SHORT RANT (TM) time, I've been thinking again.
INTRODUCTION
As an atheist who isn't shy about it who grew up in a very rural, conservative, religious area, I've had a lot of moral discussions with white conservative Christians and, pretty much universally, they get stuck on one aspect of morality. Thinking about it recently, particularly in light of the way that MAGA has taken the mask off of a lot of white conservative Christianity in general, it's seems like it's actually their morality that has this specific problem, not mine.
(NOTE: I should note that there are plenty of people who consider themselves white, conservative, and Christian who do not match the description I'm about to give and, to those people, I apologize, but you haven't been the majority of this particular group for a long time. I played around with other descriptors like "white Evangelical Christians", but there's really no easy way to describe this particular group in a way that doesn't rope in a smaller group of people who don't share the traits I'm complaining about. As I said, I apologize for that and I wish you luck in claiming/reclaiming the majority and/or leadership of this particular group.)
ABSOLUTE VS. RELATIVE MORALITY
Okay, every single atheist can pretty much recite this argument verbatim because we've heard it so many times. Essentially it goes like this, "there can be no firm basis for morality without God because, without a single, objective source for morality, all morality is relative."
For the moment, we're going to leave aside my usual counter-arguments about how none of us heard it directly from God so we're all relying on a human interpreter who supposedly wrote it down and told others, how we have no way of knowing which God/religious system is actually true because all of them resist definitive proof, and how we can't even actually prove that any God or metaphysical phenomenon actually exists, so the whole thing might just be some guys' personal moral system which makes it not only just as relative as a non-religious moral system, it makes it more limited because you're preventing other people from contributing.
All of that does actually need to be considered in a real argument, but I'm going to move past it now because my actual point here doesn't even rely on refuting the initial argument directly. The argument I'm making here is that their own behavior proves their arguments wrong!
HOW CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS BEHAVE
Here's the thing, I reject the idea that the God these people believe in provides an objective an universal morality not just because I don't believe in that God and don't trust the people purporting to tell me what He says, but also because white conservative Christians themselves don't act like these are objective and universal moral rules!
Both the research into moral foundations and just observing the MAGA political movement, whose purported basis is conservative Christianity and whose ranks are filled with self-described white conservative Christians, makes it fairly easy to see that white conservative Christians apply a very different moral lens to people outside their own group than they do to people within it.
Just look, for example, about how white conservative Christians view people of other races. White conservative Christians consistently show higher than average hostility to African-Americans. It's a pattern we see over and over again where white conservative Christians consistently show more negative views toward out-groups than they do toward their own in-group.
And it’s not even just directed at outsiders. Look at the case after case where white conservative churches have sheltered child abusers and rapists, sacrificing their own women and children to maintain the reputation of powerful men who offend again and again and again. I only linked two here, but I was able to find them with a simple search on DuckDuckGo in a few seconds, there are so many, many more if you care to dive in.
This is supposed to be objective, consistent, and universal morality? This group that we consistently see espousing the sacred and inviolable nature of the family while cheering on our government's family separation policies? The group that consistently calls for harsh discipline and punishment for others but forgiveness when their own are charged with a crime? The same group that condemns Bill Clinton's sexual assaults and ignores Donald Trump's? Look, my moral system may come from myself rather than some all-powerful, all-knowing entity, but at least my moral system applies universally.
Because that's the thing, white conservative Christians don't act like they have a moral system with objective and universal rules, they act like they have a moral system that lets them be cruel to others while always letting them off the hook. It hardly seems like their moral rules are objective and unshakeable truths of the universe when they're constantly bending them for the people they happen to like.
CONCLUSION
Look, I'm not going to claim my moral system is objective, I live in a universe without anything metaphysical that could possibly make such a system a fundamental fact of reality, but at least my system is consistent and universal.
White conservative Christians clearly have developed a moral system that doesn't apply to everyone, has constantly shifting rules, and no longer seems to even pretend to have any basis in anything but their own tortured interpretations. At this point, if there are not rules that actually apply to or limit their own actions, can we even say they really have a moral system at all?
