A secular framework for understanding influence
Recently, I came across a question on Facebook:
“Atheists, how are you coping with knowing that the Western mind is so thoroughly Christian that even most secular values are ‘expressed’ versions of Christian ethics?”
My immediate response was simple: I’m teaching people the concept of leveragism.
And then I had to laugh a little. No I'm not.
To almost everyone else, "leveragism" probably sounds like nonsense. It's not that I haven't talked about it at all. But up until this point, it's only been alluded to in some of the writing I have done over the years. Never fully called out as a concept. And there's reasons for that.
What is leveragism? Fair question. It’s a concept that has meant a great deal to me for a long time, but I’ve never really given it much public life. I mentioned being a "leveragist" in my memoir, but otherwise it has mostly existed in my own head, reappearing over the years whenever I found myself thinking about power, belief, fairness, and the strange advantages some people seem to inherit just by speaking with enough certainty.
This post is my attempt to explain it.
The origins of leveragism
The earliest form of this idea showed up around fifteen years ago, when I was first leaving the cult I had grown up in. Back then, I was thinking about atheism in a much more confrontational and structural way. I even created a Facebook page for something I called the Leveragist Church of Atheism.
What I was reaching for, even then, was the feeling that atheism lacked a real leverage backbone in public life. Religious belief seemed to come with built-in advantages. It came with cultural deference, legal protection, moral authority, and a kind of rhetorical shortcut. The believer could say, “God says so,” and often skip past any burden of deeper reflection. Meanwhile, the nonbeliever was expected to explain, justify, soften, and defend.
At the time, I thought maybe atheism needed its own type of church to answer that imbalance.
But I never moved forward with it. Partly because I worried about how it would be received, and partly because I was concerned I was in danger of reproducing the same kind of dogmatism I was trying to escape. That mattered to me. So I left the page up, let the idea sit, and kept living.
A few years later, The Satanic Temple arrived on the scene, acting with the same sort of leverage that I had envisioned necessary.
But I felt the concept didn't really end there, and I never really stopped thinking about it.
Over the years, the ideas kept resurfacing whenever I ran into systems or people who seemed to wield certainty itself as power. It became useful to me as a way of thinking about atheism, but also as a way of thinking about authority more broadly. Eventually, years later, it made its way into my memoir. That was not the beginning of the idea. It was just one of the first times I put it into words publicly.
In the book, I wrote:
“Much more I am a leveragist. If it’s acceptable for a group to use their body, their wealth, their deity, or any other sort of unquestionable God to silence you, it is fully acceptable to leverage everything you possess to topple those deified convictions. There is no untouchable, catch-all state of being that has all the answers in the real world.”
That line came late. The thinking behind it came much earlier.
What is leveragism?
Leveragism is my way of describing how people and institutions use leverage to gain advantage, protect authority, justify power, and disconnect others from the common good.
At its simplest, it begins with this idea: human beings are connected to the common good through things like empathy, pain, need, conscience, and mutual recognition. Those are the things that tether us to each other. They are the basis of moral life.
But people also look for ways around that tether.
They look for leverage.
Sometimes that leverage is God. Sometimes it is nihilism. Sometimes it is ideology, biology, tradition, hierarchy, wealth, or institutional prestige. The common thread is the same: a person or institution appeals to something that presents itself as unquestionable, and uses it to shut down inquiry, excuse harm, or exempt itself from ordinary moral accountability.
That is where leveragism begins.
A working definition might be this:
Leveragism is a moral framework for understanding how influence is used to connect or disconnect individuals from the common good, especially through claims of certainty, authority, and exemption.
Authority as leverage
One of the strongest patterns I kept noticing over the years was that very different worldviews can function in very similar ways.
A religious absolutist may say, “God says so.”
A nihilist may say, “Nothing matters.”
An ideologue may say, “The doctrine is settled.”
A biological absolutist may say, “Nature determines everything.”
These are not the same beliefs. But they can all operate as leverage when they are used to cut off empathy, flatten complexity, and excuse domination.
That is what interests me. Not just what people believe, but what those beliefs do when they are used as force multipliers in human relationships and social systems.
This is also why I still think the concept is especially useful from an atheist perspective. Atheism, at least in my experience, often has to learn to live without borrowed absolutes. It has to reason more openly, and more vulnerably. That does not make atheists automatically better, obviously. Nihilism can become its own absolutism too. But it does mean atheism can offer a clearer view of how much power society still grants to religious certainty just for being religious.
Religious freedom, or religious leverage?
At its best, freedom of religion is supposed to protect people in the practice of their beliefs. That makes sense. The point was not to create untouchable institutions. The point was to protect conscience.
