The Huffington Post is running a series called “Beyond Belief” which includes some fascinating sounding interviews with faith figures. The series is launched with a poll which has some interesting findings, notably that 60% of people think religion does more harm than good and some 55% of people think that atheists are as likely to be moral people as religious people.

That latter finding is treated to a 5 paragraph quotation from Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association (oddly there is no religious leader comment on the finding). Central to his argument is the following:

“"This survey just confirms what we know is the common sense of people in Britain today - that whether you are religious or not has very little to do with your morality,"

What the survey proves, in point of fact, is that most of the people surveyed think that being religious doesn't inherently make you more moral than an atheist. That's not a very controversial statement, if anything the fact that 45% don't think that should be pretty worrying for the BHA (given that 60% think religion does more harm than good).

Copson goes on to say:

"Most people understand that morality and good personal and social values are not tied to religious belief systems, but are the result of our common heritage and experience as human beings: social animals that care for each other and are kind to others because we understand that they are human too.

"Not only that, people understand that religious beliefs themselves can be harmful to morality: encouraging intolerance, inflexibility and the doing of harm in the name of a greater good. We only need to look around us to perceive that fact."

It's difficult to quite follow that line of argument – it seems to want to have its cake and eat it – to say that morality somehow floats out there completely untethered to any religious beliefs, but also that religious beliefs are responsible for bad moral actions. It's hard to see how logically both those positions can be held. Either religion is a complete moral disease (not really a sustainable position), or is responsible for good and bad moral actions (a basically indisputable statement), or it has nothing to do with how we behave whatsoever.  What you can’t logically do is deny the good benefits while claiming the bad bits.

This really gets to the crux of the issue. The survey does not prove (how could it ever hope to?) that atheists and the religious are equally moral people. It just tests what people react to a bunch of questions they are asked on the telephone or internet one day.  According to some religious sociologists, the answers often have about as much significance as responses to a question like ‘what is your favourite colour?’  It would be almost impossible to really test whether atheists or religious people are, on average, morally better or not.  One would have to test so many variables, including what religion we're talking about, how religious the person in question is, and how to define morality, as to render such a study frankly impossible.

What can be proved though, is the enormous moral commitment of religious groups in the UK. More than 10 million people a year benefit directly from social services provided by churches. Then there are the vast numbers of explicitly religious charities that work on everything from homelessness to supporting the elderly, from pastoral care for victims of trafficking to supporting projects for the unemployed. This does not prove that religious people are more moral than atheists of course, but it does indicate that there is a very large body of evidence to suggest that the social and moral commitment of religious people in Britain is enormous. Arguably there is also evidence that religious people commit more time as individuals to voluntary work and give more money to charity than others do. Given the scale of religious charity work at the very least the onus would seem to be on the BHA to back up their claim that atheists are as moral as the religious than vice versa, whatever a survey says.

The way forward for religious groups of course is to better make that case. To shout louder about the enormous social and charitable impact that religion has in the UK. Hopefully a format like the Huffington Post’s ‘Beyond Belief’ series will help to make that case. Hopefully that case will be allowed to be made and given a fair hearing, rather than being dismissed too readily even before a word has been written as a force unlikely to cause “positive change” (as sadly, seemed to be the implication of editor Stephen Hull’s introductory blog). Religious people and charities contribute to enormously positive changes in society, they deserve better than the cursory and clichéd set of criticisms that the series has seen so far.

Ben Ryan is a researcher at Theos

Image from Patheos from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.