This is the first of a three-part series by Alex DiBranco.

“Now that I know atheists can be moral—” I burst into laughter, interrupting Catherine, a Dartmouth junior and Catholic friend of mine. She frowned. “I’m serious,” she said, continuing with her statement—now that she knew, she could possibly date an atheist.

When I decided to write an article looking into perspectives on atheism for my journalism class, I wasn’t quite prepared for many of the responses I would get, even from amongst my own friends. The default assumption that atheists cannot be moral could still bring me to occasional incredulous laughter at the end of my research, despite having been confronted with a number of responses from intelligent young persons, my peers, telling me that, as an atheist, I lack morals.

To begin my research for this article, I emailed a survey to the approximately 4,000 Dartmouth undergraduates. I asked specific “check-the-appropriate-box” questions, and requested that students provide their religious affiliation, definition for atheism, and finally any additional comments elaborating on their perspective on atheism or contact information for follow-up questions.

The first survey question was modeled on a national survey that asked whether people would be willing to vote for a candidate for president who was a given minority: Jewish, Catholic, black, female, homosexual, atheist, etc. In that poll, atheists were at the bottom of the list, with only 45 percent willing to vote for an atheist candidate. My survey addressed only religious (or non-religious) beliefs, asking students to check a box next to the candidates for president they would be willing to vote for who were generally well-qualified and also happened to be: Jewish, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Mormon, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Agnostic, or Atheist (one respondent asked why just regular “Christian” or “Protestant Christian” wasn’t included, and I explained that I chose beliefs that were likely to be discriminated against—the religion that the majority of American presidents have professed to believe didn’t seem to fit that criteria).

The results from Dartmouth’s campus were more favorable to atheists, since 80 percent of the 515 students who responded would be willing to vote for an atheist president. Evangelical Christians and Mormons actually fared worse, with only approximately 60 percent of students saying they’d be willing to vote for an Evangelical or Mormon candidate, and just 76 percent said they would be willing to vote for a Muslim candidate.

After seeing these results, I checked the religious affiliations provided; there were a surprising number of atheist, agnostic, or otherwise non-theist/non-religious students. College campuses do tend to have demographics more skewed toward atheism/agnosticism than the country at large, but it also appeared that there was a selection bias to the survey: students who identified as atheist/agnostic saw the survey as more personally interesting to them.

Despite this potential respondent bias, 4.5 percent of students who took the survey agreed with the statement “Atheists are not moral,” while 8.2 percent agreed that “Atheists can be good or moral, but not to the same extent as religious persons. A bare handful of students were in agreement with former president George H.W. Bush’s statement, “I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.” However, over 16 percent thought that “Atheism has a negative impact on society.”

The bulk of this series of articles is based on the personal responses I received in anonymous comments on the survey and follow-up interviews with students. I found these comments very revealing as to the kind of perspectives on atheism that are out there, and representative of an intriguing array of religious backgrounds and personal experiences and viewpoints.

While I use “theist” or “religious person” as general descriptive terms, in many cases the discussion in the article deals mostly with a Judeo-Christian God, since that is the mainstream in America.

The merit of surveying college students is not because they are representative of the country at large. The value lies precisely in the fact that they are unrepresentative. College is supposed to be the time when people are the most liberal, exposed to the greatest diversity of beliefs. So when you see prejudice here, you can extrapolate that it’s worse in the rest of the country (and a glance at national dialogue can confirm this). After concluding my on-campus research, I added some national perspective to my article by conducting interviews with figures outside of the Dartmouth bubble (including August Brunsman, Executive Director of the Secular Student Alliance, who is publishing this article) and reading more of the literature on atheism, including some of the popular works of the four authors (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett , Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) who have been dubbed “the new atheists."

But I had another reason for wanting to focus on my peers. Young people are our future. You can write off sexist, racist, homophobic, or anti-atheist (no good word for that one) middle aged persons as “behind the times” if you want, holdovers of a previous generation and its prejudices—even if they’re well-meaning, many parents and grandparents make out-of-date comments that cause their kids and grandkids to cringe. But college students are the bright new vanguard. They have about half a century before them to shape, influence, and attempt to impose their beliefs on the country. So I really want to know what they’re thinking.

This series of articles explores those lines of thinking, grouped into the following topics.

