Some dogmatic beliefs may contain wise reflections about morality or justice. At best they can be treated as mythic narratives—not history or physics, but poetic story, figurative teaching, or a prompt for moral reflection. But once people treat dogma as literal fact—or as rigid moral law—it often produces a narrow and flattened morality. Furthermore, some religious stories are so brutal, or so sharply at odds with other parts of the same tradition, that even a charitable metaphorical reading can feel strained.
One can often find, in the same religious text, stories or teachings that contradict each other—sometimes directly, sometimes in subtler ways. Because of this, many individuals end up “picking and choosing” passages to bolster a pre-existing stance on almost any subject. There is a name for this in religious studies—proof-texting—and it is one of the main ways dogma becomes both rigid in tone and flexible in application.
One of the clearest signs of the problem is that the same sacred text can be used to defend opposite moral conclusions. Christians have quoted the Bible to defend hierarchy, exclusion, and harsh punishment; others have quoted it to argue for equality, mercy, and liberation. That alone should make us cautious about treating scripture as a self-interpreting moral manual.
Many people feel that their guidance regarding right and wrong—their foundation of morality—comes from religion or religious texts. People may consider the Ten Commandments to be an obvious moral guide. Yet thinking about morality this way reminds me of the moral development of children. At an early stage, a child may feel morality is dictated by a rigid external rule: “don’t take that cookie,” or “you’ll be punished if you take that cookie.” In this stage, the reason not to take the cookie is not understanding, empathy, or principle, but obedience and fear of punishment. That may keep order, but it is a precarious foundation for morality.
Real moral development requires more than rule-following. It requires thinking about why an action is right or wrong, taking other minds seriously, weighing short-term impulse against long-term consequence, and recognizing that rules sometimes conflict or require exceptions. A person may have to resist an authority figure rather than obey one. That is not moral failure; sometimes it is moral maturity.
Rule-following is not the same thing as conscience. If the main reason a person is not stealing from you or assaulting you is fear of divine punishment or obedience to an external rule, that is not especially reassuring! In fairness, this is not how most thoughtful believers actually live: for them the rule is a scaffold for conscience rather than a substitute for it, and the two grow up together. My worry is narrower—it is about what happens when the rule is asked to carry the whole weight, and reflection on it is treated as disobedience. Most people want something deeper in themselves and in those closest to them: judgment, empathy, guilt, restraint, and the ability to reason through difficult cases. Rare exceptions do exist. Stealing food to save a starving child is not the same thing as theft or greed. Humans are capable of this kind of moral reasoning whether they are religious or not, and there are good reasons why it emerges naturally in social species and cooperative cultures.
I do have to acknowledge that some religious texts contain inspired statements about moral reasoning—for example, the Sermon on the Mount, with its emphasis on kindness, love, and humility. But many of these ideas are not unique to Christianity. Variations of the Golden Rule—the ethic of reciprocity—appear across many traditions: Confucian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and others. This is not evidence of divinity; it is what we would expect in human societies grappling with the same recurring problems of cooperation, conflict, and conscience.
The treatment of religious texts as perfect moral instruction manuals is problematic on many levels. It is hard to maintain that every specific word in a religious text—let alone every translation choice or manuscript tradition—is a flawless, literal directive. Most people therefore focus on a higher level of organization: a verse (a numbered unit), which is the most common unit studied in sermons or religious meetings.
Many churches have a kind of “book club” format in which small groups meet in someone’s home—refreshments served—to discuss a particular passage, often guided by published interpretations consistent with the group’s existing style of thinking. Sometimes the analysis stops at the verse level, partly out of practicality. It is complicated to integrate a theme across an entire text like the Bible, with its many books, authors, genres, and historical layers. For each theme or figure of speech present in one verse, there may be dozens of resonant passages elsewhere, sometimes in widely disparate parts of the text, and contradictions—either direct or qualitative—are not difficult to find.
But, as with studying literature, it is a narrow way to understand a text to focus only on its most granular fragments. Much meaning in literature comes from a more holistic analysis: genre, context, narrative arc, tension, voice, contrast. Likewise, if you look at a photograph, it would not make sense to divide it into tiny sections and analyze each separately as though the whole image were nothing but a pile of fragments. It is often inconvenient to do holistic analysis in most sermons or study sessions, so many communities stop at the verse level—or at best, a short passage. These verse divisions were actually decided upon by editors, rather than being features of the earliest manuscripts. The chapter divisions we now take for granted date only to around the early thirteenth century—the work of Stephen Langton, later Archbishop of Canterbury—and the verse numbers are later still, introduced by the Paris printer Robert Estienne in 1551. The oldest manuscripts have none of this scaffolding: no chapters, no verses, no punctuation, not even spaces between the words. The grid we read through was laid down by editors, centuries after the texts themselves.
