Moral Absolutes or ‘It Depends’: How Americans See Right and Wrong

The Bible Says It. I Believe It. That Settles It. (Or Does It?)

The more I think about what religion means, the more that I think that there are just two camps of people in the United States. Some folks draw bright lines around what they think is right and wrong. In evangelical circles, there’s an oft uttered phrase, “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” They just have a really clear sense of what is acceptable in their world and what is not.

Then there’s a whole different class of folks who just don’t seem to believe in anything concrete. It seems that their most likely response to a lot of complicated questions about right and wrong is, “It depends.” For them, ethics are situational. For what it’s worth, surveys don’t make it easy to get to the bottom of this divide. I mean, can you really ask, “Are there moral absolutes in your life? Where did they come from?” We sort of nibble around the edges when asking questions about a respondent’s view of the Bible, but there’s been a woeful lack of focus on this idea of moral clarity.

Well - I’ve got a great question from the most recent Pew Landscape Survey. Respondents were asked to pick either of these two options:

There are clear and absolute standards for what is right and wrong

Or

Whether something is right or wrong often depends on the situation.

Here’s what that looks like in the entire sample of nearly 37,000 folks.

I don’t really know what I expected to see when I made this graph, but I was still kind of surprised at the results. The public is almost evenly divided on this type of question. About 55% say that everything is situational, while 44% said that there are clear moral standards for what is right and wrong.

Listen, I’ve messed around with survey data enough to know that people often offer responses to survey questions that can seem incredibly contradictory. You would be shocked at how many Americans will agree with the statement: A woman should be able to obtain an abortion if she wants one for any reason. Then, two questions later, agree with a ban on abortion after 20 weeks. It’s almost like they read the first question and think, “Yeah, I’m pro-choice.” Then read the next statement and go, “Wait, not in that situation.”

So, color me a bit skeptical of those 44% of folks who say that the world is black and white. I think we can consider this question through the lens of, “I want to believe that I have a solid moral framework.” But that facade crumbles pretty quickly when poked and prodded just a little bit.

But, religion has to play a big role in this right? I mean, where does this sense of moral foundation come from, if not some type of faith framework?

I write a whole lot about the uniqueness of American evangelicalism and this is surely a clear example of that. There is only one religious tradition in which a majority of respondents said that “there are clear and absolute standards for what is right and wrong” and it was evangelicals. In fact, 61% chose this response option. But I do feel the need to point out that nearly four in ten of them ascribed to situational ethics.

Among every other Christian group in the sample, a majority did not have bright lines around what was right and what was wrong. For mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, and Catholics - about 44% chose the “clear absolute standards.” For folks from other world religions like Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, the share was even lower at 40%.

Then, we have the non-religious. I think it should come as little surprise that atheists/agnostics were the most likely to choose the “it depends” response - 77%. That was about twenty points higher than most Christian groups. But notice that the nothing in particulars stand apart from the other types of nones on this question. About a third of them believe in moral absolutes. Which is only ten points lower than many Christians. That’s something worth ruminating on.

What about age? I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent a lot of time around older folks and it does seem like they are more inclined to say, “This is right. That is wrong. I don’t have the desire to debate these facts with anyone.”

This is a good example of where my own personal experience doesn’t fully align with the data. I mean, among respondents born before 1970, responses were essentially evenly divided on this question. Half believed in absolute moral standards and the other half believed that it depended on the situation.

But once you move into those younger age cohorts, you start to see a clear trend emerge. Younger people are less prone to believing in moral absolutes. For folks born in the 1970s, 53% chose the situational response. It was 58% for those born in the 1980s and 62% among respondents who were born in the 1990s. Among the youngest cohort, just 29% said there are absolute standards of right and wrong.

A question I have is will this begin to shift as those young adults move into middle age? For folks in this survey who were in the sixties and seventies, do they take a more pragmatic view of things when they were in their twenties or thirties? We just don’t know based on this single data source.

Okay - time to combine the last two graphs. I’ve got a decade of birth variable as well as the four largest religious traditions in the data.

