Can Evangelical Ethics Become More Evangelical?

Allow me to start with reflections on how ethics tends to be viewed and practiced in evangelical contexts.  These observations are made based on my own location in evangelical contexts, such as churches, seminaries and mission organizations, over the last 35 years, and as an academically trained Christian social ethicist. Starting with these observations will help locate my responses to the important issues raised in the discussions this month on “Evangelicalism and Morality.”

While evangelicals may claim that the Bible is authoritative in ethics, how Scripture’s authority actually applies to making moral judgments is another matter.  My hunch is that most evangelicals view the Bible as a rule book or moral manual of sorts for making ethical decisions.  The hermeneutical difficulties of this approach should be obvious. Not only is this approach to Scripture’s role in ethics reductionistic, it also reflects an understanding that ethics is simply making decisions or following rules. This is related to the tendency in evangelical contexts to conflate ethics with apologetics, so that defending the right thing becomes the right thing to do. The Bible in this method functions as a collection of a bunch of position papers on select topics, ones that are perhaps important to evangelicals but few others.  It’s quite easy in my view to make universal moral statements about how things should be, and then lob them from pulpits and podiums, often quite shrilly.

But this is not the task of ethics.  Ethics does not start with the bad behavior of others.  Ethical reflection, responsibility and response start with us, with who we understand ourselves to be in light of God’s call and purposes, what we ought to be about and care about, and how we ought to live.  Moral formation is about learning to live more coherently, with integrity if you will, between what we profess to be true and living truthfully in all areas of life. This is a much harder task than the lobbying for various moralisms for it requires an on-going, honest self-examination of our lives over the course of our lifetime in open conversation with Scripture, Christian community, and with eyes wide open to the realities of our world. Christian moral formation and growing in our ethical sensibilities are concerned with who we are, how we live and what we actually do. I suggest, therefore, that moral formation and the development of character (should) go together given the learned, practiced and concrete dimensions of both. Equal attention and importance must be given to who we are, what we believe about what is “good, true, noble and just” and how act.

Much ink has been spilt over the years on the influence of individualism in American culture, and the particular ways in which individualism informs religious piety and practice. This has also impacted how evangelicals tend to view the moral life, equating ethics with growth in personal piety, fostering a misconception in my view that if one is “right with God,” then one will be right about everything else. This emphasis on the individual as both the target and source of change (i.e. “saved” people will “save” society) contributes to a constructed divide between personal and social ethics.  This impacts how evangelicals tend to use Scripture in ethics and analyze social issues which are often viewed merely as the extension of personal problems or individual moral failures, ignoring the systemic, contextual and historical roots of many social ethical issues.

This has resulted in two evangelical ethical practices.  One, we may read the Bible simply as a source for growth in personal piety while ignoring the very social dimensions and contexts of Scripture, and the moral issues found on its pages:  violence, rape, ethnic pride, tribalism, schisms, economic injustice, abuses of political and religious power, exploitation of others, greed, grabbing and abusing the land, among others. We’re not quite sure what to do with these realities recorded on the pages of our sacred text. Sadly, these issues tend not to raise our moral ire even though it’s difficult to read the Prophets and come out unscathed about our religious, economic and political complicities in the various injustices and oppressions in our world today. Two, while purporting Scripture’s authority in ethics, in actual practice, evangelicals tend to rely on other sources as normative for making moral judgments which often mirror the moral assumptions and reasoning of political ideologies, in either conservative or liberal forms, based largely on individual rights, libertarian freedom of the self, and judicial notions of justice as reward or punishment.

Is it possible for evangelical ethics to actually be more evangelical based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Given hope is a key Christian virtue, I still and must affirm, “Yes!”  What needs to change in our moral orientation and commitments for this to happen?  Perhaps starting with the Kingdom of God as the source of our moral vision will combat the tendency to link the moral vision and ethical sensibilities of the people of God with any one nation, such as the United States.  The development of moral vision should not be an individual task, nor should it be the task of a local congregation or broader denominational community. These are contexts for embodying moral vision but not the source of moral vision. Given the demographic, gender, class, racial, ideological and global segregation of most evangelical churches, I fear moral vision birthed within these limitations would tend to reflect the particular self-interests, economic assumptions, political proclivities, and personal preferences of those “at the table” making these determinations. Instead, starting with the Kingdom of God based on the trajectory of Scripture and embodied as Gospel would enable evangelicals to be the counter-cultural agents they purport to be but sadly are not. We need to be less concerned with making (forcing?) the United States to be Christendom and direct our attention to helping the Church become more Christian.

Evangelicals also need to confront their moral selectivity and myopia.  If the Kingdom of God is the source of our moral vision, then there is nothing outside the purview of God’s concern.  In other words, evangelicals need to concern themselves with more than just matters of sexuality and the unborn. Evangelicals need a stronger prophetic streak in our ethic, in line with the Scriptures we purport to obey, that challenges injustice in its many forms, and the competing calls for our loyalties and allegiances, even the ones by which we are privileged.  Starting at these points may help our ethic become more evangelical as the good news of God’s reconciling justice for all creation.