Religion encourages morality

The argument

Most religions prescribe followers with a specific moral code, dictating an acceptable way to act and treat others. Though these definitions of morality vary from religion to religion, many have the same basic principles. For example, most promote ideals like compassion, kindness, altruism, faith, peace, and love. Needless to say, people who internalize and replicate these virtues will become model members of society, functioning well in the schoolroom, the workplace, and their personal lives. Thus, religion becomes a way to create morally upstanding-and thus, productive-members of society. On a broader scale, once religion becomes a key component in a given culture, its values will inculcate the social institutions of the society, from education to politics to the economy. In this way, even people who do not practice their culture’s dominant religion will likely internalize at least some of the moral code it promotes. This effect can be seen especially in America, where Christianity is the most common religion, and its unique conceptions of morality, sexuality, and the family have permeated the country as a whole, allowing it to work as a constituent whole following roughly the same moral guidelines. Evidently, religious morality, regardless of the faith it comes from, has a unifying effect on societies, allowing them to work together to improve.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While a shared definition of morality could benefit society, this is only true if that definition is actually a good one. Since many religions have flawed, outdated positions on modern issues like women’s rights, LGBT equality, abortion, and the death penalty, accepting their views on a societal level could be extremely detrimental, especially for minorities.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The shared principles are pitched at a level of generality where nothing turns on them. Compassion and kindness are endorsed almost universally, including by people with no religion, so citing them does not show that religion supplies the morality. What differs between traditions — and what is actually contested — is the specific content on divorce, sexuality, the status of women, blasphemy and capital punishment, which the premise sets aside. [Rejecting P2] "Model members of society" runs two claims together. Being cooperative and being productive are not the same as being moral, and a code can produce compliance with an order that is itself unjust. Comparative work on honesty, generosity and prosocial behaviour finds differences between religious and non-religious populations that are small and inconsistent once the effect of belonging to any community is separated out. [Rejecting P3] The mechanism cuts both ways. If a dominant religion's morality inculcates a society's institutions and shapes even non-believers, its errors are inculcated on the same terms and are harder to revise, being backed by an authority not open to argument. That is the counter-argument's objection, and it falls hardest on the minorities who did not adopt the code.