Christianity Inverts Morality
Christian morality distorts the true purpose of morality, turning a tool for flourishing into a destroyer of life.
Christianity tells us: “We’re all sinners,” which means: “We’re all immoral from the moment we’re born, through no action of our own.” This is the doctrine of original sin—and it is not only false, it is a mockery of morality.
Some Christians attempt to downplay this doctrine, perhaps because they foresee some of its disastrous consequences. But this idea is central to Christianity. If you’ve ever attended a sermon, you’ve almost certainly heard it in some form. This idea is also explicit in the Bible and often repeated. In Mark 10:18, Jesus says “No one is good—except God alone.” Christians repeat this idea when they quote verses such as “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalms 51:5). And famous minister Billy Graham wrote on his website: “. . . God’s standard is nothing less than perfection. But as the Bible says, ‘There is no one righteous, not even one’ (Romans 3:10)” (emphasis added).
To play devil’s advocate, I can quote James, Jesus’s brother, who said “faith without deeds is dead” (James 2:26). But would a Christian dare say we could be fully, morally good without God? No—that would be heresy. Although actions surely have a place within Christianity, drawing the conclusion that we can be good through our actions alone directly contradicts it.
This idea—that we’re immoral through no act of our own—is an unjust inversion of morality. Christianity asks you to disregard justice entirely and to consider people and oneself inherently bad. Justice demands holding individuals accountable for their actions and rewarding or punishing them accordingly. It does not involve condemning individuals for things they didn’t do.
Consider how unjust it is to hold humans guilty for the crimes of their ancestors. For example, some advocates of “social justice” encourage taking money from white people, whose ancestors were slave owners, and giving it to black people, whose ancestors were slaves.
Here is another example that is comparatively minor but nonetheless has real consequences for children and their developing minds. In middle school, sometimes my teacher would ban the whole class from recess because a few troublemakers disrupted class.
Any reasonable person can clearly see that holding people guilty for things they didn’t do is unjust—yet many people give Christian morality a free pass to do this.
We are now likely sensing that the Christian conception of morality is unfair and doesn’t make any sense, but knowing what morality is not is only slightly helpful toward the end of understanding what it is.
Morality is a man-made code of values we use to guide our actions toward the goal of living. It is not something a creator gives us; there is no evidence of any such creator. It is not a “social construct” or a subjective whim either. Morality is something we need.
We need morality because we cannot live by instinct. Animals can, but we humans must make observations and think about how to live. In order to live, we must discern between food and poison, for example, and then form ideas that can be as simple as “Apples are good” and “Arsenic is bad.” This is the basic process by which we learn about and live in the world, and we must discover morality by the same process.
The purpose of a moral code is to guide our choices in life. Most people understand this, including Christians. No moral code or philosophic argument can convince us that we should want to live, but if we want to live, then we must act in certain ways that promote and protect life while avoiding actions that damage it. When we understand this, we can see why values matter: They give us ends and goals in life, and a moral code that corresponds to reality is our means of achieving them.
But the Christian moral code inverts the purpose of morality entirely. According to Christianity, the purpose of morality is simply to obey God—even if doing so harms life. There are many historical examples. In the Bible, the Israelites, under God’s command, kill all of the inhabitants of several cities. The medieval Crusaders murdered millions in the name of God. And Mother Teresa dutifully served God by always wearing the worst pair of shoes from donation bins so that the poor would always get better shoes. This practice permanently deformed her feet.
Today, we still see people obey God despite the harm to life it may cause. People with differing sexualities are expelled from or repressed in their church communities. Women in many Christian denominations birth large families, believing God commands them to, and have later voiced painful regret. Others found nonprofits, evangelize overseas, or merely tithe just because they believe God compels them to.
Although Christians disagree intensely about what God commands, they all agree on one thing: We should always obey him—even if the cost is human life. If Christian morality happens to serve human life, it does so by accident, not by design. If people do things that serve their lives and call that Christian morality, they’ve failed to see its purpose clearly.
If one takes Christian morality seriously and acts from it, it necessarily leads to a worse off life. I speak from experience.
About a decade ago, Christian morality guilted me out of love. I was at a summer camp where I met a girl I liked. We held hands and kissed for a day or two but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I was being “impure” for being intimate with a girl before a God-approved marriage. When things got too serious, I literally sprinted away from her in fear and never spoke to her again. She could have become my girlfriend or even my wife but Christian morality killed my young love at its roots.
Several years ago, my church offered me and some other youths the chance to travel across the country to serve the poor and evangelize. I felt deeply guilty because I wanted to stay home, yet I also felt like I should go and should want to go because it was what God and my pastors wanted. I decided to go merely to relieve my guilt, not because I saw value in the trip.
When I was in middle school, I tried being friends with everyone because I thought God wanted me to love even my enemies. But I only kept getting hurt because I never learned how to establish healthy boundaries.
I thought that I was the problem. But I wasn’t. Christian morality was.1
Christianity inverts morality, weaponizing what should be a life-serving tool. If we are to live full lives, we must reject Christian morality entirely and discover a morality that serves human life by design.
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Doesn’t accepting Christian morality make you the problem too? If I was an adult, yes. “It takes two to tango” as some say. But I say “no” in my case because I was indoctrinated as a child to accept it uncritically—plus I was never formally taught how to think critically because that would cause me to doubt my faith. I continued to believe until I was about twenty years old because I continued to accept and repeat flawed arguments in defense of Christianity (called “apologetics”), which made Christianity appear rationally defended (I had to learn about psychology and self-teach myself critical thinking skills in order to reveal the flaws of these arguments, which Christians avoid teaching). I identified some of these arguments in 3 Fallacies That Kept Me Stuck in Christianity.
Maddox, I just discovered your work because it popped up on my feed and this essay is a breath of fresh air—not only because of the honesty but because of the clarity in which you write. So many of your internal struggles due to faith mirror mine. I was born under conditions of medical malpractice that have affected me my whole life in painful ways. I also grew up in the Bible Belt, so I heard I was born with "original sin" my whole life. I thought as a child (and it carried into my adulthood subconsciously), Well, since my birth was so bad I must be a really bad person because everyone else has such nice stories about the day they were born. I'm still working through getting rid of that identity. Thank you for writing about such a polarizing topic in such a constructive way.
I think you raise a real concern, but some key pieces need to be framed more precisely.
First, on original sin. Many Christians would deny that humans are morally blameworthy for Adam and Eve. The more common view is that humans are born with a corrupted or conflicted nature, where emotion often overrides reason and error is predictable. On this account, “we are all sinners” is mainly a description of how people actually behave, not a legal indictment of the human race for someone else’s crime. If your critique targets inherited guilt, you need to show that this stronger version is actually central to mainstream Christianity, rather than a minority interpretation.
Second, on the claim that Christianity requires obedience to God even at the cost of life. Before making that case, it seems important to separate two things that often get conflated: the plain moral teaching of the Bible, and the way religious authorities have used religion to pursue power. The Crusades, for example, look less like faithful Christianity and more like political violence dressed up in religious language. If religious leaders violate their own professed moral code, that tells us more about human power-seeking than about the code itself.
In other words, I think your instincts are right that something is deeply wrong here, but the problem may be less “Christian morality as such” and more the way fallible humans consistently corrupt moral systems when they gain authority.