The Claim and What It Actually Requires
There is an argument that does not need much elaboration before most audiences recognise it, because it is so familiar as to have become ambient. It runs roughly as follows: without religion, morality would have no foundation; without the fear of divine judgement, human beings would have no reliable motive to behave decently; and without the church, the mosque, or the synagogue, the poor would starve, the sick would go untended, and society would dissolve into violence and mutual exploitation. On this account, religion does not merely inform our moral lives. It authors them, gives them their shape and their binding force, and supplies the only warrant that can make a moral claim genuinely obligatory rather than merely convenient. The clergy are not simply one voice among many in the ethical conversation; they are the custodians of something given from outside human experience, something that secular reason cannot replicate and secular institutions cannot replace. This is the claim to the moral high ground in its fullest and most demanding form, and it is the specific claim this essay will test against the evidence.
Notice what the claim actually requires in order to stand. It requires not only that religious teaching has historically promoted moral behaviour, but that it has done so more reliably and more ambitiously than secular alternatives. It requires that the institutions carrying this teaching have themselves embodied the values they profess, that the organisations asserting moral authority have lived up to the standards they assert. It requires that as moral understanding has advanced, religious institutions have led rather than resisted that advance, serving as the engine of progress rather than the brake. And it requires that societies shaped most thoroughly by religious authority are, by measurable standards, more just, more peaceful, and more humane than those shaped by secular norms. If any significant portion of this quartet of requirements fails, the claim to high ground fails with it. The question is not whether individual religious believers have lived moral lives, because a great many obviously have, and the charge that atheists are immoral is separately addressed elsewhere on this site. The question is whether the institutional claim is warranted, whether the record of organised religion, weighed honestly against the record of secular moral progress, supports the authority that religious institutions routinely assert over the rest of us.
The honest answer, and the one this essay will defend across several sections, is that it does not. The institutional record is not merely imperfect in the way that all human institutions are imperfect. It reveals a pattern, one consistent enough to require explanation rather than apology: religious organisations have characteristically defended arrangements of power and cruelty, retreated from those positions only when secular pressure made retreat inevitable, and then, with remarkable consistency, claimed retrospective credit for the moral progress they resisted. Claiming to be the author and guardian of morality while lagging behind moral progress and shielding the powerful is not high ground. It is a marketing position. And it is long past time to say so plainly.
1. The Slavery Reversal: Lagging Behind and Then Claiming the Lead
No single historical episode exposes the gap between the claimed moral authority of religious institutions and their actual moral record more clearly than the history of slavery. Consider what the record actually shows, stripped of the retrospective editing that has become standard in religious apologetics. For the first fifteen centuries of Christianity’s institutional dominance in Europe and its colonies, the major churches did not merely tolerate slavery. They participated in it, theologically justified it, and vigorously defended it when challenged by reformers. The Catholic Church held enslaved people as property. Protestant denominations in the American South produced some of the most elaborate theological defences of the institution ever written, mobilising scripture with considerable sophistication to argue that the enslavement of Africans was divinely sanctioned and morally sound, not a necessary evil but a positive good ordained by a loving God.
The biblical case for slavery was not a fringe position; it was the mainstream theological consensus of the most powerful churches on earth. Genesis 9:25, in which Noah curses Canaan to be “a servant of servants,” was cited for centuries as the foundational warrant for racial slavery. Ephesians 6:5, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters,” was read from pulpits across the slaveholding world as divine instruction, as clear and binding as any other commandment. Thornton Stringfellow’s “Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favour of Slavery” (1856) is representative of an entire genre: careful, learned, institutionally supported theological argument that slavery was not a moral error but a divine arrangement. The Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America formally declared in 1861 that slavery was “a divine institution.” This was not an embarrassing minority position held by a handful of eccentric ministers. It was the denominational consensus of some of the most powerful religious organisations in the world at the height of the institution.
Yes, there were religious abolitionists, and their moral courage deserves genuine recognition. The Quakers were early and consistent opponents of slavery, and individual figures within mainstream denominations took brave positions against the grain of their institutional leadership. But the standard apologetic move, which is to point to these individuals and claim the moral credit for religion as such, is precisely backwards. The abolitionists succeeded not because religious authority supported them but despite the fact that most religious authority opposed them. The institutional churches were, on balance, on the wrong side of the most important moral question of their era. And when abolition came, when the combined pressure of secular and heterodox religious agitation finally made slavery untenable, the denominations that had defended it most robustly reoriented themselves and eventually, in some cases after more than a century, issued carefully worded apologies. The Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 explicitly to defend slavery from its abolitionist critics within the Baptist movement, did not formally apologise for its founding position until 1995, one hundred and thirty years after the Thirteenth Amendment. Whatever that represents, it is not moral leadership. It is moral followership on a geological timescale.
