How Religion and Morality are Related? A Concise Literature Review

Where do religion, religious belief and religiosity placed on moral emotion, thought and behavior? Is religious belief effective on morality? Does being religious also mean being moral? Or inversely, does being not religious or not having a God belief mean being immoral? Classical theories on the relationship between religion and morality claim that religion strengthen morality and suppress the negative emotions of the individual. However, empirical studies can have different or contrary results with these classical theories. Both religion and morality have complex elements and the different combinations of these elements pave the way for different religion-morality relationships. A detailed examination of the studies on religion-morality relationship is, it would seem, essential to highlight the future studies conducted in this vein. In our study, various relationships between religion and morality in the English literature were examined; nonetheless, due to the nature of the study no experimental work was conducted. In this study, firstly, the description of morality and its content were explained; secondly, the study seperates the literature into five categories in appropriate with the categories which are set four different religion-morality relationship in the study. According to these four religion-morality relationships, religion positively influences morality; religion negatively influences morality; religion and morality are unconnected and the relationship between religion and morality is complex. The most important finding obtained from this study is that because both religion and morality are multi-dimensional structures, the effect of religion on morality is rather complicated.

Keywords

Religion, God, Morality, Pro-sociality, Cooperation, Altruism, Well-Being