What's Religion Got to Do With It?

There are many days when the moral sensitivities of this nation seem dulled beyond redemption. A few moments watching TV or sampling the offerings down at the cineplex generally offer all the evidence one might need.

And yet, every so often it is possible to catch a glimpse of a surviving moral wisdom in the American people, at least a majority of them. The opposition to cloning that surfaces in Thursday's ABC News/Beliefnet poll offers one such glimpse. Sixty percent say cloning animals should be illegal in the United States; 60% oppose "therapeutic cloning," the cloning of a human embryo to produce medical treatments. And 87 percent say it should be against the law to produce a child through cloning. The opponents told pollsters that they are guided by their religious beliefs.

White evangelical Protestants are among the most likely to oppose all cloning-and 95% of them are opposed to human cloning. Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants are slightly more in favor of some forms of cloning-but the numbers who oppose it are nevertheless overwhelming. Among those who oppose cloning, 40% who oppose human cloning cited religious beliefs as their reason. The numbers were even higher for those opposed to cloning animals (48%) and those opposed to "therapeutic cloning" (49%). (Click

for complete results at ABCNews.com)

Why would religion be such an important factor on this particular issue?

Some moral theorists have concluded that most people feel an intuitive "yuck," and that elegant moral theories are really just ways to articulate that feeling of skin-crawl we all know.

But there is a better way to make sense of moral revulsion. Catholics would locate it in the concept of natural law-the original moral sense given at the creation to all people that enables us to discern right and wrong even apart from biblical revelation. Reformed Protestants use the language of common grace to get at the same idea. The concept includes the belief that God makes knowledge of his will available to all people through a variety of means, including the witness of an uneasy conscience.

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