Dr. Enrico Gnaulati: Christian and Humanist Love Ethics

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/10

Dr. Enrico Gnaulati is a clinical psychologist based in Pasadena, California, and the author of the nationally acclaimed book Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior Is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder. His work has been featured on Al Jazeera America, KPCC Los Angeles, and KPFA Berkeley; in Maclean’s and Prevention magazines; and online at the Atlantic and Salon. Gnaulati talks about secular humanism, contrasting it with traditional Christian views on marriage. They explore differences in power dynamics, intimacy, egalitarianism, and mortality awareness, emphasizing secular humanism’s fairness and personal accountability in long-term relationships, based on “Out with Agape Love and In with Secular Love Ethics.”

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So today, we’re here with Enrico Gnaulati. He is in Altadena, California, United States. I didn’t know about that place; I knew about Pasadena before hearing about it. So, how did you first get into secularism? A quick primer question. 

Enrico Gnaulati: The honest but quick answer is that I studied to be a Catholic priest in rural Scotland as a young teenager. So, I studied to be a Catholic priest from about age 13 and a half to about 17.

That is part of my deep personal history. As a young man, however, I immigrated to the United States. I was in college, where I started to take courses on Western civilization. Intellectually, I imploded at that point, experiencing what I would describe as a form of trauma. I felt that my Catholic upbringing had trapped my mind in a steel cage and so narrowed my understanding of the world that I felt betrayed. Since my early twenties, I’ve moved further away from organized religion. I eventually earned a master’s degree in existential-phenomenological psychology, reflecting my deep interest in existentialism and secular humanistic ways of understanding the world that substituted for that early Catholic conditioning.

That’s a broad answer, but more specifically, the article you’re interviewing me about today, published in Free Inquiry, is adapted from my recently released book, Flourishing Love: A Secular Guide to Lasting Intimate Relationships. In that book, I attempt to reclaim a pro-marriage, pro-intimate partnership perspective from the religious right and argue forcefully for a secular humanistic pro-marriage viewpoint. This has occupied much of my time recently.

Jacobsen: What were the obligations of marital institutions between partners—to themselves, one another, and their church—while growing up in the church or during your formal priestly training? How is marriage ideally supposed to play out within that theological framework?

Gnaulati: In my book and article, I argue that there are fundamentally different ways of thinking about marriage and long-term intimate partnerships. For listeners, when I say marriage, I also include long-term committed partnerships, so I use the term loosely. There are key differences between how secular humanists and people of faith—especially those with conservative views—think of marriage.

The conservative position carries significant moral weight, with accountability to a god or divine presence. You are supposed to make yourself lovable in the eyes of God first and your partner second. There’s a triangular approach to marriage, where being a good person is part of a reward-and-punishment system tied to an afterlife. In contrast, in the secular humanistic tradition, you are accountable to your flesh-and-blood partner. You treat them well because you desire to, not because it’s your moral obligation or because of divine surveillance monitoring how you love, give love, and receive love and determining whether that makes you an upstanding person of faith.

That’s a broad way to differentiate the two. There’s much more I could say. 

Jacobsen: How do you see communities formed around marriage functioning in an inter-belief context? This is an article-related topic, but it’s a fascinating question. I don’t see this explored too much, but your expertise may be helpful here. If you live in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and pluralistic context—religiously speaking—are there any situations in which those formulations of how people should live in partnership come into conflict with one another? Or do people generally find themselves tolerant of different ways of partnering?

Gnaulati: It’s a good question, Scott. One of the reasons the Christian right is doubling down on traditional marriage is because they don’t see it holding up well in a pluralistic social context. In such a setting, there are multiple temptations, greater sexual openness, and views that sex can be used for pleasurable and bonding reasons, not just for procreation.

The more pluralistic and diverse communities become, the more openness there is to shifting sexual norms, and these norms are seen as a direct threat to Christian ideas about marriage. This leads to a more conservative doubling down on what the Christian right believes marriage ought to be. 

Jacobsen: Now, I hear more about Christian nationalism, the Christian right, and so on from Americans—particularly from American freethinkers—than from other countries. So when you see this doubling down on traditional marriage, you also see, within the secular humanist community, a more open acceptance of LGBTI+ ways of partnering. There is greater acceptance of marriage and common-law partnerships, diverse ceremonies and more flexible views on the time people may take before committing to someone. There’s a cosmopolitan appeal to the humanist ethos around partnership. What do you think are the strengths of that ethic, grounded in the principles of universalism, while acknowledging the wide range of ways human beings identify themselves and exist with one another?

Gnaulati: Yes. One way of thinking about it is that those who tend toward a more secular humanist mindset when approaching love and long-term partnerships tend to have a more egalitarian view of relationships than those who are more conservative, religiously speaking. Data shows that these egalitarian relationships are more likely to last longer.

If you have a more equitable, fairness-minded approach to relationships—where love is not about mutual self-sacrifice, as seen in Christian agape love, where Christ gave His life for humanity’s sins—that’s considered the highest form of love in Christian doctrine. This idea promotes radical altruism, where one gives and gives without being mindful of receiving. In contrast, secular humanists tend to be fair-minded. The quality of love you give is inherently connected to the quality of love you receive. There’s mutuality in the arrangement: we look out for each other, for each other’s happiness, and try to maintain fairness in the relationship. There’s no power imbalance; power is shared equally. These mindsets are more likely to be secular and humanistic in nature; whereas, among conservative Christians, you’re more likely to see a power hierarchy.

There’s always that struggle in faith communities, where people say, “Yes, we’re going to try to be fair, reasonable, and equitable between the genders, without power imbalances.” However, they can’t escape the underlying hierarchy: God, man, woman, child. That power hierarchy always lurks in the background. In marriages where there’s an erosion of power-sharing, where there’s an ideological belief in patriarchy and the superiority of men, even if some data shows that these marriages can last, they tend to be satisfactory, not flourishing marriages. It’s important to differentiate between the two.

