Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro recently urged liberal HBO host Bill Maher to realize that he takes much of the Christian worldview for granted, despite rejecting its basis in the Bible.

During a discussion last week on the overtime segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher," Shapiro pressed the comedian to explain why he largely agrees with much of the morality that religious people do.

WOW. Ben Shapiro made the audience ERUPT after stating a simple fact. pic.twitter.com/22WsnswA01BILL MAHER: “The Bible is full of nonsense and wickedness.”

SHAPIRO: “But you and I agree a lot on morality, right? Because we were born in a society built by the Bible. You can think…

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 13, 2025

"Why do you and I agree on morality, like 87.5 percent? I'm a religious Jew, you're an atheist. Why do we agree on those things?" he asked after Maher said the Bible is "full of nonsense and wickedness."

"Because we probably grew up a few miles from each other in a Western society that has several thousand years of biblical history behind it," Shapiro said. "And so you can think that you hit that triple and you formed your own morality, but the reality is, you were born morally on third base."

When Maher suggested modern morality and the ideals of the Founding Fathers emerged from the Enlightenment, Shapiro noted the Enlightenment did not come from a vacuum and that Thomas Jefferson assumed much from the biblical worldview, despite refusing to believe in its supernatural claims.

"Thomas Jefferson used the morality of the Bible when he was ripping all the miracles out of the Bible," Shapiro said, referencing the Jefferson Bible, a compilation of passages from the Gospels that Jefferson made in 1820 by physically cutting verses about Jesus' miracles.

Noting that "cut flowers die," Shapiro said the commonly assumed morality in a historically Christian society can linger for some time even after the society ceases to be Christian.

"If the flower is the result of the root, and then you cut the flower, you can live on with a secular humanistic morality, be a moral person, be a good person, but it does not systemically maintain," he said, adding atheists have "no actual outgrowth from a basis of belief that this is fundamentally demanded of you by a higher power."

"The values that you believe are not things that can just be reasoned to, because they assume things that are not in evidence, like the inherent value of humanity," he said.

The exchange echoed an appearance the late Charlie Kirk made on Maher's "Club Random Podcast" in April, when Kirk pressed Maher over the same argument and urged him to answer on what basis an atheist can assert what is morally good or evil.

"How do you think society best determines what is good?" Kirk asked, to which Maher replied, "That's a great question. Isn't that what government is always wrestling with? What makes society good?"

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— Merica ???????? (@Merica197138) April 22, 2025

Maher went on to dismiss the idea that morality has to be based on divine authority and judgment, and suggested a sense of good and evil is "intrinsic."

"If it's intrinsic, then why is it that a lot of countries that don't have Christianity struggle to come to these realizations?" Kirk asked.

In May, Tucker Carlson and BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock suggested that Maher has not come to terms with the importance of eternity, which Carlson said is the basis of wisdom.

"Understanding just how little power you have, understanding that what really matters is what comes after this — those are the roots of wisdom. And I feel like [Maher] has none of that at all, so I don't listen to a single word he says, ever," he said.

Whitlock echoed Carlson at the time, noting that Maher's defense of core Western values, such as freedom of speech, contradicts his rejection of the Christian religion from which they emerged.

Maher has increasingly pushed back against the intolerance of the "woke" radical Left in recent years, and one of his "Real Time" monologues in 2023 went viral when he criticized those in academia who deride Western civilization.

"Maher is starting to figure out there is no free speech without Christianity," Whitlock said, adding that ideas such as forgiveness, tolerance and the ability to acknowledge one's frailty are inherently biblical.