Does Religion Make People Better?

I have just read for the umpteenth time that ‘morality only become meaningful with religion’ and that ‘without religion anything becomes permissible’, and of course the word ‘religion’ is almost always used to mean belief one or another deity or god. I have long had trouble with these claims, not because I dislike religion but because I like and take an interest in history. I know of few historical facts demonstrating that religious devotion made people better or that being non-religious made people worse. I have just read parts of Nelson Mandela’s Conversations With Myself – letters he wrote and notes he made during his long incarceration. Some parts are this absorbing book are painful to read. The loneliness, the separation from his family, the isolation and the physical hardship caused him, as you would expect, terrible distress. That he didn’t give in to despair as the long years, the slow decades, rolled by says something about his incredible conviction. But it also made me question even more the often-repeated and widely accepted claims mentioned above.

Just a few facts. Apartheid, one of the more wicked and inhuman ideologies of the 20th century, was the brainchild of a group of deeply religious people, the Afrikaans. According to Wikipedia, and I’ve read the same claim elsewhere, Afrikaans have long had the highest rate of consistent churchgoing of any group of people in the world. D. F. Malan who set up the apartheid system in 1948 had studied theology and was an ordained Protestant minister. His successor Hendrick Verwoerd had doctorates in and theology and psychology cum laude and was likewise a conspicuously pious man. Even those Afrikaans who had no part in establishing apartheid were happy to benefit from it, endorse it and vote for those who implemented it – as they regularly attended church – churches that were racially segregated after the Churches Native Laws Amendment Act of 1957. And as apartheid met with more and more resistance from people like Nelson Mandela, pious Afrikaans lied, bribed, fixed elections and stacked courts in their favor; they beat, tortured and murdered their opponents to keep apartheid going. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission even established that P. W Botha, another deeply religious man, had ordered the bombing of the South African Council of Churches headquarters in Johannesburg.

To dismiss Malan’s, Verwoerd’s and the others’ piety as insincere and self-serving would be to ignore facts. Even their most bitter opponants acknowledged that they were staunchly religious men who prayed and read the Bible regulary. In fact, it was probably their firm, albeit it misguided, belief that they were doing what God had ordained that made them so determined to uphold apartheid. Oh, and just so one particular religion doesn’t get all the thumping, it is equally true that other South African Christians opposed apartheid with a similar determination, and   I know of deeply religious Sinhalese Buddhists who excused and justified some of the worst cruelty of Sri Lanka's civil war.
Nelson Mandela on the other hand, who is quite irreligious, stood up to apartheid long before it was popular to do so, endured decades of cruel imprisonment (and they really were cruel to him) and emerged from this martyrdom seemingly without any  rancor or ill-will and with a readiness to engage with and forgive his former tormentors. So does ‘morality only become meaningful with religion’ and is it true that ‘without religion everything becomes permissible?' I see no evidence for this. People can be deeply and devotedly religious and commit great evil. Likewise, someone could be without any conventional religious conviction and yet have the highest standards of morality and integrity. So it’s not just religious conviction that makes the difference but something or some things else. What?