The pattern here recurs so consistently across different moral questions and different centuries that it cannot be dismissed as coincidence or as a failure of individual practitioners rather than of the institution itself. Religious bodies defend the status quo when the status quo serves established power. Secular and often explicitly irreligious reformers challenge that status quo and eventually prevail. The religious institutions then gradually, generation by generation, revise their positions to align with the secular consensus they resisted, and at no point in this process do they concede that the reformers were right and the church was wrong. They absorb the change silently, update their theology to accommodate it, and continue to assert their role as the ultimate moral authority. This is not high ground. It is intellectual dishonesty dressed in vestments, and the vestments should not prevent us from naming it clearly.
2. The Magdalene Laundries, the Abuse Scandal, and the Concealment of Power
If the slavery reversal represents the largest single failure of religious moral leadership across the longest timescale, the concealment of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is the most damning recent evidence for the prosecution. The scale of what has been documented is not in serious dispute. The Ryan Report in Ireland (2009), the John Jay Report in the United States (2004), the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia (final report 2017), and subsequent investigations in Germany, France, Chile, and across much of the world have established beyond any reasonable doubt that the systematic sexual abuse of children by clergy was not an isolated or occasional phenomenon. It was widespread, it was known to senior church leadership, and the institutional response to that knowledge was not to protect children but to protect the institution and the men who ran it.
The mechanism was consistent across countries and decades. A priest would be credibly accused of abusing a child. The case would be reported to a bishop. The bishop, following what internal documents repeatedly show to be standard procedure, would transfer the priest to a new parish without informing the new community, quietly settle any legal claims with confidentiality agreements, and invoke the authority of the church to discourage reporting to civil authorities. The abuser would gain access to new victims, and the sequence would begin again. This consistent pattern of institutional concealment was not the result of incompetence or of individual moral failure operating without systemic support. It was policy, the deliberate application of institutional authority to protect the institution’s reputation at the cost of the children in its care, and it was policy directed by men who spent every Sunday asserting their institution’s unique moral authority over the lives of their congregants.
The Magdalene laundries belong in the same indictment. Operated primarily by Catholic religious orders in Ireland from the eighteenth century until the last one closed in 1996, these institutions confined women without trial or legal process for such offences as being pregnant outside marriage, being considered insufficiently plain in appearance, being intellectually disabled, or simply being inconvenient to their families. The conditions documented in the McAleese Report (2013) include forced labour, physical abuse, and the routine denial of basic dignity and autonomy. An estimated 10,000 women passed through these institutions over their operational history. Many died there and were buried in unmarked graves, some of which were discovered in 1993 when a religious order sold convent land for development and the remains of 155 women and children were excavated. The Irish state finally offered a formal apology in 2013. The religious orders that ran the institutions did so with considerably greater reluctance and a degree of hedging that spoke volumes.
None of this should be surprising to anyone who thinks carefully about what the structure of religious institutional authority actually requires. An institution that claims divine sanction for its authority, that teaches its members to defer to that authority as a spiritual obligation rather than a rational choice, and that operates largely beyond the reach of democratic accountability is not an institution that will naturally hold itself answerable for its abuses. The claim to divine authority is precisely the claim that ordinary human standards of scrutiny do not fully apply, that the institution answers ultimately to a higher court that is conveniently unavailable for consultation. And when ordinary human scrutiny has applied, despite rather than because of the institution’s cooperation, what it has consistently found is not the moral exemplar that the institution advertised itself as being, but an organisation that protected its own power and its own reputation at the expense of the most vulnerable people in its care.
To document these facts is not to malign the millions of people who attend religious services, who draw genuine comfort from their faith, and who live decently by any standard. The ordinary believer in the pew is not responsible for the decisions of the hierarchy, and making that distinction matters. But the institution that claims to provide moral guidance to those ordinary believers, that asserts its right to pronounce on the sexual ethics of entire nations, that lobbies governments on questions of reproductive choice and marriage equality, cannot simultaneously disclaim responsibility for what its own leadership knowingly did and systematically concealed. The moral high ground requires accountability. An institution that evades accountability while asserting authority has forfeited its claim to the former and should be asked, plainly and persistently, on what basis it continues to make the latter.
3. Contraception, Epidemics, and the Calculus of Real Harm
There is an objection worth acknowledging before it arrives. The abuses described above, a critic might reasonably say, represent the failure of human beings within religious institutions, not the failure of religious teaching itself. The doctrine is pure; the practitioners were corrupt. And if one were prepared to evaluate religious morality by its own stated ideals, divorced entirely from the actual consequences of its institutional application, this distinction might carry some weight. But the claim under examination is not that religious doctrine, read in isolation from the world it operates in, always produces pure moral precepts. The claim is that religion, in practice, provides the moral high ground from which the rest of society should take direction. And in practice, across a range of questions where the consequences are empirically measurable and the human cost is concrete and documented, the direction provided by religious authority has not merely been unhelpful. It has been lethal in the most literal sense, and the mechanisms of that lethality deserve examination.
