A Thinking Reed

Can Christians separate "personal" and "social" morality?

Written by

Lee M.

in

Melinda Henneberger accuses Christian conservatives of “overturning the Gospels” by focusing on sexual morality rather than economic justice:

We as a nation—a proudly, increasingly loudly Christian nation—have somehow convinced ourselves that the selfish choice is usually the moral one, too. (What a deal!) You know how this works: It’s wrong to help poor people because “handouts” reward dependency and thus hurt more than they help. So, do the right thing—that is, walk right on by—and by all means hang on to your hard-earned cash.

Thus do we deny the working poor a living wage, resent welfare recipients expected to live on a few hundred dollars a month, object to the whopping .16 percent of our GNP that goes to foreign aid—and still manage to feel virtuous about all of the above.

Which is how “Christian” morality got to be all about other people’s sex lives—and incredibly easy lifting compared to what Jesus actually asks of us. Defending traditional marriage? A breeze. Living in one? Less so. Telling gay people what they can’t do? Piece o’ cake. But responding to the wretched? Loving the unlovable? Forgiving the ever-so-occasionally annoying people you actually know? Hard work, as our president would say, and rather more of a stretch.

While I’m sympathetic to a lot of what she says here, it’s too simplistic to say that Christians shouldn’t be worried about sexual ethics. Ms. Henneberger seems to buy into the idea that sexual behavior is essentially “private” and nobody else’s business. But why couldn’t conservatives say the same thing about economic behavior – as the libertarian philospher Robert Nozick put it, what is morally objectionable about “capitalist acts between consenting adults”?

The thing is, Jesus, Paul, and the Christian tradition generally don’t really go out of their way to separate “private” sexual morality from “public” matters of economics. Jesus comes down pretty hard on divorce, and Paul’s admonitions regarding sex are well-known. In Acts the church is notably economically egalitarian, but the Apostles also require Gentile converts to refrain from “sexual impurity” as one of the parts of the law that still apples to them.

Of course, this raises the question of who is being addressed by Christian ethics – the church or society at large? Is there a “minimal” morality that applies to everyone, while Christian morality only applies to Christians? But if that’s so, how can we apply Christian teachings on economics to society as a whole but not its sexual ethics (as liberals sometimes seem to want) or vice versa (as conservatives would like)?

Comments

6 responses to “Can Christians separate "personal" and "social" morality?”

  1. Meg

    To me what divides morality for the church from morality for the church and the world is the question of harm.

    So Christian standards of sexuality should be followed by Christians, but we don’t need to require others to follow them. We can encourage them to live according to Christian standards, but we shouldn’t use law to force them to. Of course if we’re talking about pedophilia and other exploitative behaviors it’s a different matter. Here I’m talking about, say, cohabitation.

    But when someone is harmed, our call to defend the defenseless will sometimes rightly be be acted out in the realm of laws. So it was right for Christians to work against slavery, and it is right for Christians to challenge our nation’s support of despotic governments. And so on.

    That doesn’t mean I think social morality is inherently more important than sexual immorality. It means I’m trying to understand how were are called to be in the world. I believe we’re called to live purely and justly ourselves, and we’re called to love our neighbor, which sometimes means protecting them from harm.

    Meg

    Reply
  2. Lee

    Great comments – thanks for stopping by, Meg!

    Reply
  3. Maurice Frontz

    I think the dichotomy is totally false between personal morality and social morality. Personal morality is social morality because all action is related to other beings.

    What I do supposedly “alone” in my bedroom, with my internet connection, a DVD, or a sex partner is an inherently public act. I have always thought that the thing that makes homosexuality the hot button issue for today is that our sexuality and how we live it is inherently public. What we are talking about is a fundamental change in what people can expect to deal with and actually, who people are expected to be.

    If you wear a wedding ring, people, on the whole, know what you are doing. If you live in the same household, as adults of the opposite sex and more and more often, of the same sex, people know what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be in public for it to be public.

    A friend of mine’s husband is divorcing her for a woman he met at work. This will affect a. him, b. my friend, c. the other woman, d. my friend’s children by him, e. the other woman’s children if she has any, f. future generations, g. the friends, family and coworkers of all involved. I fail to see how this is simply “personal” morality. If it ain’t social, I don’t know what it is.

    Yes, it is problematic and perhaps impossible for Christians to impose “their” morality on the world. But it is not problematic for Christians to pray for others, indeed to beg them, to submit to God in these matters, lest they wreak havoc among others, perhaps a more important point than what happens to themselves.

    As for Ms. Hershberger’s article, it is more an anti-Bush tirade than any sort of serious theological point. She saw an easy shot and she went for it. She herself gets to be very pious while being paid for it – the very same fault she accuses others of.

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  4. Joshie

    Piously pontificating for free like we do is better than her getting paid for it? I’d take the money if I could get it, I don’t know about you guys.

    “Is there a “minimal” morality that applies to everyone, while Christian morality only applies to Christians?”

    I would say yes, and I think the scriptures support this. Paul talks about how, even when they have not heard the law preached, the “gentiles” behave according to it, they are a law unto themselves. There is a universal law (from God) written on the hearts of all, to which the conscience bears witness (Romans 2.12-16).

    There is also the Noahide covenant in Genesis 8.20-9.29 made with all humans, all creatures and the earth itself, prior to the coventants with the patriarchs. The main principle of this covenant is respect for human life. The Noah/Ham/Canaan story in 9.20-27 is very strange, and was probably heavily redacted to make it less risque and more of an ethnic slur, but at the very least, it seems to say that respect for others, especially one’s parents is a part of respecting life. That, it seems should be a basis for a universal morality all can be expected to live up to.

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  5. Lee

    So, it seems there can be at least three “levels” of morality:

    1) Specifically Christian morality

    2) The “minimal morality” that is accessible to everyone (natural law?)

    and

    3) The morality that can or should be enforced by the government/law.

    Do we want to say that 2 is a subset of 1? Or might 1 and 2 actually conflict in places? And do we want to say that 3 is a subset of 2? (i.e. only moral truths that can be agreed to, in principle, by everyone are candidates for state enforcement, but not necessarily all of them?)

    Reply
  6. Joshie

    I’m sort of treading on unfamiliar ground here, so bear with me. I don’t how helpful thinking of subsets and the like is, but if pressed I would say 1 is a subset of 2.

    Both 2 and 1 are from God. I would hesitate to call 2 natural law, since I think Paul makes it clear this is a law on the heart of every person (and perhaps creature), it comes from God (thru Gos’s Wisdom, thru the Spirit) into the person testified to by that person’s conscience, not from God to nature to the person.

    1 is a hightened, clarified, completed version of 2 due to the highened clarified, completed level of communion with the Spirit one experiences in the church. This is a fuller revelation through the Spirit via the preaching and teaching of the Word, study, dialogue, and meditation on the scriptures and the rest of the tradition, and personal revelations trough prayer (ALWAYS clarified and controlled by the tradition and teaching of the church, and intended for the church at large, not a secret intended for one or a select few).

    As for 3, just laws should A. be a reflection of 2; B. be a reflection of the culture and C. deal with the problem of sin and the limitations of human knowledge and action. Those are my unrefined thoughts at the moment.

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