Again, evangelical Protestants stand apart from the rest of their birth cohort. That was true for every decade of birth from the 1940s all the way through the 1990s. However, I do want to point out that according to this data from Pew, the youngest adult evangelicals have a view that departs significantly from the rest of their evangelical brethren. Just 40% believe that there are moral absolutes in this world. That share doesn’t differ statistically from mainline Protestants from the same age bucket. Interesting, for sure.

What else do I notice here? Well, mainline Protestants and Catholics tend to look almost exactly the same when holding age constant. I also feel like I need to point out that those numbers don’t really shift in a meaningful way when comparing responses from the 1940s cohorts and the 1980s cohorts. Christians born forty years apart have the same basic worldview. That’s not what I would have guessed.

Here’s one more thing that I want to flag - the nones. For those non-religious born in the 1970s, one third tend to think about the world in black and white ways. That drops to 29% among respondents born in the 1980s, then it dips to 26% in the 1990s cohort and drops even further to 21% among the youngest adults. I don’t know what to make of that, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Now, to this point I’ve left politics out of the equation. But I knew that political ideology had to play some kind of role in black and white thinking. It doesn’t take a lot of theorizing to get to the conclusion that conservatives tend to be more prone to thinking in terms of absolute right and wrong and liberals are often a bit more situational. And, guess what - the data totally supports that idea.

I defined ‘religious’ as just belonging to any religious tradition, regardless of the type. And the non-religious were those who said that they were atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. The group that is the most likely to believe in moral absolutes are religious folks who identify as very conservative in terms of political ideology. The group that is the least likely to have this worldview is the exact opposite: non-religious folks who say that they are very liberal. Yes, the result is just as clean as that.

You can see that the bars just sort of cascade downward when moving from the conservative part of the graph to the liberal portion. The drops are also fairly incremental, too. It’s not like we can find a clear inflection point when moving from conservative to moderate or moderate to liberal. Every step left pushes the bars down and every step right sees them get a bit taller.

But, I’ve left a breadcrumb for myself in this. Among non-religious people who describe their political ideology as “very conservative”, more than half of them say that there are clear standards of right and wrong in the world. You better believe I need to figure out what those people are basing their morality on. So, check back on that in a couple months because I am fascinated to go down that rabbit trail.

Before I finish this investigation, I wanted to show you one more piece of analysis that I just can’t stop thinking about. It’s a simple regression model that tries to understand what factors lead someone to be more inclined to believe that there are clear moral standards in the world. I threw a bunch in here including demographics, religion and political ideology.

There are only two demographic variables that really popped: age and gender. Someone born in the 1960s was about 6% more likely than someone born in the 1970s to believe that the world is black and white. And a male was about 28% more likely to think about the world in black and white compared to a woman. Remember that this is a regression, too. So we controlled for other factors. This is as close as we can get to apples to apples.

Being affiliated with any religious tradition was incredibly predictive of believing that there are clear and absolute standards in life. In this model, a person of any faith tradition was about 72% more likely to take this stance compared to a non-religious respondent.

But, without a doubt, the most important factor was political ideology. In this simple model a conservative was 330% more likely to take a black and white approach compared to a moderate or a liberal. And, again, that’s after controlling for factors like religious affiliation, age, race, education, gender, and income. Of course we know that both religion and politics tend to go hand in hand, but I was still struck by how much politics wins the day in this model.

But, of course, there’s an endogeneity problem here. Does being a political conservative lead someone to be more of a black and white thinker? Or does being a black and white thinker lend itself to conservative ideology? We can’t explore that here.

So, some takeaways.

1. A bare majority of Americans believe in situational ethics - they don’t see the world as black and white.

2. The only religious tradition where a strong majority believe in moral absolutes are evangelicals. Atheist/agnostics are at the other end of the spectrum.

3. Younger folks tend to take a more malleable approach to these issues compared to older ones.

4. Political ideology is the most predictive factor here - even more than religion.

I’ve left a lot of dangling strings off of this post. So, expect me to poke and prod this data even more in the months to come.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.