Consider the Catholic Church’s sustained opposition to condom use during the HIV and AIDS epidemic. The virus spread explosively through sub-Saharan Africa during the 1980s and 1990s and into the 2000s, in precisely the communities where the Catholic Church had its deepest institutional presence and its strongest cultural authority over daily life. The scientific consensus on the effectiveness of condom use in reducing HIV transmission was not seriously contested by any reputable public health organisation; the evidence was overwhelming and the stakes were as high as stakes can be. We are not talking about theological discomfort or doctrinal revision, but about millions of human lives. The Church’s position, articulated with particular force under John Paul II and maintained under Benedict XVI, was that condom distribution encouraged sexual promiscuity, that the only morally acceptable response to the epidemic was abstinence and marital fidelity, and that promoting condom use was therefore a moral error. Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, went further in a 2003 BBC interview, claiming that the HIV virus could pass through the latex of condoms. This was not a theological position on a matter beyond empirical investigation. It was a straightforwardly false empirical claim made by a senior church official in a context where the falsehood could cost lives, and it was made in the service of a doctrinal commitment to the prohibition of artificial contraception that pre-dated the epidemic by centuries.
The prohibition of artificial contraception is itself rooted in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, issued by Paul VI over the explicit objections of the commission he himself appointed to study the question, a commission that formally recommended changing the church’s position after careful study of the available evidence. Paul VI declined to accept its findings. The consequences were not confined to theological debate. In communities with limited access to healthcare and high rates of maternal mortality, the prohibition on contraception has produced more pregnancies, more unsafe abortions, more maternal deaths, and, in the context of the AIDS epidemic, demonstrably more HIV transmission. These are documented harms, recorded across multiple decades and multiple countries in the public health literature, and they flow directly from a moral position asserted with divine authority by an institution that claims to speak for the highest ethical values available to humanity. One might reasonably ask what moral high ground looks like if this is the view from it. The honest answer appears to be that the high ground is high precisely because its occupants have decided to remain there regardless of what the evidence says is happening at ground level. The doctrine takes priority over the data, and the human cost of that priority is absorbed by people who are not the ones asserting the authority.
4. Women, Equality, and the Theology of Subordination
The treatment of women by organised religion is not a peripheral topic or an unfair subject of focus when assessing claims to moral authority. It is central to the assessment because the claim to moral authority has, historically and continuously, been exercised most comprehensively and most oppressively over the lives of women. The subordination of women is not an accidental feature of religious history that can be explained away as the contamination of pure doctrine by patriarchal culture that existed independently of religion. It is, in the major Abrahamic traditions, doctrinally grounded, scripturally evidenced, liturgically performed, and institutionally enforced across centuries.
Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 14:34 that “women should remain silent in the churches” is not an obscure verse requiring careful contextualisation before its meaning becomes accessible. It is direct, it has been taken literally for most of Christian history, and its influence on the exclusion of women from positions of religious authority persists in the Catholic Church and in large portions of the Protestant world to this day. The Catholic Church’s formal position, articulated in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis issued by John Paul II, is that the ordination of women to the priesthood is simply not possible, and that “this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” The door is not merely closed; it is declared permanently sealed by divine authority, and those who question the sealing are told that the question itself is not open for discussion. The argument given is that Jesus chose twelve male apostles, and therefore the male-only priesthood reflects the will of God. Applied with anything approaching intellectual consistency, this mode of reasoning would also prohibit the wearing of polyester-blend vestments and the use of electrically amplified music in worship, since both were equally unknown to the apostles. The argument is not applied consistently, because consistency is not the governing concern. The exclusion of women is the conclusion already reached, and scripture is recruited in its service after the fact.
Beyond the question of ordination, the religious record on women’s equality is one of consistent, institutionally organised opposition to advances that the secular world eventually won through sustained political and intellectual effort. Women’s suffrage was opposed by significant portions of religious leadership in Britain and America, with arguments drawn from natural law theology about the proper ordering of the sexes and the distinctive spiritual vocation of femininity. The Church of England’s leadership was notably hostile to the suffragette movement, and the Catholic hierarchy in the United States was, with individual exceptions, aligned against women’s political equality as a matter of theological principle. Opposition to women in the workforce, opposition to married women holding professional positions, opposition to equal pay legislation: in each of these debates, religious voices were disproportionately represented on the side of the established hierarchy, and secular voices disproportionately represented on the side of reform. This is not a coincidence; it reflects the structural interests of institutions whose authority is organised around a theology of natural hierarchy, in which the subordination of women is not a regrettable historical accident but a feature of the divine design.
