This episode is about where morality actually comes from. And to tell you that, I have to start somewhere I didn’t start in the book until the third chapter — with my own family. Because the question of where morality comes from has, for me, never been abstract. It came to me through a Catholic childhood and a lifetime of trying to honor the parts of it that were honest and lay down the parts that weren’t.

I was baptized as a baby in a Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Ukrainian Church. I went through Catechism — the traditional training for young people that is intended to produce fully confirmed Catholics who know exactly what they believe and exactly why they are required to believe it. The teachings stress, from an early age, that the Church has answers to the greatest mysteries of existence — and that those answers were not provisional but final. Not subject to revision. Revealed by God and transmitted, unbroken, through an institution that had been transmitting them for two thousand years.

The questions the Church offered to answer were genuine. Why are we here. What do we owe each other. What happens when we die. How should we live, given all of that uncertainty. But the answers were not to be questioned. Questioning them was not intellectual honesty. It was a failure of faith.

My family attended, but we were not what you’d call strict Catholics. My dad was the least interested in attending, and his rants about the Church were legendary. Which is why I was genuinely surprised by his reaction, much later, when I casually mentioned as an adult that I was thinking of attending a different denomination. He said, “No. You don’t change churches. You’re Catholic. You were born a Catholic and you die a Catholic.”

It took me much longer to understand his reaction. To understand it, I want to tell you a little about what shaped him.

My dad was born in Soviet Ukraine in the summer of 1932, during the peak of the Holodomor — Stalin’s forced famine that killed an estimated four million Ukrainians. He was raised, quite literally, in a barn on one of Stalin’s brutal collectives. His earliest memories were of digging in the fields to find a stray potato. His family moved to France just before the outbreak of World War II. That is where he met my mom, who was born in Versailles.

My mom was born in 1935. She spent a good portion of her childhood living under Nazi occupation. She and her seven brothers and sisters were raised alone by her mother in a one-room attic, just a short distance from the Castle of Versailles. The Castle, draped in an oversized Nazi banner, had become home to the German Wehrmacht during the occupation. My mom vividly remembers standing in long lines for food, and seeing children and adults wearing the yellow Star of David patches. She learned at a very young age how simply being born a certain religion or race could subject you to unspeakable horrors. Man’s inhumanity to man, on full display for everyone to see.

For my parents, the Church was not necessarily a trustworthy institution. But the certainty it had preached found its way to my parents, as it had so many others. And it had found itself to me.

Then my son started experiencing gender dysphoria. And it became clear that this topic seemed to breathe new life into the religious right and the emerging Christian nationalist movement. Their messaging was clear. Gender is binary. Determined by God at conception. Fixed for life. Deviation is immoral. So immoral that it represented a threat to God’s Kingdom.

The Church had an answer. The answer was wrong. Not because I decided it was wrong. Not because I preferred an answer that was easier for my family. Because when I followed the evidence — the same evidence my engineering training had taught me to follow — it was impossible to ignore.

So I want to ask the question this chapter is named for. Where does morality actually come from?

There is a claim at the center of almost every argument for keeping religion embedded in public life: without religion, we have no morality. Strip away the church and the commandments, and all that remains is chaos. This argument is so pervasive that it has become almost invisible. An assumption so widely shared that questioning it feels like questioning whether children need parents.

It is also, as it happens, precisely backwards.

Morality does not require religion. If anything, morality has survived despite some of what organized religion has done in its name. Let me make this argument carefully, because it is easy to make carelessly in ways that are unfair to religious people.

I am not claiming religion has never produced moral goods. It has. The American abolition movement was substantially religiously motivated. Frederick Douglass. Harriet Tubman. The Quakers who ran the Underground Railroad. The white northern clergy who preached against slavery in the years before the Civil War. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was organized largely through Black churches, led largely by ministers, and spoke a moral language thoroughly grounded in the Hebrew prophetic tradition. Liberation theology in Latin America produced generations of activists. The Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day, built one of the most substantial networks of practical care for the poor in American history. These are not edge cases. They are central to the history of moral progress.

What I am claiming is more specific. The moral content of these movements — their commitment to human dignity, their opposition to domination, their insistence on the equal worth of every person — is not derived from religion in the sense that it is not available by any other route. The same commitments can be reached, and have been reached, by rigorous secular reasoning. The Enlightenment thinkers who developed the philosophical foundations of human rights — Locke, Kant, Mill, later Rawls — arrived at conclusions about human dignity that are not distinguishable in their content from what the prophets insisted on. The route was different. The conclusions were the same.