“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”

Adrian, a Dartmouth sophomore, quoted the above phrase attributed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky to explain his belief that atheism is a negative impact on society. “Most Atheists,” he wrote in response to my survey, “find it easiest to embrace a simplistic form of atheism which is immoral.” While he was of the opinion that atheists could have morals, he thought nonetheless that there was a lower likelihood of their being moral.

An anonymous student responded, “I don’t think that atheists are inherently immoral, but I am hesitant to trust them in positions of power if they don’t believe in personal consequences to immoral actions.”

The question of morality is a key issue went dealing with atheism and prejudice against atheists. A 2003 New York Times poll found that 58 percent of American believe “that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral,” compared to only 40 percent who disagree with that statement. If you don’t believe a person to be moral, it’s understandable that you would not want a relationship with them or have them serving as your president. The frustration amongst atheists and other nonreligious students lies in this widespread belief that they don’t have morals.

Hannah, an agnostic junior, voiced this frustration. “People have this idea that atheists don’t have a set of moral codes—if they don’t believe that they’re gonna get punished for doing wrong, they’ll do it…I am shocked at the perception/assumption that atheists are inherently amoral. One instance: I meet this stranger while working, and we chat for a few minutes. At the end, he throws out before he leaves, ‘So obviously you’ve accepted Jesus in your heart…?’ Surprised by the assumption, I reply that I do not believe in Christ nor ascribe to a particular religion… So this guy’s belief system is thrown off whack from this five-minute conversation, but then he thinks I’m an anomaly in the atheist agnostic spectrum.”

Yet almost all of the atheists and agnostic who responded ascribed to some kind of moral code. Elizabeth, an atheist student, cited both feelings and science in describing her morality. “To me it ‘feels right’ to be fair and compassionate in my interactions with others—to treat them as I would want to be treated. This sense of right and wrong is part of how our brains are wired—over the course of human evolution, the ability to get along with others in a community has been advantageous.” Emily, a Christian first-year, was in agreement: “I don’t think it takes faith to know that killing and stealing are wrong and that helping other people is good. It just takes being human.” [emphasis added]

Annie, a lapsed Lutheran, summed up the issue well. “It makes me uncomfortable not to follow a moral code.” Except for the psychologically disturbed, empathy and moral instincts are an innate fact of life, which continue to shape our actions whether or not the belief in God is discarded, so that we feel better when we act according to our “conscience.” For a more detailed scientific explanation for morality, Richard Dawkin’s best-seller The God Delusion elaborates on the Darwinian roots of acting “altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other.” It takes heavy negative socialization to make a person actually desire to do harm to another human being—socialization that can even come in the form of organization religion.

Indicating that even for theists there is an objective morality unrelated to God, Rebecca, a Jewish student, asked “Theoretically speaking, if God asked you to torture a child, would that still be wrong? If so, surely there is a right or wrong outside of religion.” This argument is similar to that of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a Dartmouth philosophy professor and author of the book Moral Skepticisms. In a debate with Dinesh D’Souza, conservative Roman Catholic author and speaker, over whether morality could exist without religion, Sinnott-Armstrong cited a study in which Quaker children were asked if bullying was wrong (yes, they agreed), and why—“because God said so.” The interviewer then asked, “If God said it was okay, would it still be wrong?” “Of course,” they responded, taken by Sinnott-Armstrong as demonstrating that even when we think given persons’ morality stems from God, in general our natural belief in right and wrong supersedes what religion might tell us. Emily supported this with her remark that “even though I do identify myself as a Christian, I can’t say I agree with every moral decision advocated in the Bible.”

Leaving morality to the prerogative of given religions instead of discussing it as a society is not necessarily healthy. “I consider myself an atheist and a humanist,” one student indicated. “As people we should talk to each other about values (ethics, morals)—this should be a unifying part of our society—religion annexes it and makes it divisive.”


Alex DiBranco is a senior at Dartmouth College studying Creative Writing and Government. She is the editor-in-chief of the progressive campus paper the Dartmouth Free Press, vice president of the Dartmouth Coalition for Progress, and just finished an internship with the progressive think tank Political Research Associates. Atheism and feminism are a couple of her favorite topics of conversation, and she hopes to work for a progressive non-profit or publication after graduation.