What is equally revealing is what happens to these positions over time. Each generation of religious leadership quietly abandons the previous generation’s certainties without ever acknowledging the abandonment. The theological justifications for excluding women from public life, which were presented as the considered moral teaching of the church, grounded in scripture and natural law and the unbroken tradition of the faithful, are now simply absent from the mainstream of even conservative religious discourse. Nobody in the mainstream churches is currently arguing from the pulpit that women should not vote. But nobody is acknowledging, either, that the position was wrong, that it caused concrete harm to real women across generations, and that the people who challenged it on secular grounds were right when the churches were wrong. The revision happens invisibly, the institution’s claim to moral authority continues unchanged, and the women who suffered under the previously certain moral teaching receive neither acknowledgement nor apology. A longer treatment of what faith has cost women specifically is available elsewhere on this site, but the pattern matters here because it constitutes direct evidence against the institutional claim under examination.
5. Homosexuality and the Art of the Silent Retreat
The same pattern of confident assertion, active resistance to change, silent revision, and continued authority claim plays out with particular clarity over the question of homosexuality, and the pace of the cycle is fast enough in this case to be observed within a single lifetime rather than across centuries. The position of the Catholic Church, formally stated in the 1975 declaration Persona Humana and maintained with varying degrees of pastoral emphasis ever since, is that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church, promulgated in 1992, describes homosexual tendencies themselves as “objectively disordered.” This is not a minor doctrinal flourish or an obscure theological qualification. It is the formal teaching of an institution that claims universal moral authority, applied to the intimate lives of a significant portion of the human population, and it has shaped law and policy in countries where that institution has significant political influence.
The real-world consequences of religiously sanctioned homophobia are not hypothetical or abstract. Section 28 in the United Kingdom, the legislation that prohibited local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality in schools and public institutions, was supported and celebrated by Christian lobby groups who argued that it protected family values and the proper ordering of society. The criminalisation of homosexuality across much of the post-colonial world is directly traceable, in many specific cases, to laws introduced by colonial administrators working in active partnership with missionary churches, laws that have remained on the statute books and been actively defended by local religious hierarchies long after the colonial powers themselves moved toward decriminalisation. Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which in its original 2009 form proposed the death penalty for certain acts and in its revised 2023 form still imposes harsh custodial sentences and creates sweeping restrictions on the promotion of LGBT identities, was drafted and promoted with the enthusiastic support of religious leaders, including American evangelical missionaries who travelled to Uganda specifically to advance the cause. This is the moral high ground in operational form: legislation that criminalises the existence of a minority, crafted and defended by institutions claiming divine sanction, causing documented harm in the form of violence, imprisonment, family breakdown, psychological damage, and suicide.
In Western countries, the retreat from the most extreme positions has followed the now-familiar pattern without the familiar acknowledgement. Denominations that a generation ago were united in condemning homosexuality as a grave moral disorder are now divided, tentatively revised, or actively debating positions that would have been considered rank apostasy even two decades ago. The Church of England has moved in the direction of permitting the blessing of same-sex couples, a development that represents a direct reversal of the position held with theological confidence for the entirety of the Church’s existence. The United Methodist Church in America formally ended its prohibition on the ordination of gay clergy in 2024. Each of these shifts is presented not as a belated recognition that the previous position was morally wrong and caused real damage to real people, but as a Spirit-led development of doctrine, a deepening of theological understanding that somehow, through what must be a remarkable coincidence, always moves in precisely the direction that the secular consensus reached a decade or two earlier. The institution retains its authority. The people who fought for equality on secular grounds, the lawyers and activists and philosophers who made the arguments that actually shifted public opinion, receive no acknowledgement. And the theological edifice that justified the harm is quietly dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere without the rubble being publicly examined or its victims being compensated.
6. What the Data Says About Secular Societies
The empirical counterpart to this historical argument is at least as important as the historical case itself, because the claim to moral high ground rests not only on religious institutions being a positive force in history but on the implicit premise that secular societies, lacking the grounding of religious authority, would be morally worse. This is the threat that lurks beneath much of the rhetoric: remove religion from public life, and you remove the essential restraint on human behaviour. The social fabric would unravel in the absence of divine sanction. It is a powerful and emotionally resonant claim. It is also, when tested against the evidence of actually existing secular societies, substantially false.
The sociological data on the correlation between religiosity and social wellbeing is not uniformly against religion, and intellectual honesty requires saying so clearly. There is credible evidence that regular religious attendance correlates with certain prosocial behaviours at the individual level, including charitable giving, volunteering, and reported subjective wellbeing. These correlations are real, though they require careful interpretation: much of the prosocial activity associated with religious attendance is directed primarily toward co-religionists rather than the wider community, and the social support networks available through religious congregation may account for the wellbeing effects as well as or better than the theological content of the belief itself. But the data at the sociological level, comparing whole societies rather than individuals, tells a substantially different story from the one that religious authority requires.