This preference for the fragment over the whole reflects one characteristic failure of dogmatic thinking. By turning complex ancient literature into a storage box of isolated rules, people can avoid the harder work of empathy, judgment, context, and reason. Dogma is attractive partly because certainty feels safe, and shared certainty binds a group together. But the cost is high. When we trade nuance for rigidity, we do not just limit our own moral growth; we also make collective intolerance and cruelty easier to justify.
References
Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47–69. https://doi.org/10.1086/701478
A large cross-cultural test of the hypothesis that morality consists of solutions to recurrent problems of cooperation. Surveying the ethnographic record of sixty societies, the authors find that seven cooperative behaviours—helping kin, helping one’s group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to legitimate authority, dividing disputed resources fairly, and respecting prior possession—are regarded as morally good wherever they appear, in all regions of the world. The findings give empirical weight to the claim that shared moral intuitions, including versions of the Golden Rule, are what one would expect from a cooperative social species rather than evidence of a single divine origin.
de Waal, F. B. M. (2006). Primates and philosophers: How morality evolved (S. Macedo & J. Ober, Eds.). Princeton University Press.
Drawing on decades of primate research, de Waal argues against “Veneer Theory”—the view that morality is a thin cultural overlay on an otherwise selfish animal nature—and contends instead that the building blocks of human morality (empathy, reciprocity, consolation, a rudimentary sense of fairness) are continuous with the social instincts of other primates. Based on his Tanner Lectures and including critical responses from philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer, the volume supports the argument that moral capacities arise naturally in social species rather than requiring a supernatural source.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814
An influential challenge to rationalist accounts of morality, including Kohlberg’s. Haidt argues that moral judgments are usually produced by rapid, automatic intuitions, with conscious reasoning arriving afterward as post hoc justification—the “emotional dog” wagging its “rational tail.” The paper complicates any picture of mature morality as primarily deliberative, but it equally undercuts rigid rule-following: the empathic and reactive intuitions Haidt describes are precisely what a fixed list of commandments cannot encode.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development, Vol. 1: The philosophy of moral development. Harper & Row.
The foundational statement of Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral reasoning, which describes development as a movement from a preconventional level (in which right action is whatever avoids punishment or serves self-interest), through a conventional level (conformity to social rules and roles), to a postconventional level (reasoning from general ethical principles that can stand in judgment over particular rules and authorities). The framework supplies the vocabulary for the distinction at the heart of this chapter—between morality as obedience to an external rule and morality as principled reasoning—though it has been criticized for privileging abstract justice reasoning and for the gap between moral reasoning and moral conduct.
Metzger, B. M., & Ehrman, B. D. (2005). The text of the New Testament: Its transmission, corruption, and restoration(4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
The standard scholarly handbook on New Testament textual criticism. Among much else, it documents that the familiar apparatus of chapter and verse is a late editorial imposition: chapter divisions are generally credited to Stephen Langton in the early thirteenth century, and the verse numbers of the printed New Testament to Robert Estienne in 1551; the earliest manuscripts were written without these divisions, and indeed without punctuation or even spaces between words. This supports the observation that verse boundaries are an artefact of editors rather than a feature of the original texts, and that reading “by the verse” can fragment what was composed as continuous argument.
Neusner, J., & Chilton, B. D. (Eds.). (2008). The golden rule: The ethics of reciprocity in world religions. Continuum.
An edited volume in which scholars examine formulations of the Golden Rule across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Greco-Roman philosophy, attending both to the shared core and to the genuine differences among them. It documents the near-universality of reciprocity ethics that the chapter invokes.
Noll, M. A. (2006). The civil war as a theological crisis. University of North Carolina Press.
A historical study of how American Christians on both sides of the slavery question appealed to the same Bible with equal confidence—pro-slavery writers citing the household codes and scripture’s apparent toleration of slavery, abolitionists appealing to the broader arc of liberation and the command to love one’s neighbour. Noll argues that the impossibility of settling the dispute “by the Bible alone” constituted a genuine crisis for scriptural authority. The episode is perhaps the clearest historical illustration of the claim that one sacred text can be marshalled to defend opposite moral conclusions.
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