Michael Tomasello, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has spent more than thirty years investigating the origins of human moral psychology. His work, synthesized in *A Natural History of Human Morality*, arrives at a conclusion that ought to fundamentally change the way we think about this question. Modern humans evolved, far beyond any other primate, in their capacity for shared intentionality. The ability to jointly attend to a common situation, share a goal, coordinate toward it. This capacity for ultra-collaboration gave us a survival advantage no other species has matched. And it produced something else. Morality. Not handed down from above. Morality that evolved — imperfectly, unevenly, with enormous variation across cultures and periods — as the set of rules that enable the cooperation our species depends on.

Chimpanzees share food. Apes protect their young. Our ancestors, long before they had a single word for any god, were already governing themselves by principles of mutual aid. The principles worked because bands that internalized them survived better than bands that didn’t. That’s not a pious story. It’s a practical one. And it’s older than every temple on earth.

Derek Parfit, the philosopher whose three-volume *On What Matters* I’d recommend to any serious adult, spent the last decades of his life arguing for the convergence of secular ethical theories. That consequentialism — the view that the moral worth of an action lies in its outcomes — and deontology — the view that certain actions are right or wrong regardless of consequences — and contractarianism — the view that moral rules are those rational parties would agree to — properly understood, arrive at the same conclusions about what we owe each other. The convergence of these frameworks from completely different premises is itself a form of evidence. You don’t need a revelation. The reasoning converges from multiple independent directions.

Now here is the harder part. If morality evolved rather than was revealed, then we have to ask what role religious institutions have actually played in its development. Not in theory. In practice. Over the centuries when they held the most power.

The record is not encouraging.

By the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church had become the first global organization to formally authorize the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A series of papal decrees declared that European Christian monarchies had the God-ordained right to conquer and permanently enslave the peoples of Africa and the Americas. This was not a fringe position. This was the mainstream theological consensus of the most powerful religious institution in the world. And its authority rested on its claim to speak for God. Its certainty about God’s will made it immune to the moral evidence surrounding it. The suffering. The death. The generational destruction of peoples and civilizations.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the church — Catholic, Protestant, Southern Baptist, Methodist — continued to provide the theological scaffolding for slavery and genocide against Indigenous peoples. After the Civil War, Southern churches did not simply acquiesce to the reimposition of racial hierarchy. Many of them provided its most eloquent defenses. They justified segregation from the pulpit. Opposed the civil rights movement from the pew. Deployed Biblical language against integration with the same fluency they had once deployed against abolition.

The point is not that religion is uniquely malignant. Human institutions of every kind have been capable of terrible things. The point is specific. The claim that religion is the *source* of morality is empirically false. And the political implication drawn from that claim — that we need religion in our government to keep us moral — is not only false but dangerous. Governments that have embedded religious doctrine into law have not been more moral. They have been more certain. And certainty is not the same thing as goodness.

Phil Zuckerman has spent much of his career studying the most secular societies on earth — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland. Religious observance has collapsed in these places over the last fifty years. They are also, by almost every measurable indicator — violent crime, child welfare, civic trust, charitable giving as a percentage of GDP — some of the most morally successful societies in human history. If the story that you need religion to be moral were true, these countries would be a mess. They are not. Meanwhile, the most religious country in the developed world — ours — has incarceration rates, child poverty rates, maternal mortality rates, and rates of violent death that no Scandinavian country would accept for a week.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the distinction precisely. What he called the social gospel was not an appeal to Biblical authority as such. It was an insistence that faith, lived honestly, points toward the same evolved moral truths that a clear examination of human dignity requires. That every person counts. That suffering matters. That the powerful do not have the right to oppress the powerless simply because they are powerful. He did not derive his moral commitments from Scripture and then apply them to civil rights. He recognized that Scripture, read honestly, condemns the same things that evolved moral intuition condemns. The cruelty of arbitrary power. The dehumanization of people who do not fit the dominant category. The cowardice of those who could speak and chose silence.

That is the social gospel. It is being fiercely opposed today, just as it was in King’s time, precisely because it points to the same moral conclusion that the evidence of evolutionary psychology points to. That every human being’s dignity is not negotiable. And that no institution’s certainty about God’s preferences changes that.

I close this episode where I started it. With my dad. Who could not let go of his Catholic identity even as he raged at the Church. Whose certainty about who I was — Catholic, in his view, by birth and by death — could not be revised, even as he himself revised many of his other inherited certainties over a long life. I loved him. I miss him. And I understand now, in a way I didn’t then, that what he was holding onto was not theology. It was belonging. The need to know who you are and where you stand. And the danger of asking too many questions of the answer that gave you safety.

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