Three years ago, I started my practice of witchcraft. My father had grown up Methodist, and still held those beliefs even into his period of agnosticism. One day, he asked me something. “If you don’t follow the Bible, or have any major code of religion, what keeps you from murdering and stealing at will?” I didn’t really have an answer for him because I thought it was so simple that I didn’t need to explain it. I don’t go out murdering and stealing at will because it’s not conducive to my life and it does not aid me or anyone else in any way. I run into this “moral dilemma” a lot and sometimes I find that some really believe that they need something external to tell them how to be a person (not talking about any person or sect in particular). I do also think that this idea has the same emotional roots as the desire for external validation, especially in the context of social media. Performative kindness has seen such a rise in social media that it’s impossible not to have seen some sort of video where an influencer is offering monetary or food assistance to someone in need. Many of these videos have been outed as disingenuous, and I can’t help but wonder how we got to this point of performative morality. I mean, I’m sure that the original teachings of most religions speak strictly against things like this, so why do it and proclaim that one is following the words of their deity? Like most things in society, it’s to fulfill the needs of ego, either by directly appealing to such, or indirectly, like appealing to society. All of it really does circle back to ego, though. We mostly see performative morality in the form of purity culture, often based heavily in religion. Linda Kay Klein’s book, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, does a stellar job of investigating this relationship and the trauma that results from growing up with it from a young age. This type of morality shapes self-image, behavior patterns, brain chemistry, and trauma responses. It’s used as a shackle for many, preventing healthy relationships with things like the body, the mind, health, and with other people as well. When you become afraid of a perceived lack of morality, those fears ingrain themselves in the very structure of your being. It can take a person years to process their way through them, and some aren’t ever able to truly move past them.
This article is really informative and well-written. You should definitely consider submitting it to articles and other newspaper publications.