Phil Zuckerman’s research, collected in his 2008 book “Society Without God,” examined the Scandinavian countries, among the least religious in the world by every available measure of belief and practice, and found them to be, by an equally wide range of measures, among the most peaceful, most equal, most healthy, and least violent societies on earth. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway consistently rank at or near the top of international indices of human development, press freedom, gender equality, and low corruption, and near the bottom of indices of violence, imprisonment, and infant mortality. The United States, considerably more religious by self-report than any comparable wealthy democracy, consistently and substantially underperforms these countries on most of the same metrics. The murder rate in the United States is several times higher than in Sweden. The incarceration rate is extraordinary by any international comparison. These are not marginal or debatable differences; they are substantial, persistent, and replicated across multiple data sources and multiple decades of observation.
Gregory Paul’s comparative analysis of religiosity and social dysfunction, published in the Journal of Religion and Society in 2005, found that among prosperous democracies, higher levels of religious belief and practice correlate with higher rates of homicide, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted infection, and abortion, not lower. The United States is the outlier that drives this correlation most strongly, but the pattern holds when it is removed from the analysis and the remaining countries are examined on their own. The countries where religion has the least institutional grip on public life are not, by measurable standards, the countries where human beings treat each other worst. They are, with considerable consistency, the countries where human beings treat each other best, by almost every criterion that a serious moral evaluation would include.
As Jerry Coyne writes in “Faith Versus Fact” (2015): “But the God hypothesis for morality and altruism has its own problems. It fails, for example, to specify exactly which moral judgments were instilled in people by God and which, if any, might rest on secular reason. It doesn’t explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has.” The force of this observation is considerable and deserves to be dwelt upon. If morality were genuinely God-given, constant in its source and authoritative in its content, we would expect it to be stable across time and cultures. What we observe is that it changes, sometimes dramatically within the span of a single generation, and that the direction of change tracks secular moral reasoning far more closely than it tracks any revised theological consensus produced by councils and synods. This is not compatible with the claim that religious authority is the source of moral progress. It is compatible with the claim that secular moral reasoning drives progress, and that religious authority, with the occasional honourable exception, follows at a respectful distance.
7. Who Leads and Who Follows: The Direction of Moral Progress
The empirical argument about secular societies connects directly to the historical argument about who actually leads moral progress when the accounts are examined honestly. The standard religious apologetic acknowledges the failures catalogued in earlier sections but explains them as deviations from true doctrine, and then pivots to point at the genuine achievements of religious reformers: the hospitals founded by religious orders, the schools built by missionaries, the soup kitchens run by the Salvation Army, the civil rights movement that drew its energy and its rhetoric from Black churches in the American South. None of this is fabricated. These are real achievements and they deserve acknowledgement without reservation. But the apologetic consistently conflates two separate and quite different things: the good done by individual religious people, and the institutional claim to moral authority. The former is real and should be acknowledged without hesitation. The latter is what is under examination here, and the evidence for it is considerably weaker than the apologetic requires.
Consider the American civil rights movement, which is probably the most frequently cited example of religious moral leadership in modern history. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister, and the movement drew enormous energy, extraordinary courage, and much of its rhetorical power from Black churches and from the prophetic tradition of the Black church in America. But what is also true, and significantly less frequently noted in religious apologetic literature, is that the most powerful and most numerous religious institutions in the country were not, on balance, on King’s side. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was silent or hostile on civil rights during the movement’s most critical years. The Catholic hierarchy in many Southern states was aligned with the existing social order and with gradualism at best. Billy Graham, the most influential evangelical voice of the era and a man of genuine personal decency by most accounts, repeatedly urged patience and delay, warning against the provocation of public demonstrations and the pace of change. The religious establishment as a whole did not lead the civil rights movement; a prophetic minority within religious communities, working alongside secular activists, civil rights lawyers, and politicians operating under secular constitutional frameworks, eventually prevailed against the combined resistance of state power and most of organised institutional religion. The movement’s success came through, around, and often despite the institutional church, which is a different thing from saying it came because of it.
The same analysis applies with at least equal force to the abolition of capital punishment in most liberal democracies, to the recognition of women’s legal equality, to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, to the legalisation of divorce, and to the growing legal recognition of the right to die with dignity and on one’s own terms. In every one of these moral advances, the primary driving force has been secular: philosophers arguing from first principles about the nature of human dignity, lawyers advancing rights frameworks derived from Enlightenment thinking, scientists contributing evidence about human psychology and the absence of deterrent effects, political movements building coalitions around shared values that require no theological grounding to be compelling. Religious institutions have, with occasional and honourable exceptions that are important to acknowledge, resisted each of these advances, revised their positions when resistance became publicly untenable, and continued to assert their authority over the moral life of societies whose moral progress they repeatedly obstructed. As Coyne notes in “Why Evolution Is True”: “Religious morality, at least as promulgated by priests, rabbis, imams, and theologians, is usually one step behind secular morality.” One step behind is, if anything, a generous assessment when the full historical record is laid out. The evidence from slavery, from women’s equality, from LGBT rights, from the management of public health crises, and from the protection of children in institutional care suggests that the gap is often wider than a single step, and that the direction of travel is consistently and predictably the same.
