Understanding atheism as a moral system.

The Age of Atheists

by Lincoln Mullen

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals. This suspicion has deep historical roots. In the early United States, the Revolutionary state constitutions often obliged office holders to express a minimal belief in God to exclude atheists, and skeptics were long excluded from giving testimony in a court of law by the required oaths. 

An atheist who did not believe in God's judgment in the next world could not be trusted to tell the truth or carry out the duties of his office in this. 

Deists and other skeptics did flourish briefly in the early republic, and groups such as the Ethical Societies and the Free Religious Association and in later times speakers such as Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow gained a following. 

Mostly, though, American atheists have had a difficult time in the United States, where one's moral system came under greater scrutiny than the specifics of one's religious affiliation. 

Atheists used to run afoul of the power of the state that condemned blasphemy and protected public morality. Even more often, atheists have encountered widespread public hostility. 

This year the Pew Research Center reported that when Americans reported which religions they thought of favorably, atheists (followed only by Muslims) were at the bottom, with evangelicals showing a particular antipathy towards atheists. (Pew Research Center, "How Americans Feel About Religious Groups," July 16, 2014; "U.S. Evangelical Christians are Chilly Toward Atheists—And the Feeling Is Mutual," July 16, 2014.)

The suspicion that atheists have no morals is ironic, given what historians have learned about atheism in the United States. 

Science, from the discoveries of the Enlightenment to Darwinian evolution to the arguments of the New Atheists, has provided a justification for rejecting the intellectual claims of religion. 

More important, though, is morality, which has often been the underlying motive that led people to deny the usefulness of religion.

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

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