You have probably been in this conversation before.

You’re talking with a friend, a family member, or a stranger online about something you both care deeply about like sexuality, justice, parenting, politics, or faith. No matter what you say, no matter how carefully you explain yourself, it feels like they are hearing a completely different language. You walk away frustrated, maybe a little hurt. You’re convinced either you are the worst communicator in history or that the other person is a wicked fool. To make it worse, they likely feel the same way about you.

What is going on?

A psychologist named Jonathan Haidt tried to answer that question in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. His answer, though he is a non-Christian, is a very useful tool believers can pick up to engage our deeply divided world about questions of what is good, beautiful, and true.

In this book, Haidt sets out to understand why moral disagreements are so bitter, so persistent, and so impervious to argument. He discovered that most moral disagreements are not primarily about facts or logic, but values. You cannot win an argument about what is wrong if the other person doesn’t agree with you about what is valuable. Actions, and our judgments of them, are downstream values.

Imagine you are trying to explain why a piece of music is beautiful to someone, but they’re hard of hearing. You are not wrong about the music. They are not stupid. They just don’t hear what you hear. That is, in essence, what is happening in many of our most heated moral debates.

To get somewhere in conversation, we need to go past what people are saying to why their saying it.

Six Moral Foundations: A Map of Human Conscience

Haidt developed what he calls Moral Foundations Theory. He identified six core moral “taste receptors”, innate psychological systems that all human beings carry, but that different people and cultures dial up or down in different proportions.

Here they are:

1. Care / Harm

The deep human instinct to protect the vulnerable and avoid causing suffering. This is the foundation behind compassion, kindness, and outrage at cruelty. This asks. “Is someone being hurt?”

2. Fairness / Cheating

The instinct for justice and reciprocity. It wants people to be treated rightly and cheaters to not prosper. The questions here are, “Is this fair? Is someone being cheated?”

3. Loyalty / Betrayal

The instinct that binds communities together. It values those who are faithful to the group and condemns those who betray it. It inquires, “Is someone being disloyal? Is the community being protected?”

4. Authority / Subversion

The instinct for social order, leadership, and legitimate hierarchy. It recognizes that some structures, traditions, and authorities deserve respect and obedience for the good of all people. It’s focus, “Is someone undermining legitimate order?”

5. Sanctity / Degradation

The instinct that some things are sacred, noble, or pure by nature. To degrade these things is genuinely wrong, regardless of whether anyone is “harmed” in a physical sense or even if consent is offered. Its question, “Is something sacred being profaned or degraded?”

6. Liberty / Oppression

The instinct that individuals deserve freedom from domination and coercion. When people feel that a powerful force is crushing the rights of ordinary people, this is the line they feel is being crossed. “Is someone being unjustly controlled or oppressed?”

Haidt’s key finding is this: all six foundations are real, all six are human, and all six are weighted very differently by different people. To use an example from modern American politics, Progressives tend to rely most heavily on Care, Fairness, and Liberty. Conservatives draw more evenly from all six, making sure Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity are not forgotten along the way.

This is not a small difference in emphasis. It means that in many moral arguments, one side is raising a genuine moral concern and the other side is not hearing it at all because they don’t share the concern.

Why This Matters for Christians

Why should a Christian care about the theory of a secular psychologist? Three reasons.

1. It’s Largely True

The moral foundations Haidt identifies are not inventions. They are discoveries. He found them embedded in human cultures across the globe; in Brazil and India, in conservative and progressive communities, in religious and secular settings alike. That kind of cross-cultural universality is exactly what you would expect if these intuitions were part of our created design rather than mere social convention.

Paul writes in Romans 2:15 that Gentiles who have never read the Law “show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.” Haidt’s research is a perfect example of that truth. These moral foundations are tattooed onto every human heart by its Maker.

2. It Explains What the Bible Says

The Bible tells us that the human conscience is real but corrupted. It is there, but it is disordered. This means all humans have genuine moral instincts, but sin has distorted how we apply them and which ones we emphasize. Haidt shows that people do not lack morality, we just use it badly. We amplify certain instincts while suppressing others. We call good evil and evil good. Again, not because we have no moral sense, but because our sense of morality has been bent by sin and its ensuing stupidity.

Haidt does moral psychology. The Bible is does moral theology. They are looking at the same human being from different angles or reading different books, but, in many ways, they’re the same thing.

3. It Makes Us Better at Conversations

When you are talking with someone who doesn’t share your Christian convictions, it is helpful to remember they are not operating in a moral vacuum. They do have moral foundations, they are just weighting and applying those foundations differently than you are.

Haidt’s research reveals one of the main reasons conversations about sexuality, gender, life, justice, and family go nowhere: we often share completely different moral concerns. Christians who speak about Sanctity, “this degrades what is holy,” are dismissed as Puritanical weirdos by progressives. Progressives raise the moral concern of Care, “this hurts people,” and the conservative may be eager to dismiss their claim as manipulative emotionalism. In both, the conversation dies before it begins.

Here is how Haidt’s list helps me: if I can learn to identify which moral foundations someone is reasoning from, I can stop arguing past them and start speaking to what they actually care about. You are not compromising. You are translating.

Here’s an example: you are not going to convince someone who weights Care and Liberty above all else that pornography or sexually provocative entertainment is harmful primarily by appealing to Sanctity. But you can appeal to the harm it does to real people. You could point out how they exploit women in the industry, destroy marriages, rewire the minds and pursuits of the young men who watch it. If I begin with Care and Fairness, I am speaking their language. Then, once I have established the real, shared moral common ground, I’ve a fighting chance to produce more light than heat. This is not manipulation. It is wisdom. It is the difference between throwing a rope and watching someone drown and actually tying the knot where they can grab it.

A Caution for Christians

Before I close, one honest caution. Haidt’s theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. He is telling us how people actually reason about morality, not what morality ultimately is. He is a moral pluralist. He believes all six foundations are equally valid human concerns and that no tradition has a corner on moral truth.

Christians won’t agree with that because God doesn’t. Scripture is clear that moral truth is not merely discovered in our intuitions but revealed by God. The six foundations are real, but they can all be corrupted, misapplied, and weaponized. Care without truth becomes toxic empathy. Fairness without God’s definitions of property rights becomes communism or the worst kinds of DEI. Sanctity without the gospel becomes self-righteous moralism. The foundations need a foundation! The foundation of all foundations is not found by intuition alone but the character of God revealed in Scripture and embodied in Christ.

So, use this as a tool. It is a good one. But use it the way a surgeon uses a scalpel: carefully, in service of something greater than itself.

The Bottom Line

For Christians, Haidt’s framework is both a confirmation of what Scripture says about the universal human conscience and a practical key for engaging people whose moral language feels foreign. Don’t abandon your convictions, but learn to translate them.