The reasons for this persistent pattern are not mysterious and do not require the attribution of individual malevolence to explain them. Religious institutions, like all institutions, have structural interests in their own preservation and in the maintenance of the authority structures that preservation requires. Moral progress frequently threatens institutional authority, because it implies that the previous consensus was wrong, and an institution that claims divine sanction for its teaching cannot easily acknowledge that it was wrong about a significant moral question without undermining the basis of its claim to authority on every other question. The path of least resistance is to resist change as long as politically possible, absorb it when it becomes unavoidable, and never explicitly acknowledge what has changed or why. This is not a strategy adopted consciously by malevolent individuals, though individual instances of deliberate bad faith are well documented. It is the predictable behaviour of an institution structured around an unchallengeable claim to authority derived from an unchallengeable source. The structure produces the behaviour. The behaviour produces the record. And the record is what we have been examining throughout this essay.
8. Wealth, Power, and the Gilded Ledger
No honest assessment of the claim to moral high ground would be complete without some examination of the material interests that religious institutions carry into their moral pronouncements, because those interests are substantial and their relationship to the content of the doctrine is rarely discussed with the frankness the subject deserves. The Catholic Church is, by any reasonable estimate, among the wealthiest institutions on earth. The Vatican’s financial holdings are notoriously opaque, but estimates of its property portfolio in Italy alone run to several billion euros. The Church of England is the second-largest landowner in England, with a property portfolio valued at over eight billion pounds. Megachurches in the United States operate as multi-million-pound enterprises with sophisticated financial and media arms. Evangelical networks control broadcasting empires and lobbying infrastructure that rivals the resources of major corporations. These are not trivial facts when evaluating the claim to moral authority, and the reluctance to discuss them in polite conversation about religion is itself a form of deference that the facts do not warrant.
An institution that preaches the virtue of poverty while accumulating extraordinary wealth, that invokes the authority of a figure who instructed his followers to sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, and that uses its tax-exempt status to avoid contributing to the public funds from which it draws substantial benefit, is an institution whose material interests deserve scrutiny when it makes moral pronouncements about the economic obligations of others. The contradiction between gilded altars and empty bowls is not new, and raising it is not anti-religious spite. It is a straightforward application of the standard by which any moral claim should be evaluated: does the claimant’s behaviour correspond to the values they assert? When a bishop who lives in an episcopal palace issues a pastoral letter on the moral obligations of the poor, the question of correspondence is not impertinent. When an institution that controls billions in property wealth opposes the social welfare programmes that serve as the secular alternative to its own charitable activities, often on the grounds that state provision crowds out voluntary giving, the relationship between the doctrine and the institutional interest deserves examination rather than deference.
This does not mean that all religious giving is insincere, or that religious charities do not do real and valuable work in difficult circumstances. A great many of them demonstrably do, and it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. But the aggregate picture, of wealthy and powerful institutions claiming moral authority over others while being substantially exempt from the accountability mechanisms that apply to other wealthy and powerful organisations, is not the picture of an organisation that has earned the high ground through demonstrated virtue. It is the picture of an organisation that occupies territory of its own designation and defends it with the most powerful claim available in any cultural context: the claim that the designation comes from God, and that questioning it is therefore a form of impiety rather than a legitimate exercise of rational scrutiny.
9. The Anticipatable Objections and Why They Fall Short
Several objections to the argument made in this essay are predictable enough and serious enough to deserve direct treatment before the conclusion, because engaging with them honestly is part of what it means to make a rigorous argument rather than a polemic. The first is the “no true Scotsman” response: the institutions that did these things were not truly following their religion, and the true religion, properly understood and faithfully practised, would produce none of these outcomes. This objection is seductive because it appears to preserve the purity of the doctrine against the contamination of institutional failure. Its problem is that it is unfalsifiable, which is precisely what disqualifies it as an argument. Any institution that does good can be claimed as an example of true religion in action; any institution that does harm can be disowned as a corruption of the authentic teaching. By this standard, religious morality cannot be evaluated at all by examining the behaviour of religious institutions, because any evidence against the doctrine can be categorised as a failure of practice rather than a failure of the doctrine itself. An argument that is immunised against all possible evidence by definitional manoeuvre is not an argument. It is a theological escape hatch, and it should be identified as such without apology.
The second objection is historical relativism: we should not judge the past by the moral standards of the present. The defenders of slavery were men of their time. The architects of the Magdalene laundries were products of their cultural moment. We cannot hold them to standards they had no way of knowing. This is a more sophisticated objection, and it contains a partial truth that should be acknowledged. Historical figures are constrained by the conceptual frameworks available to them, and it is unreasonable to expect them to have arrived at moral conclusions that required centuries of argument and experience to develop. But the objection proves too much when it is applied to the religious moral record, because the abolitionists who challenged slavery were also men and women of their time, fully subject to the same historical constraints, and they reached the correct moral conclusion. The suffragists who challenged the subordination of women were contemporaries of the churchmen who defended it and deployed the same scriptural tradition against a different conclusion. The existence of people who reached the right answer at the same time that religious institutions were reaching the wrong one is precisely the evidence that the institutional failure was not simply a product of historical limitation. It was a product of institutional interest and theological commitment to arrangements that served the institution’s power rather than the welfare of the people subject to it.
