Does the West Need a Religious Revival?

My notes and additional thoughts on the Free Press/FIRE debate with myself and Adam Carolla vs. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ross Douthat

Paramount Theater, Austin, Texas. February 27, 2025.

Gathered here were over 2,000 people in a standing-room only theater to witness the debate with myself and Adam Carolla vs. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ross Douthat on the title question “Does the West Need a Religious Revival?” It was one of the most professionally produced events I’ve experienced in my more than 30 years of doing public talks and debates, including an opening video montage introducing the topic, the debaters, followed by a thoughtful neutral commentary by Bari Weiss of The Free Press, which sponsored the debate along with FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It was an Oxford style debate in which the audience was polled on their position (yes or no) on the debate proposition, before and after, and whoever moved the most people over to their side at the end was declared the winner.

You can watch the entire debate here (or click on the screen shot below).

Spoiler alert: “Shermer and Carolla were able to convince 12 percent of the audience to switch to their side—that religion is not the answer—changing more minds than their opponents, and winning the night.”

I am now 4-0 in Oxford style debates. Here are the others if you are interested:

1. Intelligence Squared: Science Refutes God:

2. Intelligence Squared: The More We Evolve the Less We Need God:

3. Oxford Union: God Does Not Exist:

I began the Austin debate by thanking the organizers and audience, and noting that we were not there to debate if anyone personally needs a religious revival, or whether or not religion is good for individual people. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. Nor were we there to debate whether or not the NON-Western world needs religion—or more precisely, whether or not it needs Christianity to replace Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, or any of thousands of folk and pagan religions. And, finally, I clarified that thought we could all agree that by the West we mean the Western Industrialized democracies, the vast majority of which have for centuries been primarily Christian—or Judeo-Christian. With those caveats, I addressed 4 points often made in the name of Christianity as being the foundation (the “operating system” in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s descriptor) of Western civilization.

1. Christianity is responsible for most of the Western cultural values we cherish: art, architecture, music, literature, science, tech, engineering…

In response I use the comparative method and counterfactual causality reasoning:

Were Homer and Sappho Christians? Were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World inspired by Christ’s great gift of salvation? Clearly we do know what geniuses in the past have done without Christianity, in the great ancient pre-Christian civilizations of Sumeria, Babylonia, Akkadia, Assyria, Egypt, and Greece in the West; the ancient civilizations that arose in the Indus Valley in modern day Pakistan and India; in the Yellow River and Yangtze River valleys in modern day China; and in many others besides. Every one of these peoples produced magnificent works of art and architecture, music and literature, science and technology—though it should be noted that both Christians and Muslims often did their best to annihilate all evidence of these achievements with innumerable acts of cultural vandalism, pillaging, and censorship.

2. Christianity is responsible for Western democratic and economic values:

If true, then societies in which Christianity is or was the dominant religion should show Western-like forms of democracy and capitalism. They don’t. The Byzantine Empire, for example, was predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian from the early A.D. 300s, and for seven centuries produced nothing remotely like democracy and capitalism as practiced in modern America. Even early America wasn’t like it is today when, a mere two centuries ago women couldn’t vote, slavery was legal and widely practiced, and capitalism’s wealth was vouchsafed to only a tiny minority of land holders or factory owners. Throughout the late Middle Ages and well into the Early Modern Period, all the nation states, city states, and various political conglomerates of Western and Central Europe were not only Christian but Western Christian, and yet as late as the 19^th century the only quasi-democratic republics in Europe were England, Holland, and Switzerland.

3. Christianity is the basis of our commitment to Equal Rights.

This claim is usually tied to the biblical passage from Galatians 3:28, in which the apostle Paul proclaimed: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Here I added an aside that Paul was probably not channeling woke progressive trans activists in the clause about there being neither males nor females.) Christians imagine that this Bible verse is the foundation of the famous line in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence—“All men are created equal.”

