'I Don't Need Religion to Be a Good Person'
This is one of the most common statements made by people leaving or distancing themselves from Islam. It sounds reasonable. Examined carefully, it contains several assumptions that do not hold up, and misses the point of what Islam is actually for.
Contents
The Statement and Its Assumptions
The statement assumes:
- That the purpose of Islam is to make you a good person
- That goodness is self-evident and requires no external standard
- That a person is a reliable judge of their own goodness
All three assumptions are worth examining.
Islam Is Not Primarily an Ethics Course
Islam is a relationship between the created and the Creator. Its primary purpose is not moral improvement; it is submission to God, worship of God, and the preparation of the soul for what comes after death. Moral improvement is a consequence of that orientation, not its purpose.
A Muslim who reduces Islam to "being a good person" has already lost most of the religion. The prayer is not about being good. The fasting is not about being good. The hajj is not about being good. They are about God: about the acknowledgement of His lordship, His mercy, and the human being's utter dependence on Him.
What Standard of Goodness?
When someone says they do not need religion to be good, they are implicitly using a standard of goodness. Where does that standard come from?
A serious case has been made (most prominently by historians like Tom Holland and philosophers like Charles Taylor) that contemporary secular ethics is largely a secularised inheritance of Christian moral commitments: the equal dignity of every human being, the moral weight of the weak, the duty of compassion to strangers. Whether or not the historical genealogy is exactly that, the broader point holds: the values that feel "obviously" good are not self-evident products of human reason. They are the contingent product of specific traditions: and if those traditions are abandoned, the values do not necessarily survive on their own.
More practically: contemporary secular goodness is highly contingent. What counts as good changes with social consensus. Slavery was once compatible with being a good person by the standards of one's time. So was colonialism. So was a great deal that is now considered abhorrent.
Islam's standard of goodness is not contingent on social consensus. It is grounded in divine command: which is either true or not, but is at least stable.
The Self-Assessment Problem
The most serious problem with the statement is the assumption that the person making it is a reliable judge of their own goodness. The Quran is consistently cautionary about this:
"Have you seen the one who takes his desires as his god?" (25:43)
The nafs (the self) is not a neutral evaluator of the self. It rationalises, minimises, and reframes. A person who has no external standard against which to measure their behaviour will consistently find that their behaviour meets the standard, because the standard adjusts to accommodate the behaviour.
Islam provides an external standard precisely because the internal one cannot be trusted without it.
Common Misconceptions
"Secular ethics are sufficient for a good society." Secular ethics are largely derived from religious moral traditions whose grounding has been removed. Their long-term stability without that grounding is undemonstrated.
"Religion is just about rules." The Islamic tradition's primary concern is the relationship between the human being and God. Ethics are a consequence of that relationship, not its content.
Scholar References
- Quran: 25:43: on following desires as a deity
- Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Al-Fawaid: on the self and its rationalisations
- Malek Bennabi, Islam in History and Society: on the civilisational function of religion
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: secular philosophical argument that ethics without religious grounding is incoherent