The third objection is the positive contribution argument, already partially addressed in Section 7 but persistent enough to require more direct treatment here. Whatever its failures, the argument goes, religion has done enormous good in the world, and any honest assessment must include both sides of the ledger. This is fair as an accounting principle, and it is accepted without reservation. But it cuts against the specific claim under examination rather than for it. The claim under examination is not that religion has done no good. It is that religion holds the moral high ground, meaning it has a superior claim to moral authority compared to secular alternatives. For that claim to stand, the balance sheet would need to show not merely that religion has done good, but that it has done more good and less harm than the secular tradition that developed alongside and often in opposition to it. When the ledger is compiled honestly, including the items that religious apologists prefer to omit, the case for institutional superiority is not convincing. The secular tradition that produced the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the recognition of universal human rights, and the development of international humanitarian law without any appeal to divine authority has a balance sheet that compares respectably with the religious one, and in many of the most important entries, it compares favourably.
10. The Secular Alternative Is Not a Vacuum
One persistent confusion underlying the defence of religious moral authority is the implicit assumption that undermining the claim leaves a vacuum, that if religion does not hold the moral high ground, nothing does, and the alternative is a landscape of unanchored moral relativism in which anything goes and nothing is condemned. This assumption is stated explicitly enough to warrant direct address. The question “without religion, what grounds morality?” is asked as though the only alternative to religious morality is no morality at all, as if the secular tradition of moral philosophy were a recent invention scrambling to fill a gap rather than a body of thought that predates Christianity, substantially antedates Islam, and has produced some of the most rigorous and durable moral reasoning available to human beings.
Epicurus was constructing a coherent and humane account of the good life on secular grounds in the third century BCE, arguing that pleasure rightly understood and social cooperation were sufficient bases for a decent existence without requiring divine oversight. Aristotle’s virtue ethics, developed without reference to any revealed religion, has been more influential on Christian moral theology than most theologians are comfortable acknowledging publicly, a fact that suggests the direction of intellectual debt runs differently from how it is usually represented. The Stoic tradition, running from Zeno through Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, developed a universal ethics grounded in reason and human dignity that required no supernatural warrant and commanded adherence from people across radically different social circumstances. The Enlightenment tradition of moral philosophy, from Hume and Smith through Kant and Mill and on through the contemporary work of philosophers like Derek Parfit and Peter Singer, has produced increasingly sophisticated accounts of moral obligation grounded in reason, evidence, and the observable facts of human and animal experience. None of this tradition is perfect or free of error; it contains its own failures and blind spots, some of them significant. But it is a tradition that corrects its errors when they are identified and argued against, because it is committed to evidence and argument rather than to revelation and authority. That commitment is precisely what the religious moral tradition has struggled most to match, because revision in the light of evidence implies that previous certainty was mistaken, and institutions built on claims to divine authority find mistaken certainty existentially threatening.
The secular moral tradition is also, crucially, the tradition that produced the most important moral innovations of the past two centuries. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the recognition of universal human rights, the development of international humanitarian law: these are secular achievements, grounded in secular argument, advanced by secular or heterodox figures working against the grain of dominant religious authority. They are the foundation on which atheist and secular morality is built, and they are a prouder foundation than one that required divine commands to prohibit murder while permitting genocide, that maintained with absolute theological confidence a long series of positions it has since quietly abandoned, and that continues to assert its authority over questions it has already been proven wrong about within living memory.
11. Morality Has Improved Fastest Where Religion Has Weakened
There is a final empirical observation that deserves explicit statement, because it is the most direct answer to the claim that secularism would produce moral deterioration. The countries that have experienced the most rapid and sustained decline in religious practice and belief over the past half century are not, by any reasonable measure, the countries that have simultaneously experienced a deterioration in the quality of their moral and civic life. They are, by most of the measures that a serious moral evaluation would include, the countries that have made the fastest and most durable progress on the issues that matter most: the reduction of violent crime, the expansion of legal equality for women and LGBT people, the development of robust and universal social safety nets, the elimination of capital punishment, the recognition of animal welfare as a legitimate moral consideration, and the growth of secular humanitarian institutions capable of operating effectively across national and religious boundaries.
