Is Any Religion Good?

By Keith Parsons | 6 March 2026
Letters to a Free Country

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Good Religion Is The Best Cure For Bad Religion

Like any large, complex, multi-level human phenomenon, religion is neither all good nor all bad. I do not think that even the most ardent atheist could deny that good religion can inspire good people to do good things. I do not think that even the most ardent apologist can deny that bad religion has motivated bad people to do bad things.

In the now famous phrasing of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in 1999—

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

What is good religion? It is religion that takes all the messages about love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, peace, and acceptance seriously. Good religion seeks what is best in us, the “better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln’s words, and amplifies and encourages those good things. Good religion seeks unity, consensus, and compromise. It is happy to work with all people of good will, whatever their beliefs. Good religion preaches a God of acceptance rather than condemnation. It sees those who do good works as its allies in spirit rather than those who agree with it on the minutiae of a creed. Good religion does not seek political power and does not employ the coercive power of government to impose its doctrines. It eschews violence and seeks change by nonviolent means. It supports science and rationality.

Bad religion is the opposite of the above. It seeks to exclude and vilify; it is tribalistic and hegemonic, condemning all others as “other.” It proclaims a rigid dogma and will not tolerate dissent. It rejects consensus and compromise; it’s our way or the highway to hell. Indeed, hell is for all the people the True Believers dislike, such as atheists, liberals, leftists, infidels, feminists, evolutionists, LGBTQ people, and Democrats. They hate with a clear conscience, being convinced that God hates the same ones they do. Their God is a God of wrath and retribution. They seek power and wealth, which they use to impose their doctrines on others. Bad religion gladly employs violence to destroy perceived opponents and to further their aims. Science and reason are the enemy. Sometimes they are rejected outright; more often they are twisted and perverted to promote items of the creed (e.g., creationism).

But why do we need religion at all to combat bad religion? The process of secularization has been enormously successful, right? Church attendance in the economically advanced nations of what was once Christendom has declined enormously. According to Google AI Overview (the source of all statistics cited here), only 12% of Britons attend church at least monthly and 58% never attend. According to that same source, the French are even more inclined to shrug at religion. Only 4.5% to 5% of those historically identified as Catholics attend Sunday mass weekly and over half the population is considered atheist or agnostic. Even in formerly pious America church membership has fallen below 50%, and 28% to 29% identify with no religion. There are far more “nones” than there are Southern Baptists, and the Baptist numbers are declining (a demographic factoid I find particularly satisfying).

They say that Julian, the last pagan emperor of Rome, cried out on his deathbed, “You have conquered, O Galilean!”—Christianity had won. Would we now hear the despairing call, “You have conquered, O Voltaire, Hume, Paine, Ingersoll, Russell, Darwin, Huxley . . .”? Time for secular people to run a victory lap?

No way. To the extent that religiosity has declined in some countries, the loss is far more than compensated for in others. Christianity, for instance, is growing explosively in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the countries like Britain, where Christianity has declined, Islam is the growth religion. Where religion has declined, is secularism the cause? I am not a sociologist of religion, so I would gladly defer to anyone with the expertise. However, my suspicion is that where religion has declined it is the fault of the churches themselves. I think young people do not leave their parents’ religion because they come to believe it false but because they experience it as irrelevant. In the turmoil of the sixties, to many young people the churches offered nothing meaningful but only mealy-mouthed, hypocritical pieties that did not address the hard, vital issues of war, racism, and injustice. Subsequent generations have not been drawn back to the mainstream churches.

When their religion has ceased to mean anything to them, some become atheists, agnostics, or “nones.” Others become extremists. They are drawn to the most militant, aggressive, intolerant, and often violent forms of religion. Why? Fundamentalism, whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu or whatever gives answers: definite, clear, answers that have the ring of authority. Those answers are all wrong, but for those who believe them those answers give purpose, meaning, and direction. They tell you that you are a part of the most important movement in the world, to bring about God’s will on earth. This task may require you to leave your home and journey to a faraway land to preach the Word. It may require you to leave your home and journey to a faraway land to kill many people.

In the United States, the vast majority of people are not religious fundamentalists.* They reject the Dominionist theology that would put fundamentalist Christians in charge of everything. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not want Gilead. Nevertheless, there are millions of the Christian Nationalists who are organized, well-funded, and working tirelessly to promote theocracy. Groups like Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty (gag) strive for political power wherever they can get it, at the local, state, or national level. Locally, they have had considerable success in taking over school boards and waging the culture war, banning books, whitewashing the curriculum, and harassing LGBTQ students. Just recently, though, even conservative communities have gotten sick of the ideologues and rejected them in favor of board members interested in improving education rather than grinding an ax.

