound joy looking down onto Scottish fields and watching the sunlight move across them. I found myself overwhelmed with an upsurge of transcendence during a Beethoven symphony. And I routinely feel something that could only be described as profound awe when really, truly looking at my son or the night sky with my undivided attention. 

Whatever the opposite of nihilism is, that is what these experiences were – and continue to be, whenever I think back on them. They have indeed become “a cheering light unto my soul.” (22) At these moments, I don’t stop to think how it’s possible to feel such transcendence despite being irreligious. “Reality suffices,” as the philosopher André Comte-Sponville has said. There is no need for dogmas or last judgements, rewards or punishments. “When you feel ‘at one with the All,’” he writes, “you need nothing more. Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices.” (23)

Make no mistake – I believe humans need these transcendent experiences. A life without any of the kinds of uplifting moments I just described would not be a fulfilled or happy existence. But religion doesn’t have a monopoly on the sublime. One doesn’t need to subscribe to a specific creed or dogma to appreciate beauty, to feel wonder and awe, to honor special days and times of year, to widen one’s circle of concern beyond the ego, to act justly and lovingly towards others, to live contemplatively, or to devote oneself to an ethical cause. As Sam Harris wrote, “Concern for others was not the invention of any prophet.” (24)

One of the virtues that non-believers are often accused of lacking is humility. Without God, the argument goes, humanists are at risk of overestimating their own importance. In my experience, humility, like all human traits, doesn’t seem to consistently line up with the groups we might want it to. There are plenty of arrogant atheists, just like there are plenty of arrogant believers. 

Atheist philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote extensively about living a moral and virtuous life without belief in the supernatural, and she argued that a key part of succeeding in this is finding ways to see the world as it really is. When we do that, humility follows as a natural consequence, because we see that “the world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and we are blinded by self.” (25) She describes how this stepping out of the self allows us to see more clearly, put our lives in perspective, and draw sustenance from the real world, without recourse to myths:

“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.” (26)

Whenever we have a moment where “there is nothing now but kestrel,” this is our attempt to look away from the self towards “a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt-of virtue.” (27) Murdoch describes these moments as “undogmatic prayer.” (28) The universe suffices, and we count ourselves lucky to be here to witness it.

What I can say with certainty is that a feeling of humbleness can come from a variety of sources right here on Earth, no divinity required – it can come from observing the cosmic scale of the universe, the movements of history and our incredibly brief time on stage, the generations to come and the world we’re leaving for them, or simply the relentlessly humbling process of aging and dying. 

These experiences of humility, transcendence, and meaning are common to all of us, whether we are humanists or religious devotees. The cynical part of me wonders if perhaps every group needs an Other as a repository of undesirable traits, and this could in part explain why tolerance towards atheists has remained stubbornly static over the decades, even as tolerance toward other minority groups has increased. 

But I choose to take a more optimistic view. There is, and has always been, more common ground between believers and non-believers than either side has wanted to acknowledge; we all have a seat by the fire. Labeling someone as religious or non-religious is not as informative as simply asking, “How does this person treat others? What do their actions contribute to the world?” We all share a common humanity and an individual responsibility to create lives of meaning and purpose. Professing a religion is no guarantee that we will succeed in that task; rejecting religion is not evidence that we have failed.

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