Moral Witness in Society: False Starts and Slow Finishes

It's Time to Forget Altering Society: There is No "Society".

Recently, I had the chance to publish a review of Melissa Florer-Bixler’s How to Make An Enemy over at Sojourners. (The review is paywalled, unfortunately, but I’m happy to try to link to it if you email). I read it not only because of my ongoing interests in social conflict and peacemaking—a topic which has occupied probably the last ten years of professional writing in one form or another—but because her thesis is something like this: what is needed is not more conciliation, but more clearly distinguished conflicts. Better to draw the lines and to stake ground when it comes to moral questions within church, then to be non-specific and ultimately, be of no help to anyone.

In principle, I’m okay with this: it’s better to have clearly delineated positions than to try to have a muddy middle in which no one is really sure what’s being argued about. Apart from some quibbles about how we define what moral commitments are ride-or-die for Christians, my main problem with the book was that I’m not sure how a person gets into that kind of community apart from already having adopted the moral position. To put a finer point on it, if a person has adopted the right kind of moral convictions apart from being a part of the church, I’m not sure what being a part of the church really adds to the process here. This isn’t an argument against moral formation in church, or to say that non-church folk can’t be moral people, but simply to say that it seems to create a scenario where your moral convictions are reflected in your church commitments, not one in which churchgoing alters your convictions.

Case in point: nearly every denomination is “purple” when defined according to the right/left political spectrum. Every denomination—and most churches—find themselves inexorably awkward positions of having to live with multiple moral positions within the same body. It’s not so much a lament at this point so much as an acknowledgment: church life—if it is drawing people from various backgrounds—will not agree with another a priori among many, many things, including many important doctrinal and moral things. Having enemies is useful to the degree that it clarifies disagreements, but becomes counterproductive if we expect that the gathered church will only ever be made of friends.

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At a deeper level, though, this book has me reflecting on what exactly the aims are of a Christian social witness. If I’m right about the dynamics in the review (and I think I am), then one possibility is that a Christian witness speaks things which one segment of society already knows, in a Jesus kind of key. I’m not satisfied with that answer for a number of reasons, mostly because it makes Jesus pretty redundant. The opposite approach of speaking about social questions fares little better, especially if we’re measuring things in terms of effectiveness: Christian discourse about public issues, at least in the States, is emaciated, co-opted, or just ignored.

In the early 20th century, Walter Raushenbusch authored a for-its-day-bestselling book called Christianity and the Social Crisis, which lays out the multiple social ills of its day and what Christianity offered by way of moral solutions. These days, it feels like another planet to try seriously propose something like that, but mostly because “society” is such an ever-changing, malleable, squishy entity: it doesn’t stand still long enough to be documented, much less Christianized. And so, calibrating a social witness to prevailing social questions has long-term ramifications for how Christians learn to have commitments over time, and very short term effects. There’s no less hope, I think, for Christians organizing their corporate lives around any particular topic, for as soon as cohesive thinking and instruction can be offered around a particular loci, whether gender, war, food ethics, etc, the landscape has shifted, and no one is listening.

With this in mind, then, I propose the following: Christians should talk about stuff, and do stuff that no is interested in today, but stuff that has been talked about for a while.

Here’s what I mean:

Behind the material surface of some of the most vexing questions of Christian ethics today (transgenderism, the use of genomic therapies, refugee resettlements, etc.), there are always—always—the same kinds of dynamics: hatred, the relation of the created world to God, what it means to live according to the Spirit. These are incredibly boring and unsexy topics: no one wants to hear people rattling around about Kathryn Tanner and non-competitive agency in the divine/creation relation, or about how to think about the Holy Spirit as both interruptive and contiguous over time, much less about the evolution of race and racism within the history of Christian thought or how notions of how poverty debilitates have changed. These are hard, slow-grained things. But these are the deep building blocks to being able to ask better questions, to have better conversations, and ultimately, to live more wisely about the next big thing. Whatever the next thing is, it will involve questions of creation, power, money, identity, and God: go slow, be prepared for the long haul, and try stuff out.

At some point very soon, no one will be talking about the material question that an academic somewhere just signed a book contract to write 200 pages on. At some point very soon, the fight that broke a church will be a footnote in history and most likely forgotten. It doesn’t make these issues unimportant: it just means that it’s better for Christians to do more slow work here than fast mobilizing work. Because people are moving at different paces in the Christian life, it’s more important here, I think, to be inquisitive and to fail well. To learn how to think, and ultimately, how to live, there’s going to be a lot of false starts and missteps. To do that, we have to tarry with those with whom we disagree now, because chances are high that whatever the next Thing is, they will be some of who I need to hear.