Are Christian ethics dead in America?

December 5, 2004

This article was published in the Chicago Tribune Dec. 5.

By: Bron Taylor
Bron Taylor is a professor of religion and an expert on Christian ethics at the University of Florida.

The lead article in the most recent issue of the journal Christian Ethics asks, “Can Christian Ethics Be Saved?” If its fate lies in the hands of those conservative Christians who labored so effectively to re-elect President Bush, then the answer is a resounding, “No.”

Exit polls show the issue of moral values took center stage during the 2004 presidential election: 79 percent of the voters who stated that moral values were the most important issue to them voted for Bush. What is equally clear is that a certain kind of conservative Christianity has decisively shaped what these voters mean by values–and what they assume is the heart of Christian ethics.

I took up the study of Christian ethics as an undergraduate student, continued it at an interdenominational evangelical seminary, eventually earning a doctorate with theological ethics as its core.

As an undergraduate, I was moved by the teaching of the Hebrew prophets who spoke out in God’s name for the poor, decrying social inequality, and was surprised to discover that Jesus spoke with similar concerns, if more gently.

I was also inspired by the contemporary expression of such ethics in the writings and life of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. This led me to the seminary, where I focused my studies on Christian ethics. Building on this prophetic tradition was Reinhold Niebuhr, who blended patriotism with a loyal critique of inequality and a voice for social justice, challenging his more prophetic brethren with a conservative’s realism about the limits of love in human society. To these voices were added the historic peace churches and their leaders, such as John Howard Yoder. This branch of Christianity underscored the point that Jesus began his ministry by announcing that he had come to preach a gospel (literally “good news”) to the poor, and that this good news had a social justice dimension.

These relatively small churches reminded the wider Christian community that loving one’s enemies and practicing non-violence were central to the identity of Jesus and his earliest followers. And to these voices were added liberation theologians who spoke for and from the social margins and were, generally speaking, deeply informed by Roman Catholic social teachings. They claimed that taking a “preferential option for the poor in history” was the foremost Christian duty. Some of them concluded that overturning despotic regimes that trample the poor was the necessary means for exercising that option.

As time went by, additional voices joined this multivocal, contested chorus to urge the protection of the natural world as God’s created order. Despite the many voices and disagreements, two central convictions animated the ferment: The teachings of Jesus enjoin moral advocacy on behalf of the poor and active peacemaking on behalf of the world.

“What you do for the least of these you’ve done for me,” Jesus said, which in Christian theology means that caring for the poor is akin to caring for God. More famously, Jesus urged his followers to be agents of social healing, for they are to love their enemies, after all, and “blessed are the peacemakers.” The internal debates those engaged in Christian ethics were immersed in were more about how to promote social justice, civil rights and peace than about whether these were central to the teachings of Jesus. These discussions occurred not only in seminaries and among intellectuals, but also in at least some mainstream and evangelical churches.

One might expect, then, that there would be much to celebrate in the 2004 national election. Polling data indicate that values, which in our culture are importantly shaped by Christian ethical understandings, played a decisive role. But probing the data further we find that these values have come to mean opposition to gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research.

There is no gospel for the poor to be seen in these data. Nor is there moral restraint on violence, which has been a major contribution of Christianity to the Western world. The possibility of a just war, in this tradition, requires many of the judicious virtues that are sorely lacking in the Bush administration, including requirements that warfare be waged only as a last resort, after all other means of redressing the wrong have been undertaken, and when the outcome is more likely to be a more just and peaceful world than if the violence were not undertaken.

Is that kind of critically engaged, justice- and peace-promoting Christian ethics dead in America? It has certainly become impotent.

Progressive Christian and political forces need not, however, continue to cede the values’ high ground in either the churches or politics. But they must take up the ethical challenge by quoting publicly Jesus’ teachings and reflecting regularly on the compassionate values his life embodied. They must be specific, labeling the antipathy to gay marriage for what it is: mean-spirited and out of synch with Jesus’ injunction not to judge others.

Even more important, they must more forcefully articulate that Christian values require more than fidelity to one’s own immediate and religious family.

Christian ethics requires a consistent commitment to social justice, peacemaking, tolerance and environmental sustainability. Yet we are unlikely to move in any of these directions if the majority of theologically conservative Christians do not convert to just such an understanding.