There are many untruths to unravel when people leave fundamentalist or authoritarian forms of religious ideology. Often these center on providing a false narrative concerning relationships; whether they be the connections we form with others, with family, intimate partners, and/ or ourselves. Within Christianity, the doctrine of “sin” touches on all these, undermining our capacity to form open and honest relationships by declaring that, at a fundamental level, we are all morally deformed beings in need of an authoritarian structure to decide what is right and wrong. Given the pervasiveness of sin’s influence in our fallen bodies and the world in which we reside, the possibility of truly real and ideal relationships can therefore only be had post-death, when such influence is no longer upon us as we reside in a supposed paradise of the soul.
This decentering of ethics from the human to the imagined and fantastical divine is an example of sociological gaslighting, where we are being asked to ignore a truth that is staring us in the face day after day, to question the very nature of how we make decisions. That truth? We decide what is right and wrong. Yes, you and I. Further, this is true of the believer and the nonbeliever alike, whether you were once part of a religious group or never have been.
Authoritarian ideological systems, whether religious or political, are great at sneaking in assumptions that are hoped never to be identified or questioned. A major one here is how decision-making concerning ethical importance is centered on the human person.
Let’s unpack why that assumption both exists and doesn’t want to be acknowledged. That assumption is in three parts: to believe that “sin” exists, that the divine is an arbiter of truth, and therefore morality requires acquiescence by us to the authority of that divinity. Here comes the point that is hoped, by the authoritarian, never to be pointed out: we must decide the ethical question of whether the divine being is, in fact, a legitimate source of morality.
To make this decision, we engage in a moral judgment from the beginning. However, having done so, we are then asked to ignore the centrality of our humanity in making the ethical decision, replacing it with the self-undermining doctrine of “sin.”
Let’s be clear. Each and every time you, as a religious adherent, or later when no longer a believer, and every time someone who never was a religious adherent, declared a moral stance on something, it wasn’t a deity deciding what is right and wrong, but you evaluating that position and agreeing.
This is made even more evident when we acknowledge that any deity in question never existed in the first place. It’s not that he/she/it doesn’t exist now, but that they never existed in the first place. The entirety of the experience of bowing to an authority played out in the imagination-land of social construction.
Every time you agreed with a deity, it was actually just you agreeing with a judgment you’d already made. Every time you make a judgment now, regardless of its connection to an authority figure or institution, it’s you putting forward the enforcement of your own mind. Are all of those judgments fully informed? Of course not. Frankly, we make judgments all the time where we’re missing information. That’s the nature of cognitive bias and thinking in general.
We don’t need religion to make uninformed decisions; we have everything we need to do that by simply being human.
This is why the process of deconstruction in leaving religious ideology sometimes goes down the proverbial path of baby and bathwater. You don’t need to jettison every belief you had. What is required instead is an acknowledgment that it was you—embedded as you were and still are in social connections, the influence of which you weren’t and still aren’t fully aware— that was making all the decisions.
Yes, there were variable influences that existed, including family, social expectations, and the bone-deep desire in every human being to belong to a group and develop a means of identifying meaning and direction for one’s life. Many of those influences haven’t gone away; it’s simply that you have a different relationship to them now.
For those who were not raised religious, we’re coming to the party you’ve been living in, complete with all the shared human conditions that make us messy, anxiety-ridden, beautiful, and creative. The authority to make moral choices is one that you’ve been living with your whole life, and those coming out of fundamentalist religious ideologies are peeling back the thin veil of dogma to see we’ve been together this whole time.
Embrace the new relationship. That starts with acknowledging that the only person you have to answer to is you. This doesn’t mean morality doesn’t exist, as the old canard concerning atheists and what’s keeping them from murdering people ridiculously attempts to show. No, what centering ethics within the human does is highlight our responsibility in service of values like integrity, self-reflection, and skepticism, among so many others.
As Galatians 2:20 says, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” By removing the struggle of skeptical inquiry, we also gave up the capacity to own the whole of who we are and who we can be. The dismissal of the self, and therefore, the undermining of our decision-making process concerning ethics, was always a lie. But it is a deception we don’t need to continue living with. Acknowledging the centrality of our humanity in determining moral judgments is to step up and take on a burden that fundamentalist religious ideology sought to take from you. That struggle and burden, is, however, how we define ourselves through the values we instantiate in behavior within every relationship we have with others, with the environment, and with ourselves.
Values are great for moving forward in full recognition of humanity’s centeredness in moral judgment. We never gave up on them, and we still hold on to many of them, despite how we may relate to them differently as our lives evolve. For instance, the value of family is still important, even as it was when religious or at another time of your life, though undoubtedly, what family means and the behavior of the relationships within it that we decide as right or wrong has changed.
Here, then, is a set of questions to start your journey of reclaiming your moral center:
- What actions are you already doing that you find meaningful?
- What values are already or can be, with reflection, tied to those actions?
- Can you find other examples of those values being supported in ways you’re not currently doing but would like to?
That’s it. That’s the start, though it’s only a start. Begin with what you’re already doing and go from there. Perhaps you’ll change your actions, and maybe you won’t. It’s quite possible how you show up currently in service of a value is not how you want to continue doing so, and that’s completely alright. This is both the burden and freedom afforded us by acknowledging and living from a human, rather than divine, centered ethical life.