When translations of Greek texts flooded into Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, the effects were transformative: the Renaissance was born. From scholars to popes, people gained an appreciation for the human body and mind, a pride that’s reflected in the art of the period (think Michelangelo’s “David”). They didn’t toss away Christian faith, but they started valuing both faith and reason, and developed more confidence in the ability of humans to figure out the truth and improve the world through science.
Modern humanism includes both “religious humanists” and “secular humanists.” The former are generally nontheistic — they reject the idea of a God who intervenes in human affairs — but they still draw inspiration from the wisdom of religious rituals and texts and from the structure of congregational life. Many Unitarian Universalists fit in this category, for example. They wouldn’t say you need Jesus to save you, but they’ll happily meet in a church for a morally uplifting sermon and songs.
Then there are the secular humanists, who are staunchly religiously unaffiliated; think of people like Salman Rushdie or Steven Pinker, and the 28 percent of Americans today who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.”
These two broad paths are both valid options for you to consider. What unites them is a belief that you can be “good without God.”
Although there is some data to suggest that religion helps promote prosocial behavior, like generosity toward strangers, we also know that religious ideas and institutions have sometimes facilitated violence against certain groups. And the evidence on prosocial behavior is actually pretty mixed when you take a closer look.
The association between religiosity and prosociality seems to depend a lot on how those things are being measured. If you measure religiosity by simple belief in God or self-identification as religious, you won’t find it a strong predictor of moral action. But examine people’s behavior right after they’ve engaged in concrete religious practices (like prayer) and you find that they do tend to show more prosociality, likely because the practices evoke moral emotions.
So religious practice might be an effective technology for cultivating morality. But it’s not the only one! Psychologists have found that we can still be moral without religion — if we set up the conditions to regularly and effectively trigger moral emotions.
One of those emotions is what they call elevation. It’s that uplifting feeling of inspiration you get upon hearing about someone who did something you consider really noble, whether it’s Mahatma Gandhi leading nonviolent civil disobedience or Susan B. Anthony campaigning for women’s rights. Feeling elevation moves us to want to act nobly, too — it nudges us to moral action.
Another such emotion is awe. It’s a feeling people often get in nature, when faced with towering mountains or a starry night sky. By reminding you that you’re a tiny speck in the universe, it shifts you away from focusing on yourself and your own problems. You move into what psychologists call the “small self” mindset — and that, it turns out, facilitates feeling more connected to others and acting more virtuously.
A third emotion is gratitude. When you feel grateful for all that you’ve been gifted, your attention naturally turns to the source of those gifts. Very often, that source is other people. Research shows that eliciting gratitude doesn’t only make you want to return the favor to those who’ve directly contributed to your well-being — it also makes you want to be generous to people in general.
So here’s what I’d suggest for you: As your kid grows up, find regular ways to use elevation, awe, and gratitude to build their moral character. Of course, you’re not limited to just these three, but I think they’ll offer a great starter scaffold.
What does this look like in practice? For triggering elevation, make use of all the awesome children’s books about admirable people, both real and imagined. One of my friends who was raised secular credits Miss Rumphius, in which the protagonist travels the world and plants flowers everywhere she goes, with teaching her to be both fiercely independent and fiercely committed to doing good. I’m partial to what I call “the first woman to” books — whether they’re about the first woman to discover a pulsar or the first woman to become a rabbi! I also recommend checking out this cool collection of spiritual exemplars from around the globe.
For awe, you can engage in dedicated activities, like going on camping trips that include lots of hiking and stargazing. But let’s be real: You’re going to be busy. So, think about ways to fold awe into the small spaces of daily living, like the walk home from school. According to a study published in the journal Emotion, “awe walks” — weekly 15-minute walks outdoors where you’re encouraged to notice a gorgeous sunset, a giant spider web, or anything that makes you go “whoa!” — can effectively foster the “small self” mindset.
As for triggering gratitude, you can make a practice of regularly writing thank-you cards with your kid. You can also express thanks for your food before starting a meal — like the prayers many religious people say before eating, but without any mention of God. Research shows that prayer successfully elicits gratitude in kids, whether they’re mentally thanking a higher power, a teacher, or a friend.
Practices like that will feel familiar from your religious upbringing; your project now is to retrofit them in a way that rings true to you. Yes, that’ll require some effort, but it’s worth it in your case because sticking to prefabricated, off-the-shelf religion would come with a serious downside.
C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, has a term I absolutely love for that downside: “value capture.” That’s what happens when a technology presents you with a certain method for doing things, and you adopt that method as a stand-in for your actual values. Think: obsessively racking up a high step count on Fitbit instead of figuring out how you can enhance your health holistically. Using a prefab method like that has the advantage of convenience, but Nguyen reminds us that outsourcing our decision-making to it will yield an oversimplified or warped version of our values.
In this case, the technology is religion, to which many people outsource all their moral thinking. But you can create a more bespoke scaffold that supports the virtues and ideas you actually believe in. In doing that, you’ll be honoring the value of intellectual honesty while also honoring the value of effectively building moral character in your kiddo.
I want to offer a caveat, though. Prefab religion comes with a major pro: unlike a Fitbit, it’s a technology that’s been debugged over millennia. Its rituals have been fine-tuned and time-tested to respond to human needs. As the psychologist David DeSteno documents in his book How God Works, these rituals contain deep insights into those needs and how to meet them effectively.
Often that’s by pushing us to do something that we don’t feel like doing but that’d probably be good for us. When grieving the death of my father, for example, I didn’t feel like having tons of people over and talking about him, but the Jewish ritual of shiva would have forced me to do just that. It surrounds you with community at a time when you might want aloneness but need togetherness. I wish I’d reaped its benefits.
When we go bespoke on our spirituality, we can inadvertently end up with something that feels thin, partly because it strips out lineage. And this is where I think the religious humanists have a leg up on secular humanists: While they do retrofit their faith so it’s aligned with their current beliefs, they also maintain whatever lineage they can.
That allows them to benefit from a tradition that demands things of them that they might not do if left to their own devices — like spending a lot of time in community (something religion is great at but modern society often fails at) and periodically disconnecting from technology (the Sabbath being the original digital detox). It also allows them to maintain a felt connection with their ancestors and the aesthetic beauty of the songs and customs unique to their background.
So even as you build your own scaffolding, try to keep an eye out for old materials that may be worth incorporating. You don’t have to entirely reinvent the wheel. And you don’t have to cede the realm of spirituality or even of religion to the dogmas you encountered in your childhood community. It’s as much yours as it is theirs. I wish you the confidence to take ownership of it, to be creative with it, and yes, to subvert it in community with people who make your vision of moral life come alive for you and your kid.
—Sigal Samuel, senior reporter