Jacobsen: Are you, in some sense, suggesting that Christian fundamentalist marriages are bounded in a way that limits them to functioning at a low level? Is that a valid interpretation?

Gnaulati: Yes, there’s some data to suggest that.

At times, when I’m at my most ideological, I take the position that to have a flourishing partnership, you need a secular humanistic mindset. In this context, there’s accountability to a flesh-and-blood partner. You’re acting kindly, generously, forgivingly, and so on from a place of genuine human desire to be the best person you can be with someone you love, rather than acting in those ways as part of a rewards and punishment system tied to an afterlife. There’s a qualitative difference between being kind, generous and forgiving from a place of human desire versus doing so out of moral duty.

Jacobsen: I would differentiate those two. Yet here we are, a non-expert me talking to an expert you, and we’re noting the power structure between the divine, man, woman, and child. And, of course, here we are, two men discussing these things. In that hierarchy, women hold a much lower status than men. Does this obligation, this divine command for men to be in charge, affect their psychology or frame of mind over time in a way that subtly or overtly oppresses women? I don’t necessarily mean domestic abuse, but in more nuanced ways, where women are tacitly encouraged to suppress themselves and be suppressed.

Gnaulati: Yes. 

Jacobsen: They have to be inauthentic.

Gnaulati: It manifests in small, big, quasi-invisible, and highly visible ways. One thing I write about—and I don’t mean to shock your viewers or listeners—is the difference in orgasm rates between women in Christian marriages and those in non-Christian or less religious marriages. Women in Christian marriages are less likely to orgasm. I get somewhat sarcastic in my argument, saying, “Wow, there’s an example of men not honouring their Christian duty to make their wives happy.” Data shows that about 48% of Christian women in committed relationships usually or always orgasm, compared to about 65% of women in the general population. That’s a small example of how these dynamics can play out, even at the level of base pleasure.

Jacobsen: What about the sociopolitics of ordinary life and living together with a partner?

Gnaulati: Yes, exactly.

In an unequal power arrangement versus an equal power arrangement, if your Christian duty as a woman is to be self-sacrificing, submissive, and subservient to a degree, how much self-respect can you have when standing up for yourself? How can you ensure a balanced division of labour at home or a balanced marriage where burdens and benefits are shared equitably? This balance is essential to any healthy long-term intimate relationship—the constant balancing of giving and gaining is always there.

We often say that people in relationships shouldn’t keep score, but it’s a normal human tendency to do so. Explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously, people want things to be equitable. They want to feel they’re getting as much as they’re giving, and vice versa.

Jacobsen: What does the research say now, if anything, about the effect on women in those marriages? Are there higher levels of resentment toward husbands in Christian marriages as compared to more secular humanist marriages? Does that show up in research as statistically significant, with decent effect sizes regarding self-reported emotions in those states?

Gnaulati: I’m not familiar with specific research on this, so I’m trying to figure out how to comment in an informed way, but as a psychologist, I have some credibility when it comes to speculating. Let’s not forget that for certain subsets of people, regardless of gender, there can be psychological safety in giving up power and entrusting it to someone they perceive as superior.

So, you can’t always assume there’s resentment. Sometimes, it can be the reverse. There can be a pathological passivity, as the great psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote about—a desire to escape from freedom by giving up one’s freedoms and letting someone else make life decisions. This can provide psychological comfort and safety, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for that individual. Many people may be subservient and submissive without necessarily feeling resentful. They get used to relinquishing power and may even acquire a certain comfort or contentedness from it.

Jacobsen: Were there any precursors to Christian formulations of marriage that were sufficiently distinct to merit such a title, where the Christian formulation of marriage improved upon earlier forms?

Gnaulati: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I’m still determining. At least in my understanding of historical forces, there was probably a codification of normal human virtues—loyalty, decency, honesty, generosity, forgiveness, and so on. These things make relationships work and can be explained as normal human virtue rather than as Christian moral duties. One of the benefits of Christian marriage may have been to codify those virtues. I don’t know enough about the history of marriage to comment in an informed way about how it evolved. However, there were likely economic reasons too—inheritance patterns and such—that made marriage an important social institution from an economic, not necessarily a religious, standpoint. I don’t know enough about it to give you a more in-depth answer. 

Jacobsen: What should be the big takeaway for making a secular humanist marriage work compared to a traditional Christian one? What could potentially evolve the current secular humanist formulation? Are there areas for improvement, given that we are bound to an empirical moral philosophy? We’re open to new information which could further update our moral and philosophical foundations.

Gnaulati: We’re discovering that strong, flourishing marriages, as I’ve said, are anchored in a fairness and power-sharing mindset. There are other factors, too, such as the importance of physical affection and sex—versus not just for procreation, but for bonding and pleasure too. There’s definite data to support that.

The problem with a religious view of marriage is that it often doesn’t emphasize the importance of intimacy—not just sexual intercourse, but forms of physical affection like kissing, hugging, and holding hands. All the data shows that the strongest marriages embody an abundance of physical intimacy at various levels. That’s crucial.

What’s unique about a secular humanist perspective—and I write about this—is the embrace of mortality awareness as a motivator to be the best, most loving version of yourself in relationships. Nobody wants to die with deathbed regrets, thinking they could have been nicer, kinder, more generous, or more forgiving as a partner. That constant, low-grade, healthy awareness of mortality we carry as secular humanists can motivate us to be the best loving version of ourselves in relationships.

Jacobsen: Enrico, I appreciate your time today. We explored a lot, especially comparing and contrasting views on marriage.

Gnaulati: Thank you.

Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices. In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.