Is it possible to build a moral society without belief in God?
That’s a question the nonreligious hosts of the British free speech podcast “TRIGGERnometry” asked philosopher Carl Trueman in 2022.
The question wasn’t new to Trueman, who is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. What surprised him was the fact that this wasn’t simply a “gotcha” question, like he would have expected during the heyday of New Atheism 10-15 years ago when “religion was just mocked.”
“Discussions of religion, particularly religion in the public sphere, have shifted in the last decade,” Trueman recently told Jonah Goldberg on the podcast "The Remnant." People who would likely have been hostile to faith, the scholar said, are now genuinely asking, “Is the world better without religion or worse?”
Yet these signs of “growing respect for the role of religion,” Goldberg pointed out, are happening simultaneously with “a growing sort of violent disrespect for religion.”
‘Smashing the sacred’
Some in society continue to “take great delight in smashing things that were once considered sacred,” Trueman said, highlighting a theme in his new book, “The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity.”
Challenging what appears to be sacred is not always a bad thing, of course, said Trueman, an expert on the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
But today’s “war against any stable categories” is giving pause to some who used to be involved, Trueman suggested — describing one of the nonreligious podcast hosts, who recently had children. “OK, so you’re beginning to realize that smashing stuff up may not be the way to go, because you want something left for your children.”
Yet there is still only a “small minority ... of intellectuals” who are “starting to take Christianity seriously because they see the problems that are emerging,” the scholar emphasized. “The overall tendency of, we might say, cultural formers or cultural elites as a whole is still down the path of desecration. ... (They) are very much on the iconoclastic side of things.”
Rising interest in ‘what it means to be human’
“Many of the problems that we face in society at the moment come down to the fact that we’ve lost sight of what it means to be human,” Trueman argued. “And that question cannot be answered without answering the theological question.”
He noted that atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche understood this in the 19th century — believing that “if you get rid of God, you have to get rid of man made in God’s image, and therefore, everything changes.”
If “you get rid of God, you really get rid of any static notion of human nature. You have to invent these things for yourself,” Trueman continued. “We actually live in an era now where the idea of inventing our own sets of values, inventing what it means to be human, is entirely plausible to us because of the tremendous power that technology has placed in our hands.”
“There are technological revolutions that don’t really disrupt what it means to be normatively human,” he continued. “We’re in an era now where we can actually start to get into the very nuts and bolts of what it means to be a human.”
‘Believers have more babies’
“One of the great sources for hope,” Goldberg said, especially for people who see value in faith, is that “believers in the sacred and the believers in the importance of consecration actually have more babies. And the ones who don’t (believe), don’t.
“So that in a generation or two, you know — look, if the Mormons keep going at the rate that they’re going ... they’re going to inherit the earth,” Goldberg said, laughing.
“And, in many ways,” he added, “it would be a nicer earth, theological differences to one side, right?”
Latter-day Saints “always improve the neighborhood when they move in,” Trueman remarked with his own chuckle.
Religious community as central to the answer
“I’ve never really understood why Catholics and various Protestant sects don’t try to emulate Mormons more,” Goldberg said. “Not theologically, but sociologically — like, have their own communities.”
“It is much easier to live a holy life or a religious life, or a decent life, if your neighbors share your values.”
Trueman agreed. While “withdrawing from society is not an option … developing some sort of robust notion of living in community as Christians or as Jews, I think that’s certainly the way to go.”
Trueman emphasized “religious community” as central to answering society’s problems.
“We need strong communities, specifically religious communities, in order to embody and to manifest what it means to be truly human,” he said. “If desecration’s the problem, consecration is the answer.”
“You can spend all day on X firing bullets at various people over whom you have no influence whatsoever,” Trueman said. “The people that you influence are the people in the dorm where you live, the people that you sit at dinner with … your next-door neighbors, the township you live in.”
“The people that you actually have real physical contact with … those are the people you can influence.”
Lasting change cannot be forced
Trueman remarked that the centrality of local work is one of the reasons why he finds “real” Christian nationalism “somewhat nonsensical.”
“You can’t legislate consecration, you can’t legislate Christianity,” he said. “You can legislate morality. You can certainly point people in moral directions. But if we’re talking about the way people think intuitively about their destiny and their end, you cannot impose that from the top.
“That has to arise from the ground up. It has to arise in religious communities.”
Trueman acknowledged that his proposal here wouldn’t be all that exciting to some people because “it could take a long time.”
One of the “hallmarks of modernity,” he said, is that “we want our solutions by this time next Wednesday.” He acknowledged that legislation appears to many like “an obvious way of doing that,” or getting the right people on the Supreme Court or in Congress.
While those things make a difference, he said, “Imposing the solution is not the same as allowing the solution to rise up spontaneously at a local level. That’s where the lasting solution will be found.
“Of course, it takes a long time. In the early church, it took three centuries for Christianity to transform the empire. We don’t like that.”
Yet such impatience is a problem, Trueman said. “It creates impossible expectations that can only be met using inappropriate solutions.”