Nonreligious people don’t need a commandment to care or to tell us that others deserve dignity, compassion, and justice.
How many times has a believer asked you some version of this question: Without God, where do you get morals?
For me? Twice in the past week.
Well, have I got news for them!
A survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) identified a growing “empathy gap” among Americans. It found 83% of nonreligious and religiously unaffiliated Americans see empathy as a “foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society.”
On the other end of the spectrum are White Evangelicals — the only group in which a majority view empathy as “dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.” PRRI found an even starker contrast among adherents of Christian Nationalism: Only 38% view empathy as foundational.
Yep. The same folks who spent centuries questioning our capacity for ethical behavior have decided caring for others isn’t a virtue but a threat.
That there exists a gap between professed moral authority and actual behavior doesn’t come as much of a surprise, of course. Just ask the survivors of clergy sexual abuse, victims of televangelist fraud, or the millions persecuted, displaced, or killed in the name of one deity or another.
It is, however, worth considering just how big a departure from their own dogma this is. For centuries, Protestant Christians sold Jesus Christ as a radically empathetic figure who fed the hungry, healed the sick, and welcomed the stranger. You know… woke stuff.
To my knowledge, there has been no New New Testament, no additions to the biblical canon that would explain the emergence of this weight-lifting, woman-hating, wealth-grubbing JC. So, what changed?
Well, in recent years, there has been a concerted effort to foment a cultural distrust of empathy.
In 2019, Christian author Joe Rigney published an essay called, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion.” In 2024, Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative Christian podcaster, published Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Much less “What would Jesus do?” and much more “Who would Jesus hate?”
But the movement has garnered support beyond religious circles, too. Earlier this year, atheist YouTuber Gad Saad released Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, warning that excessive compassion could threaten Western civilization. The bandwagon has been hopped upon by Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Vice President JD Vance.
The primary argument, so far as I can tell, is that “feelings” shouldn’t override “truth.” On its face, that sounds like something we skeptics could get behind. After all, feeling like a god exists doesn’t make it so.
But empathy doesn’t claim to answer — or even ask — what’s true. It merely invites us to consider perspectives we don’t share and consequences we might’ve overlooked.
When anti-empaths talk about “truth,” they’re referring to their own religious and political convictions as fact. And when they warn about “feelings,” they’re dismissing lived experiences that challenge those convictions. In other words, the issue with empathy isn’t that it makes us abandon reason, but that it might cause them to reconsider their own beliefs.
And that simply won’t do. It would mean introspection instead of judgment. It would require confronting uncomfortable questions about separating immigrant families, discriminating against LGBTQ+ people, and denying women autonomy over our bodies and lives. Why do that when it’s so much easier to declare: “Suffering isn’t the problem. Caring about it is.”
Which brings us back to my recent encounters with believers assuming that ‘atheism’ is synonymous with ‘amorality.’
We American Atheists have been told for so long that religion — and Christianity in particular — provides the ethical foundation of our nation. That without believing in God, we have no reason to care about others. That without the threat of eternal damnation, we’d all be murderous thieves.
But the evidence tells a very different story.
Nonreligious people don’t need a commandment to care. We don’t need a church or holy book to tell us others deserve dignity and compassion. And we certainly don’t need a pastor’s permission to recognize injustice and try to make it right.
At American Atheists, we put our secular values to work every day: fighting religious discrimination, defending children in public schools, protecting civil rights, and challenging those who would use their religion to deny others our freedom.
We don’t do all this because we expect a heavenly reward, but because we understand we have one life and what we do with it matters.
So, the next time someone asks me whether atheists have morals, I’ll point to this organization’s work. And I’ll suggest that if their compassion comes with so many conditions, perhaps they ought to spend less time questioning our values and more examining their own.
In solidarity,
Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communications & Policy Engagement
Colorado ended mandatory religious twelve-step programs for people on parole. No lawsuit, no law — just years of organizing.
Trump and his supporters are free to think he was chosen by God. But the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay for this nonsense.
U.S. service members swear an oath to a godless Constitution, not Christianity.
