depends on God as they understand him. (Perhaps it is not surprising that religious
exclusivists always think that the one true religion is their own.) But the Western world
also treats religious freedom as an important civil liberty, an idea that has spread well
beyond its boundaries. Persons have the right to practice their own religions without
interference from other individuals or the state. If morality is intrinsic to and dependent
on particular religions, it follows that individuals have the right to practice their own
moralities without interference from the state. But no society can accept that. Morality is
a system for getting along with everyone, and that requires a sufficiently common
morality to ensure that a society can function. Differences in moral beliefs and behavior
can be permitted within limits and within carefully circumscribed categories, for
example, some behavior within families and close personal relationships. And it is not
necessary that all members of a society agree on the metaphysical basis for morality, nor
need all persons in a well-functioning society have the same motives for being moral. But
they must agree on a substantial core area of moral behavior, or at the very least, there
must be a core morality that is recognized as having authority over all members of the
society, including the recalcitrant few who resist it. In a society with no common
religious authority, moral authority must come from another source.
In a liberal, pluralistic society religion is a matter of choice; a large area of morality is
not. You can opt out of religion, but you cannot opt out of morality. For this reason, even
devout religious believers in liberal democracies generally support the search for a way to
make morality independent of religion. Or, to make the point more carefully, they want to
say that there is an important respect in which morality is autonomous even if there is
another respect in which it is not. Distinguishing the different respects in which morality
may depend on religion is therefore important for those who believe, as I do, that
morality does not depend on religion in every respect.
This problem would be solved if morality has a two-tier grounding—one in God, the
other in nature. That is the approach of the historically important theory of Natural Law,
whose classic statement in Christian philosophy is found in the work of Thomas Aquinas.
This theory teaches that the basic norms of morality sufficient for civil society have a
foundation in human nature, and so morality is common to all human beings. The norms
of behavior generated by human nature arise from the natural law, which is accessible, in
principle, by ordinary human reason. The natural law, however, is not ultimate.
Everything outside of God comes from God, including the natural law, which is an
expression in the created order of the Eternal Law of God (see Aquinas 1992, I, ii, q.
91).^2 What is important for the problem of this chapter is the way natural law theory
makes morality ultimately dependent on God, while giving it subultimate metaphysical
grounding and justification in something all humans have in common. It is not necessary,
although it is often advantageous, to refer to God's revealed word in order to know what
morality teaches and why. The moral law therefore depends on God only at the deepest
level of the metaphysics of morals. The way morality needs God in natural law theory
does not threaten the functioning of societies internally nor in their relations with each
other.
In natural law theory and in biblical ethics, wrongdoing is a violation of a law. If the
ultimate lawgiver is God, and God is a being with whom the agent has a relationship
through the practice of religion, wrongdoing is something more than merely doing what
is morally wrong. It is a sin, an offense against God. Now, it is important to see that,
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