Western Europe, the most rapidly secularising region in the world over this period by every available measure of belief and religious practice, has not descended into the moral chaos that religious voices consistently predicted would accompany the decline of institutional faith. By most measurements, it has become considerably more humane, more equal, and more peaceful. The murder rate across the European Union is a fraction of the rate in the United States. Levels of social mobility, press freedom, gender equality, and democratic accountability are higher across most of the continent. The correlation between secularisation and social progress is not proof of a simple causal relationship, and claiming direct causation would be an overreach that the evidence does not support. But this correlation is, at minimum, powerful and consistent evidence against the claim that religious authority is necessary for moral order and that its decline produces moral collapse. The evidence points in the opposite direction: moral progress appears to be facilitated rather than obstructed by the weakening of institutional authority that claims immunity from rational scrutiny and accountability to democratic norms.
This is not a comfortable conclusion for those who have invested their moral identity in the religious tradition, and the discomfort should be acknowledged with genuine respect rather than contempt. The decent person who draws comfort and genuine moral guidance from their faith, who lives according to values that happen to be shared by their religious community, who finds in their tradition a resource for resilience and compassion, is not the subject of this critique and should not read it as being aimed at them personally. The subject of this critique is the institutional claim: the assertion that religion, as an organised institution exercising authority over public life, holds a special moral credibility that secular alternatives cannot match. That claim is not supported by the historical record of what religious institutions have done when given authority. It is not supported by the comparative sociological data on religious and secular societies. It is not supported by an honest examination of who has driven moral progress and who has followed at a distance. And it is dramatically inconsistent with the internal record of the major religious institutions themselves, a record of concealed abuse, defended oppression, strategic accommodation to secular pressure, and retrospective credit-claiming that is precisely what one would expect from organisations protecting their power and prestige, and precisely what one would not expect from organisations genuinely guided by a prior and superior commitment to the welfare of the most vulnerable.
Conclusion: Unearned Authority Is Not Authority
The claim to moral high ground has two possible foundations, and they should be distinguished clearly. The first is demonstrated institutional virtue: the organisation making the claim has shown, through its record across time and circumstance, a sustained and superior commitment to the welfare of the most vulnerable, a willingness to challenge power rather than serve it, a consistency between its stated values and its institutional behaviour, and an accountability to the standards it demands of others. The second is claimed divine appointment: the authority is asserted not on the basis of demonstrated virtue but on the basis of a mandate from a transcendent source that cannot itself be questioned or audited. The major religious institutions rely primarily on the second foundation, and they use it to deflect scrutiny of the first. The result is an institution that is largely unaccountable in the conventional democratic and legal sense, because it claims accountability to a higher authority that is conveniently unavailable for consultation, and that uses this claimed higher accountability to resist the ordinary mechanisms that would otherwise apply to institutions of comparable wealth and power.
When the institutional record is examined without the protection of this theological escape route, what emerges is not a picture of moral leadership but a picture of moral followership consistently dressed in the rhetoric of leadership. The institutions that defended slavery eventually retreated under pressure they could no longer contain. The institutions that confined women in laundries eventually closed them, under external scrutiny and public exposure that their own structures would never have produced voluntarily. The institutions that concealed the abuse of children eventually, reluctantly, and incompletely, submitted to external investigation after the damage was documented by journalists and lawyers rather than by the church itself. The institutions that opposed women’s equality eventually accommodated it, generation by generation, as the cultural cost of resistance exceeded the institutional cost of revision. The institutions that declared homosexuality intrinsically disordered are now, in many denominations, quietly revising that declaration and presenting the revision as spiritual growth. At no point in this long sequence of retreats has any major institution stood up and said plainly: we were wrong, the secular reformers who challenged us were right, and the authority we claimed over this question was not authority we had earned by demonstrating moral wisdom superior to theirs. The silence on this point is evidence. It is the silence of an institution that knows, at some level, that the admission would be fatal to the claim it continues to make.
Unearned authority is not authority. A moral high ground that was never climbed to through demonstrated commitment and honest accountability, but simply proclaimed from, is not high ground. It is a platform built on assertion rather than achievement, maintained by the cultural habit of deference rather than by any track record that warrants deference, and defended by the argument that questioning it is itself a form of moral failure. The claim deserves the scrutiny it has for too long avoided. The evidence to say so plainly, and to say so without malice toward the people who believe but without false deference to the institutions that assert authority over them, is not in short supply. The question is not whether the institutions of organised religion have produced good people or inspired moral acts, because the answer to that question is obviously yes and has never been seriously in doubt. The question is whether those institutions hold the moral high ground, whether their record of institutional behaviour, their treatment of the vulnerable in their care, their response to evidence that challenges their doctrine, and their relationship to moral progress that happened around and despite them, warrants the deference and the public authority they continue to claim. The institutional record, examined without protective deference, says clearly and consistently that it does not. Moral seriousness requires saying so, and the evidence provides every reason to say it without qualification.
Further reading: Jerry Coyne, Faith Versus Fact (2015); Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God (2008); Gregory Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” Journal of Religion and Society (2005); James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword (2001); Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children (1999); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).