ABSTRACT
Common ideas regarding religion and morality are: without God everything is permitted, thus atheists should not be trusted because they lack morals; or, on the contrary, religious people are moral hypocrites and religion promotes violence and love equally. This chapter shows that the previously mentioned are empirically inaccurate. It examines the most recent research, including large international studies that suggest both religious universals and differences in morality, experiments that point to underlying mechanisms, and studies that have used behavioral indicators, which are more reliable than self-reports alone. Most major research traditions and areas of moral psychology are visited: values, moral foundations, socio-moral reasoning, prosocial behavior, moral self-control, moral (in)coherence, deontology versus consequentialism, and the legitimation of prejudice or tolerance. Overall, religiosity predicts both compassionate, other-oriented morality, and personal and social control-oriented morality. The latter type of morality restricts rather than extends the former, leading to religion’s preference for a “hygienic” morality and religion’s potential “immorality.”
