“Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. Yet the transformation in the first four centuries not just in the fortunes of Christianity but also in the ethical ideas that animated it reveals the flexibility of religious precepts. Believers may see religious ethics as absolute. They have to, in order to believe. But God Himself appears to be highly pragmatic. The absoluteness of religious precepts can seem unforgiving, less so the precepts themselves. The success of religious morality derives from its ability to cut its beliefs according to social needs while at the same time insisting that such beliefs are sacred because they are God-given.”