This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Persistence of Faith given by Jonathan Sacks

was originally broadcast in 1990.

Voltaire, that 18th century scourge of religion,

used to refuse to let his friends discuss atheism in front of the servants.

Unbelief was one thing between consenting intellectuals in private,

but if it spread through society, morality would collapse.

I want, he said, my lawyer, tailor, valets, even my wife, to believe in God.

I think that if they do, I shall be robbed less and cheated less.

For the greater part of human history, religion has been seen as the foundation of morality.

In Dostoevsky's words, if God did not exist, all would be permitted.

But this belief must seem to us now decidedly strange.

Whether or not we believe in God, we inhabit a culture in which religious teachings are marginal to many people's moral choices.

When did we last hear in a television discussion or a newspaper editorial,

the simple assertion that something was wrong because God or religious doctrine said so?

Even a religious leader who said this would nowadays be branded a fundamentalist.

Our moral language has been effectively secularized.

Religion enters our conversations obliquely and with embarrassment.

Yet society survives. The world continues uninterrupted on its course.

What's hard for us to understand in retrospect is how anyone could have thought otherwise.

But they did. Believers and unbelievers alike.

No one more so than the man who, more than anyone, severed morality from religion, Friedrich Nietzsche.

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