Morality and Government

Recently a priest speaking before an audience argued that morality is either derived from God or from government, and with this false dichotomy he won applause and nods of approval. He then asked his audience to pressure government. "We decide," he told them, touching two other sources of morality: individual choice and collective agreement. The audience also applauded this contradictory proclamation.

Morality in a modern democratic society is about individual values as well as community standards. We are free to devise what we believe to be moral and immoral, and we do this by thinking about what is good for ourselves and what is needed to make the kind of world that we want to live in. We are free to entertain beliefs that are not popular, believing that our morality is superior to the morality of our neighbor or the morality of people in general. We are free to object publicly to what we believe are the laws that create the imperfections of collective agreement. We are free to hold to our own concepts of morality and to act on those concepts so long as it does not violate a community standard that has been put into law.

We are not free to impose our own concepts of morality onto others. Nor are we free to act on any concept of morality we may have that violates a community standard that has been put into law. And in the United States we are not allowed to muster majority opinion that violates the basic rights of people as expressed in our federal Constitution. In no state in the United States can people muster a majority to ban a religious grouping they deem to be evil. Religious organization is protected under the U.S. Constitution while the acts of its members as individuals remain governed by the right and wrong made by secular law.

In modern democratic societies, anyone pursuing his own notion of morality and, in so doing, injures the rights guaranteed to others, including the right to life, is deemed be a criminal. It does not matter that the individual's morality derived from the beliefs of any religious institution. A collective secular morality trumps all. And the enforcement of this collective morality is a creation of people having formed a government based on law.