Christian Ethics Is Not Politics

The Collapse of a Discipline into the Art of the Possible

One of the most depressing developments within the discipline of Christian ethics over the last 20 years has been the way in which Christian ethics has effectively become a cipher for political negotiation.

Here’s what I mean by this: ethics has become synonymous with being a political actor.

---

This collapse has come in several phases.

Back in the 1960s, it was fairly common place for discussions of the moral life to take place around conversations of what it means to be responsible or to make a decision, or, what the various virtues contribute to our lives. This is not to say that there weren’t numerous people working on what is known as social ethics—what it means to engage the moral life in public in its many dimensions, such as medicine, politics, economics, or government.

But over time, the earlier concerns of moral philosophy became collapsed into how they contributed to public goods, almost without remainder.

There were various people who recognized that this was happening and attempted to either come to terms with it by treating ethics as existing under certain conditions only, such that the moral action is that which is possible within a given context without remainder. Others attempted to reclaim the language of virtue, as having to do first with our character, developed overtime, and exercised within moral communities, letting public life grow out of those commitments.

I find myself large in the second camp for two reasons. First, while it seems reasonable to say that people are always influenced by their communities and by their relationships to public life, to say that a person is nothing more than a function of society is a dangerous proposition. Secondly, it assumes that the only solutions to civic life are those which come first from collective determinations, and then trickle down into the habits and practices of individuals. Those concerned with the rise of AI, institutional overreach, and bureaucracy do the work here of asking who it is that is providing the definition for the public about what is good and true and right.

But even among the second group, there is a resurgence of interest in virtue primarily as civic, as it relates to our corporate commitments.

Consider how many times you’ve heard in the last decade that the prime mandate of a Christian is to love their neighbor as themselves. And as well meaning as this is, this neglects that this is, in fact, not the first commandment. More insidiously, this is once again collapsing the moral life into only what it means for the political.

---

In the wake of the announcement that JD Vance would be the nomination for the president, commentary broke down in one of two predictable directions: people either touted his proposals in support of working class, economics, or people cited his inflammatory statements regarding immigration and wokeness.

In other words, you see reflected in the reactions yesterday the collapse of moral thinking into political thinking. Either Vance was touted as good precisely because of his political acumen, or if his virtue was impugned, it was precisely for social policy reasons. In both cases, what counts as the moral is determined by the political.

Hartmut Rosa, in his recent book, describes what a theory of society is about in this way:

It would be wrong to understand the term “relationship to the world”, simply as the relationship of people to their world or environment, for human beings in the world or not, a priori, given, and then enter into a relationship with one another. Instead, they only emerge from their reciprocal relatedness. The relation and the elements related originate together.

In other word, the world we live in, and the people in it, exist in a dynamic relationship, and if you collapse those two together, you have eliminated what makes people people.

By subsuming the first commandment into the second commandment, God is swallowed by the world and people into a theory of being human, and all we have left is ethics as the art of the possible, the socially beneficial, but not the true.