I’m afraid not. Paul is saying that you can carry on as you are. If you’re Greek, there’s no need to become a Jew—a significant dispensation, given that a man converting to Judaism often had to submit to adult circumcision, which is just the kind of thing that puts a guy off the whole idea. Paul was saying that if you’re a slave, you must keep on being a slave; if you’re a wife, must continue being regarded as property; no matter who you are, you can still worship Jesus Christ and be abused by your culture in whatever manner is customary for someone of your breeding and station.

In any case, in Christian countries around the world, slaves remained slaves for 18 more centuries, and women remained little more than property for 19 more centuries. Clearly, even if Paul’s message were interpreted to mean that we’re all equal, absolutely no one took it seriously.

4. Christianity makes societies healthier and more moral

I ran out of time in my opening statement to properly credit my response to this assertion, namely Gregory S. Paul’s study of 17 first-world prosperous democracies (Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States), in which he quantified the religiosity of each of the 17 countries by measuring to what extent the citizens in each (1) believe in God, (2) are biblical literalists, (3) attend religious services at least several times a month, (4) pray at least several times a week, (5) believe in an afterlife, and (6) believe in heaven and hell, ranking them on 1-10 scale.

Paul then recorded 25 different indicators of social health and well being, such as: homicides, suicides, incarceration rates, life expectancy, STDs, abortions, teen births, fertility, marriage, divorce, alcohol consumption, life satisfaction, corruption indices, adjusted per capita income, income inequality, poverty, employment levels, and others, on a 1-9 scale from dysfunction to healthy.

The results were striking…and disturbing. Far and away—without having a close second—the United States is not only the most religious of the 17 nations, but also the most dysfunctional, with the highest rates of homicides, suicides, illicit drug use, drug overdoses, deaths of despair, crime rates, incarcerations, STD infections, teen pregnancies, abortion rates, divorce rates, and juvenile and natal mortality.

If religion is such a powerful force for societal health, then why is America—the most religious nation in the Western world—also the unhealthiest in the great majority of social measures? Even inside the country the same patterns hold true—the most religious states are among the poorest and with the highest rates of homicides, suicides, abortion rates, and the like? Here is how Greg Paul clarified his study in an email response to my query about any updates or follow-ups he had to his original study:

The more atheistic the advanced nations are, the more socioeconomically prosperous the citizens tend to be, with the low theism Nordic nations prone to be doing the best in these factors. Additional data shows broadly similar patterns in the world at large. Conversely, Gallup results on religiosity and well-being in each of the 50 states shows a correlation between less of the first and more of the latter within the United States—it has long been known that the Bible Belt has high rates of murder, premature death in general, and poverty. All of a number of studies on the matter have produced similar results. This is true of the late Ronald Inglehart’s recent book Religion’s Sudden Decline, which shows that theism is in demographic trouble across the world.

The reasons why mass religion does not produce good results are well understood. Theism is based on ideological opinions rather than pragmatic secular policies that are proven to work. Just as importantly, it is well documented that as socioeconomic conditions, educational levels, etc get better religion persistently decreases in popularity, there being no known major exceptions. That means religion cannot thrive in successful societies. That in turn simply means religious societies can never be successful since the success degrades popular theism.

Paul’s final comment to me is the one I made in the debate to my opponents, and have for years been asking believers to produce:

For those who still think religion makes societies better, you need to at long last produce large scale statistical studies that show that is true, which has never been done because it very likely cannot be done. Like in science in general, cherry picking a few trends here and there while waving away the majority of the data will of course produce inaccurate results.

I did acknowledge—in response to Bari’s question to me in the first round of the debate—that once moral progress in a particular area is underway, most religions eventually get on board, as in the abolition of slavery in the 19^th century, women’s rights in the 20^th century, and gay rights in the 21^st century. But this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.

