Religion Hawes

From an early age, children are fed fables and stories, small mythologies tucked between pages, illustrations masking questions too big for their mouths-stories meant to teach them something righteous. Something moral. Is that what religion supplies? Is religion a storybook for grown-ups, providing structure and order in a chaotic world? To tell us how not to be monstrous, how to be saved, how to conduct ourselves altogether? Does religion grant a moral compass that society would be damned without? Does it divide us with the same hands it claims to hold us together with? These questions trail behind faith, mirroring a shadow, the one that stands tallest among them: can morality exist without religion?

Religious traditions across the world don’t so much suggest morality as they weave it into the very fabric of being. Religious traditions blend virtue with obedience, justice with fear, and righteousness with reward. Christians believe that a life lived well leads to eternal salvation through their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In Hinduism, the path is walked through dharma, each person’s sacred duty within a social class designed to stretch across lifetimes. Muslims seek peace with Allah, salvation through methods of submission and discipline, guided by the Prophet Muhammad. Buddhists aim to dissolve suffering entirely, renouncing the world in hopes of transcending it. Each faith, with each doctrine, leads its followers toward a version of moral living, but the light they promise at the end of the path is not always the same.

Still, sacred figures stand at the center of each story. Prophets, gods, enlightened beings-avatars of perfection or warning. Morality, in these systems, is cosmic. It is a consequence pressed upon the soul, stretched out into eternity. But the rules differ. The codes clash. A holy act in one place becomes heresy in another. Division rises-holy wars born from holy texts, each claiming its righteousness is ubiquitous, when in truth it is idiosyncratic. If religion offers a map of morality, it is a map drawn over centuries by a thousand different hands, weathered, worn, querulous, filled in with both faith and blood.

Yet, there remains the branch of people who bore their lives independently. The agnostic. The atheist. The thinker who kneels to no god and still wakes up trying to be good. For they must be simply sullied beings if they traverse life without a savior. The movement through life without scripture, without temples, without promise of paradise or threat of fire. What guides them, if not faith? Empathy, perhaps. Reason. A belief that kindness, justice, and integrity are worth pursuing just because. Paul Kurtz’s theory of secular humanism, explained in his book “What is secular humanism?” called it a morality rooted in our shared humanity (Kurtz, 2000). Albert Camus, author of “The Stranger” writing about a man condemned to push a rock up a hill for eternity, found dignity not in divine reward, but in defiance. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, he wrote (Camus, 1942/1991). Because in a godless world, the moral choice becomes more meaningful, not less-it is made freely, consciously, stubbornly.

Eaton High School senior, Evelyn South said, “I think that a person without faith still could be moral, but they might not understand why something is moral or not. It’s hard if you don’t have a set standard to follow.”

Immanuel Kant, in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, argued that moral law does not descend from heaven-it rises from within. His categorical imperative demanded only that we act in ways we would be willing to universalize (Kant, 1785/2002). John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian, told us to look outward-do what brings the greatest good to the greatest number (Mill, 1863/2001). These systems function with no divine authority. And yet they ask us to be better. To live not for eternity, but for one another.

Still, we must admit that religion provides more than a code. It gives meaning. It explains suffering. It builds community and ritual, it tells humans that there is a purpose. Without it, life is lugubrious, untethered chaos. Who would you cry out to when life ultimately collapses? Who do you thank when beauty arrives unannounced, like petrichor after drought? For many, it is far simpler to live with rules and gods and reward than with silence.

While religion often guides moral behavior, it does not guarantee it. The world’s darkest acts have often been carried out beneath stained glass or atop temple stones. History is heavy with blood sanctified by belief. A man can wear a cross and lie. A woman can pray and still hate. And so we ask: if religion cannot ensure goodness, what can?

Friedrich Nietzsche, wild-eyed and truculent, told us in On the Genealogy of Morality that religion’s morality is little more than a leash-used by the powerful to tame the strong and crush the wild spirit (Nietzsche, 1887/2007). He wanted us to reimagine virtue, to climb out from under guilt and obedience and live with courage instead. “Good is what’s proper to living, and what’s evil leads to death.” That definition, stripped of faith, reflects something primal.

While religion has long been a source of moral guidance, there are those who find their moral compass outside of religious frameworks. Locally, Eaton High School math teacher Derek Weigle, beloved by his students, puts it more simply: “When I think of the main subjects of good and evil, I interpret good as life and bad as death… and I think that happens a lot when you think of portrayals-like a lot of times evil things are dead. In other words: what is good? What is good-for who?”

Morality is about choice, not compulsion. As Weigle argues, “Morality-for me-is all about the shopping cart in the parking lot. You don’t get in trouble for not returning it… But you do it because it’s the right thing to do. You do it even though no one is watching.”

From the beginning, humans have looked up. Necks strained and heads cranked… upward. To the moon, the stars, the heavens-burning symbols of justice and wonder. Maybe we thought someone was up there watching. Maybe we hoped they were. But it’s just as likely that we were looking at reflections of our own longing. Perhaps morality didn’t come from above at all. Perhaps it was born here-among us-in the hunger for fairness, in the ache for meaning, in the terror of suffering.

Widely admired, Dean “DG” Grable, a physical education teacher at Eaton, echoes harmoniously when he says: “Even without religious belief-it doesn’t excuse you from right and wrong.”

The unknown still stands before us, vast, quiet, and demanding. For some, that silence is terrifying. Gods were designed to mold perfectly-to inhabit that space in between with their mighty being. Some humans stare into it and decide to be kind anyway. To love anyway. To live well-not because someone told them to, but because something inside whispers that it matters.

So-can morality exist outside of religion?

Yes. It must. Religion may offer morality, shape, and story, but it does not own its soul. Morality lives in the trembling space between thought and action. It rises when we hurt and choose not to harm. When we see suffering and still dare for hope. And whether that be called good, or holy, or simply human-it is enough.