Graphic by Agustina Zegers/The Gazelle

Before my first semester of college began, I signed up for NYU President John Sexton’s notorious year-long course on the religion clauses of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Relationship of Government and Religion. I did so partly because I was interested in studying theology in a contemporary framework, but mostly because I was curious about this charismatic old man who waved his hands wildly and gave out more hugs than Pope Francis. However, as the course developed, I became concerned about one specific element debated in U.S. Supreme Court cases every once in a while: morality and its dependence on a religious upbringing.

As far as I understood, most conservative justices, and a fair number of more liberal ones, argued that a religious education constitutes the foundation of a child’s moral code, seemingly implying that the lack of such an education would result in an absence of moral awareness and inability to distinguish between right and wrong. I firmly believe that this is not the case.

I grew up in a household absent of religion and thus developed my own ideas about religion through exposure to my peers who came from various cultural backgrounds. My parents, to this day, have not explicitly communicated their religious beliefs, but from what I have seen they are not people of faith, at least in the traditional sense of the word.

However, I have yet to meet a person who holds morality as highly as my mother does. Her devotion to helping others in her free time while also putting up with a household of three ungrateful men blows my mind. But above her belief in the good we can and should do, her confidence in a person’s inherent virtue and her genuine distress at the absence of morals we see everyday in so many of us tell me with certainty that if one does not follow God, one may still follow a creed of morality. In that sense, my mother is a person of faith.

Some argue that morality for the sake of morality, with no higher purpose or goal — such as gaining access to a life of eternal bliss through the absence of sin — is inherently impossible and would depend on a set of random values generated by no apparent obvious source. In my opinion, a morality born from the selfish goal of attaining endless pleasure would be an ironic way of life indeed.

I am not arguing that moral atheists or agnostics have objectively higher moral standards than religious-believers, or that they act solely out of goodwill. It would be pointless to assert that moral action is never motivated by personal gain, whether it be because we wish for personal reward or simply to feel good about ourselves. I am arguing that those who act without following rules for the sake of it, but who are instead motivated by what they themselves understand to be better from a moral standpoint, do indeed have higher moral standards, whether they are secular or religious. It would be a shame to believe that so many do good only because they fear the judgment of a higher being and the possibility of eternal damnation.

A lot of what is understood to constitute our moral code, at least from a Western perspective, is thought to originate from Judeo-Christian tradition dating back about 2000 years ago. Whether or not morality stems from religion is a whole other question, delving into the issue of the existence of God, and it is not a subject I wish to consider. But what I can say with some form of confidence is that moral standards have drastically improved since the dawn of time, and have leaped forward in the last century. The abolishment of slavery, the increasing disappearance of the death penalty or the drafting of a declaration of human rights, are few examples of a general on-going trend promoting the advent of quasi-utopian moral conduct. Those who fought for such changes and are still fighting today may be believers or nonbelievers, but above all they are people who share a common inner urge to do good. Shouldn’t we at least give some credit to mankind?