But in practice, religion often receives a kind of institutional leverage that goes far beyond freedom of belief. Religion gets treated as though it carries a special exemption from ordinary civic accountability. And that can become dangerous.
When someone argues that their Christianity is being oppressed because they are not allowed to subject a trans child to conversion therapy, or because they are expected to respect a trans coworker’s pronouns, that is not a neutral exercise of private belief. That is institutional and rhetorical leverage being used to claim too much power.
You can hold your beliefs. But your institution does not become morally special just because religion is attached to it. Your certainty does not become sacred merely because it is old, familiar, or popular.
That imbalance is one of the reasons I kept returning to leveragism.
Leveragism and the common good
The concept has become broader for me over time. It is not only about religion now, even if religion was one of its starting points and remains one of its clearest applications.
Leveragism is about recognizing when leverage serves the common good and when it breaks it.
Empathy is one of the main connectors between the individual and the common good. When leverage helps restore empathy, restore balance, expose domination, or challenge false authority, it can be ethical. When leverage is used to sever empathy, excuse cruelty, or shield power from scrutiny, it becomes destructive.
That is why I do not see leveragism as a doctrine of pure aggression. It is not a permission slip for cruelty. It is closer to a philosophy of counterweight.
If a system claims unquestionable authority, then it is fair to question it.
If a structure uses certainty to dominate others, then it is fair to resist it.
If a belief exempts itself from accountability while demanding obedience from everyone else, then it is fair to apply pressure against it.
Leveragism and the leveragist
I think there is a useful distinction here.
Leveragism is the framework.
A leveragist is the person acting within that framework.
A leveragist, as I think of the term, is not a prophet, not a believer, and not simply a victim. A leveragist is a counterweight: someone willing to use conceptual, rhetorical, emotional, or structural leverage to challenge systems that present themselves as morally untouchable.
That does not mean anything goes. It means that false innocence should not be granted to power simply because power speaks in the language of God, nature, tradition, or inevitability.
Is secular morality just Christian ethics in disguise?
My answer is no.
Not because Christianity had no influence on Western ethics. Obviously it did. But empathy, fairness, reciprocity, and the common good do not belong to Christianity. They are older, wider, and more human than that.
What religion often does is claim authorship over moral intuitions that arise much more broadly out of human social life.
Leveragism starts from the opposite direction. It does not ask which divine system morality comes from. It asks how moral connection is maintained or broken in actual lived human systems.
That is a secular question. And I think it is a powerful one.
Why I’m writing about this now
Part of the answer is simple: because I think the time is right.
We are living in a moment when claims of certainty are everywhere. Religious certainty. Ideological certainty. Biological certainty. Cynical certainty. Institutional certainty. And all of them are competing for power.
I do not think we are well served by pretending those claims are all equally harmless, or by treating every assertion of conscience as morally self-justifying.
I also know that if I say, “I’m teaching them the concept of leveragism,” then at some point I need to actually put the concept somewhere people can read it.
So this is the beginning.
I’m planning to write more about this, and eventually to expand it into a larger book project: The Moral Framework of Leveragism: Power, Empathy, and the Common Good. That book will be broader and more universal. This post is more grounded in the atheist side of the idea, because that is where it began for me and where some of its clearest uses still are.
But I think the framework reaches further than atheism. It applies anywhere people use certainty as leverage, and anywhere others need a language for pushing back.
A beginning, not an ending
Leveragism is not a doctrine, a movement, or a demand for allegiance. It is a lens—a way of understanding how power operates in the world and how individuals can respond to it with clarity, empathy, and accountability.
It began as a personal reckoning: an attempt to make sense of authority after leaving a cult, to understand why certainty so often masquerades as truth, and to find language for challenging systems that claim moral immunity. Over time, it evolved into something broader—a framework for recognizing when leverage serves justice and when it distorts it.
At its heart, leveragism asks only this:
Who benefits from unquestionable authority—and who is silenced by it?
Wherever certainty is used to dominate rather than illuminate, leveragism invites scrutiny. Wherever empathy is severed in the name of power, it calls for balance. And wherever institutions claim exemption from accountability, it reminds us that no authority is beyond question.
If you have ever felt the weight of an unquestionable system, or questioned why some voices carry more power than others, then you have already begun to understand leveragism.
This is not the end of the conversation. It is its beginning.
Working definitions
Leveragism: a moral framework for understanding how influence is used to connect or disconnect individuals from the common good, especially through claims of certainty, authority, and exemption.
Leveragist: a secular counterweight who uses available forms of leverage to challenge systems that present themselves as beyond scrutiny.