Traditional Values Don’t Require God
The American right, broadly speaking, has long grounded its ethics in religion. God gives morality its authority. Without God, the argument goes, you’re left with relativism, chaos, and the cultural left. And so conservatives who don’t believe in God—who look at the evidence and find none—are left without a home. I’m one of those people, which is why I came up with the concept of the Secular Right.
To clarify, I don’t reject the possibility of a God; I simply see no evidence for one. And yet I hold what most would recognize as traditional, conservative values: a strong nuclear family, national identity, borders, cultural cohesion, and natural norms around sexuality and reproduction.
I’m asked, often, where my ethics come from.
Here is my answer.
Moral Constructivism
I reject the idea that ethics require a divine lawgiver. They require facts about the human condition, and we have those in abundance. Pain and suffering are real. So is flourishing and decay. From these facts about what we are and what we need, we can construct a coherent moral code without invoking the supernatural.
This position is called moral constructivism. We observe human nature—our biological drives, our social needs, our capacity for suffering and joy—and we derive from those observations a set of values that serve human flourishing. The moral code is not invented arbitrarily. It’s built from evidence. The ultimate judge is not God but nature.
Environmental Feedback
Here’s a simple but powerful tool: take any behavior and scale it to the whole population. What’s the environment’s feedback when this behavior becomes universal? That feedback is the moral signal. If it results in the destruction of a society, it’s clearly harmful. If it results in flourishing, it’s clearly beneficial.
Apply it to murder: scale it to everyone, and the population collapses. The environment answers: No. Apply it to theft at scale: social trust dissolves, cooperation ends, and the group fails. The environment answers: No. The wrongness of these behaviors isn’t derived from a divine prohibition; it’s read off from what actually happens when they propagate.
Apply it to exclusive homosexuality across the entire population: reproduction ceases. This isn’t an opinion based on how one feels about these actions. It’s a consequence. The environment is simply telling us something about the reproductive baseline required for the species to persist. Most of the population is heterosexual because heterosexuality is the condition under which the population continues to exist. That’s a biological fact, not a moral verdict. Biology is where our moral facts come from.
This is consequentialism grounded in biological reality. It doesn’t require a rulebook handed down from above. It requires only that we pay attention to outcomes—to what actually happens when behaviors scale, when policies propagate, and when norms break down or hold.
What Nature Dictates
Across virtually every animal group studied, and across every human civilization that has ever existed, certain structural patterns recur: the family unit, territorial identity, group cohesion built around shared language and culture, and the protection of offspring. These functional adaptations. They persist because they work and ensure the perpetuity of the group.
The secular conservative case is simple: human beings flourish under conditions that match their nature. Strong family units produce more stable children. Communities with shared culture produce more social trust. Nations with coherent identity produce more civic cohesion. The appeal is to biology, to history, to natural order. The supernatural, which we have no access to, is simply unnecessary.
The False God of Egalitarianism
When you sever ethics from biological reality, you don’t get a value-free society. You get a society with a different god—one that is harder to argue with precisely because it wears the costume of science and reason while rejecting both.
That god is egalitarianism. Not the modest claim that people deserve equal treatment under the law—that’s defensible and largely uncontroversial. The claim I mean is deeper and more radical: that all humans are interchangeable, all cultures are equally valid, all outcomes, if left to nature, would be equal, and that any deviation from equality is therefore evidence of oppression rather than natural variation.
This isn’t a scientific finding. It’s a moral axiom—an article of faith. And like all faiths, it’s immune to the feedback that would otherwise correct it. When biology produces variation, the egalitarian doesn’t update the premise; he blames the environment. When some cultures generate more flourishing than others, he doesn’t ask why; he calls the observation bigotry. When policy after policy fails to produce the equal outcomes the theory predicts, he doesn’t question the theory; he demands more policy.
Leftist secular humanism is built on feelings-based beliefs that go against nature. Its ethics generate degeneracy and dysfunction precisely because they promote unnatural behaviors at scale, then enforce compliance through guilt rather than reason. It is a faux ideology of liberation dressed as compassion, with no feedback mechanism to tell it when it has gone too far.
This is how you get the full cultural-left package: open borders follow from the premise that all people and cultures are equal. Gender ideology follows from the premise that biology is irrelevant to identity. Diversity mandates follow from the premise that unequal outcomes can only mean unequal treatment. Each position is downstream of the same root axiom; and because the axiom is never tested against reality, the positions escalate without limit.
Egalitarianism didn’t liberate us from religion. It replaced God with an abstraction; and the abstraction, unlike God, cannot even be argued with. At least the theologian must contend with scripture, tradition, and a community of interpreters. The egalitarian ideologue answers only to the ideology itself. That’s not secular enlightenment but a religion with the humility removed.
The Gap on the Right
The left has long owned secular politics. It has built entire moral architectures without religion, but it has done the philosophical work. The right, by contrast, has largely outsourced its moral foundations to faith. That made sense when the country was overwhelmingly religious. It makes less sense now.
What’s needed is a conservative ethics that can stand without theological scaffolding. The values were never really about God; they were about what works. God was the explanation offered—and for many people it remains a sincere one—but the values themselves are derivable from nature, reason, and an honest reckoning with what human beings actually are.
You don’t need a heavenly judge to know that unnecessary harm is bad. You don’t need divine command to know that children raised in stable homes do better. You don’t need faith to look at the arc of civilizations and notice which structures endured and which collapsed. You need only to look clearly at the world. At what we are, what we need, and what the evidence—honestly examined—shows about how human beings thrive.
you, handsome truth & adan greene have fun with your antichrist jewish crusade. unsubbbed.
You see no evidence of God , yet in every living thing, every part of this world is his handiwork .