In a state run by idiots, like Texas, the theocrats can achieve considerable influence at the statewide level. The State Board of Education, which is still dominated by chuckleheads, is planning to be the first state to require Bible readings in the public schools. The attempt to post the (Protestant) Ten Commandments in every public school classroom is hanging fire right now, having gone to court and bumped into the First Amendment. Oops. The attempt to require Bible readings will hit the same barrier. Damn pesky Constitution!

At the federal level you have Donald Trump, whose only religion is Donald Trump and who thinks that morality is for chumps. He is, of course, happy to have the support of fundamentalists and pleased to promote their agenda as long as, like all his lackeys, they offer unwavering and unquestioning support. Though a more irreligious man is hard to imagine, Trump is an ally because their interests intersect.

So the best counter to bad religion is good religion. Why? The objections of secular people are easily dismissed. They are all bound for hell anyway. However, it is harder to ignore the critiques of those whose religious credentials are beyond serious questioning and who couch their criticism not in the language of liberalism, feminism, wokeism, or any secular doctrine, but in the idiom of religion. Fundamentalists can easily dismiss a frontal assault on their doctrine, like the one I would give, but how would they deal with the critique of my dear friend Rev. Dr. Paris Donehoo that their problem is that they are not Christian enough? Paris knows the Bible better than they do. He understands Jesus better than they do. He knows theology and church history better than they do. He is ideally positioned to point out their hypocrisy and how their pursuit of power and white privilege betrays the Gospel message. Such arguments confront them in ways no atheist critique can.

It is easy to see why, through the ages, churches have considered heresy to be a bigger threat than atheism. Similarly for Islam. Sunni radicals hate Shiites more than they hate non-Muslim infidels. The heretic is one of yours. He knows how you think and what makes you tick. He accepts the same scriptures as you but draws very different conclusions from them. The internal critic is far more dangerous than the external one. For Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), the unbeliever is to be persuaded; the heretic is to be killed.

However, to steal the thunder of the fundamentalists, good religion will have to offer more than critique. It will have to show that fundamentalism is a dead end and offer a more authentic and fulfilling alternative. Actually, the Roman Catholic Church may be showing the way. I regard Catholic theology and philosophy as relics (impressive relics, to be sure) of the thirteenth century that have strayed into our times and need to be chased back. Jesuits swear poverty, chastity, and obedience. I don’t like any of those. I regard the Catholic positions on abortion, contraception, and the ordination of women to be (expressing it as mildly as possible) indefensible. I regard Catholic apologists like Trent Horn (criticized in an earlier Letter) as obscurantists. However, the incredible outpouring of support shown, especially by young people, for the late Pope Francis and the current pope Leo XIV indicates that they are doing something right.

I think it is this: Instead of doing what they did for centuries—siding with the most reactionary and authoritarian elements of society, such as Franco in Spain and Leopold in Belgium—the Church now recognizes its potential to appeal to the natural idealism of youth by speaking truth to power. Instead of protecting your privilege by supporting the powerful, however corrupt, you have to be willing to speak out against their abuses, as the Catholic bishops recently did against the depredations of Trump, Noem, and their ICE goons.

Bravo! Such moral courage is bound to appeal to idealistic youth and, indeed, to decent people everywhere.

Good religion has to put itself on the moral cutting edge. This does not mean beating the drum for the same old fixations like abortion and sexual strictures. It means standing up for a livable climate and against the entrenched big money interests that are profiting by destroying the planet. It means tolerating fascism nowhere and defending human rights everywhere. It means insisting that people always matter more than profits and always siding with the down and out rather than the up and in. It means insisting that the law apply equally to all; wealth must not confer impunity. It means standing up for science and against the crackpots and pseudoscientists who have corrupted it. It means calling out bigots—by name—and shaming them. It means recognizing that food, housing, and medical care are rights, not luxuries. It means not taking second place to anyone in demanding justice and freedom.

If good religion can thus be truly good, there will still be atheists and agnostics. But no one will be able to claim that such religion is irrelevant.

*Note on usage: The polite term for theologically conservative Christians is “evangelical.” I do not use that term here because there are very many people who are evangelical but reject the theocratic agenda and extreme politics of Christian Nationalism. These include black evangelicals and many white Christians such as Jim Wallis, who are theologically conservative but politically liberal. Here I use the term “fundamentalist,” which has pejorative connotations. I regard those connotations as fully deserved by those I criticize here, so I use that term without apology.

Keith Parsons is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, emeritus at the University of Houston at Clear Lake and the former editor of the philosophy journal Philo. He has debated William Lane Craig on the topics “Is Christianity True?” and “Does God Exist?”. Dr. Parsons holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Queens University.

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