Additional topics in my notes that time did not permit me to address, included these, taken from my 2015 book The Moral Arc, from Chapter 4 on why religion is not the driver of moral progress:

Religion has also promoted, or justified, such catastrophic moral blunders as:

• Crusades (the People’s Crusade, the Northern Crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, and Crusades One through Nine);

• Inquisitions (Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman);

• Witch hunts (a product, in part, of the Inquisitions that ran from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period and executed tens of thousands of people, mostly women);

• Christian conquistadors who exterminated native peoples by the millions through their guns, germs, and steel;

• Endless European Wars of Religion—the Nine Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War, the French Wars of Religion, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the English Civil War;

• American Civil War, in which Northern Christians and Southern Christians slaughtered one another over the issue of slavery and states’ rights;

• First World War, in which German Christians fought French, British, and American Christians, all of whom believed that God was on their side. (German soldiers had Gott mit uns—God with us—embossed in the metal of their belt buckles.)

All of these events have political, economic, and social causes, but the underlying justification they share is religion, specifically Christianity. There are three reasons for the sclerotic nature of religion:

1. The foundation of the belief in an absolute morality is the belief in an absolute religion grounded in the One True God. This inexorably leads to the conclusion that anyone who believes differently has departed from this truth and thus is unprotected by our moral obligations.

2. Unlike science, religion has no systematic process and no empirical method to employ to determine the verisimilitude of its claims and beliefs, much less right and wrong.

3. The morality of holy books—most notably the Bible—is not the morality any of us would wish to live by, and thus it is not possible for the religious doctrines derived from holy books to be the catalyst for moral evolution.

Today, as the death penalty fades into history, in the Old Testament Yahweh offers this list of actions punishable by death:

• Blaspheming or cursing or the Lord: “And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.” (Leviticus 24:13-16)

• Worshiping another god: “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” (Exodus 22:20)

• Witchcraft and wizardry: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (Exodus 22:18) “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:27)

• Female loss of virginity before marriage: “If any man take a wife [and find] her not a maid … Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.” (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)

• Homosexuality: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:13)

• Working on the Sabbath: “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the Lord: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death.” (Exodus 35:2)

The book considered by over two billion people to be the greatest moral guide ever produced—inspired as it was by an all-knowing, totally benevolent deity—recommends the death penalty for saying the Lord’s name at the wrong moment or in the wrong context, for imaginary crimes like witchcraft, for commonplace sexual relations (adultery, fornication, homosexuality), and for the especially heinous crime of not resting on the Sabbath. How many of today’s two billion Christians agree with their own holy book on the application of capital punishment?

Let me end this overview with a perhaps less pugnacious perspective on religion, from the opening paragraphs of the chapter on religion in The Moral Arc:

On the good side of the moral scale, it was Jesus who said to help the poor, to turn the other cheek, to love thine enemies, to judge not lest ye be judged, to forgive sinners, and to give people a second chance. In the name of their religion, people have helped the poor and needy in developed nations around the world, and in America they are the leading supporters of food banks for the hungry and post-disaster relief. Many Christian theologians, along with Christian churches and preachers, advocated the abolition of the slave trade, and continued to press for justice in modern times. Some civil rights leaders were motivated by their religion, most notably the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose speeches were filled with passionate religious tropes and quotes. I have deeply religious friends who are highly driven to do good and, though they may have a complex variety of motives, they often act in the name of their particular religion.

So religion can and does motivate people to do good works, and we should always acknowledge any person or institution that pushes humanity further along the path of progress, expands the moral sphere, or even just makes the life of one other person a little easier. To that end we would do well to emulate the ecumenicalism of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who appealed to all religious faiths to join scientists in working to preserve the environment and to end the nuclear arms race. He did so because, he said, we are all in this together; our problems are “transnational, transgenerational and transideological. So are all conceivable solutions. To escape these traps requires a perspective that embraces the peoples of the planet and all the generations yet to come.” That stirring rhetoric urges all of us—secularists and believers—to work together toward the common goal of making the world a better place.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters, to be published in 2026.