Public Moral Debate is Dying: The Wrath of God
Concluding Thoughts, Pt. 2: On Debating with Our Neighbors
The series concludes with a mediation on engaging moral issues with our neighbors, revisiting an old debate from Romans 12-13, the wrath of God, and the annoying kindness of God.
Death to the Culture Wars
If you’ve been reading for any length of time, I’ve mentioned more than once that the culture war framework is like that Ikea furniture you’ve been meaning to get ride of. Pull out the Allen wrench, gather the pieces, set them on fire in the alley, and then bury the ashes.
It’s not that the culture wars are tiresome so much as they are in error. The culture wars are always after something on the level of a metaphysical commitments, and the Big Topic as the proxy in this war. And so, culture wars, by their nature, routinely violate one of the key principles of just war thinking: you don’t shoot innocent bystanders. Culture wars almost invariably become total wars, beginning with one topic, and then quickly engulfing the entire region in its wake.
Let’s take the most recent dust-ups over library funding as an example. As I write this, the entire library system in Llano, Texas is under threat of closure. That’s correct: the entire library system might be closed, not from lack of funding, but because of a lawsuit over whether or not books such as the “Butt and Fart” book series are encouraging grooming behavior among adolescents. I feel dumber for having written at last sentence, but this is the kind of thing which is happening, in miniature, and happening in my own city, and on the grandest of scales, has been proposed for the entire state of Missouri. Let’s be clear: child sex abuse will not decline when the libraries close. What will happen is that rural communities who rely on libraries for public access to the Internet, for reading materials, for educational events, for community gathering, and for a place to get in out of the weather, will suffer.
Culture wars, because they are not about the thing being fought over, but about something more pervasive—in this case, the shifting cultural ground regarding sexuality and gender—do not work. You can’t find metaphysical battles this way, not only because the iterations of the fight are always cropping up new places, but because the thing you are fighting over is a proxy: libraries are not your enemy, but the library will bear the brunt of your frustration.
The pattern runs something like this:
A topic is introduced, because of some recent development in the news.
People begin to debate the topic, but it’s not really the topic they disagree about. Because who really hates libraries?
However, people don’t know how to have disagreements about things like the nature of freedom, the nature of the body, what it means to be a sexed being, and the like. And they really care about those things. So, the library becomes the thing we dig in on and debate hard about.
Participants are labeled as for or against some abstract value like “liberty” or “care for children”, based on their position on the libraries. We all know that values are far more nuanced than this, but the library gives us a handle to fight with.
The way we care about the value becomes linked to whether we support the library, and in the process, our thinking about the value itself becomes emaciated. Because liberty and care for children are far more encompassing concepts, and deserve a lot more from us than how the library is funded.
Being Anti-Polite in Public: The Annoying Wrath of God
In the last issue, I began toying with this notion of being “anti-polite”, that the way to begin recovering public moral discourse is to be able to argue well with our friends first. I want to extend that now to arguing with our neighbors1, by looking at a familiar passage in Romans 12-13:
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly;[f] do not claim to be wiser than you are. 17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18 If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God;[g] for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ 20 No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
I want us to focus on v. 19-20 in particular here, in part because this language of the wrath of God shows up again in chapter 13:
4 for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority[a] does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. 6
Because Scripture plays on its own words pretty frequently, the way that “wrath” is working here is super-interesting. In 12:19, the wrath of God toward wrongdoing, and in this case, the suffering of the Christian, is paired with the injunction to explicitly do the things of the Sermon on the Mount (v.14-18). So far, so good: Christians are to behave as Christians, even when cultural tides are turning.
But what’s interesting is the way in which God’s wrath is described in 12:19—as a divine version of Proverbs 25:22, quoted there. If the Spirit of God is the one compelling the Christian to behave in this way, sent by God the Father, then wrath here means not that God is going to secretly smite the anti-library opponents, but that God is going to pour kindness out on enemies. When Paul writes earlier in Romans 2:4 that God is patient, that we might come to repentance, pouring out kindness upon us, he means it.
That Paul then turns around and uses the same language of wrath in 13:4-5 should make our head spin: in the same way that God’s anger is one of heaping coals of kindness designed to overwhelm us into repentance, so public displays of moral order consistent with God’s authorization should as well. There is no quarter here for a kind of moral grandstanding designed to destroy one’s opponent: only the kind of trust that, in being God’s people regardless of public support, we are carrying forth the suffering way of Jesus.
This “heaping of hot coals”, as Proverbs and Romans describe it, is a very aggressive kindness: a belligerent loving-kindness which refuses to disengage while remaining annoying about it. In defusing the expectation of “eye for an eye” and offering patience instead, all of the bluster about libraries becomes deescalated, so that the proxies can quit being shot and we can have a real conversation about the bigger questions that are always, always, always behind the fight at hand.
All of this is harder, and takes longer, and requires more patience. But if the ultimate aim is one of having a shared world with friends and enemies, I can’t imagine that it would take less than what God continually shows us.
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I am intentionally leaving out arguing with strangers on the Internet, because it’s pointless, morally deformative to all parties, weaponizes the worst tendencies of culture war dynamics, and no one should do it ever.
Yes--and God’s vengeance has been defined in that passage is in terms of “paying back”, ie pouring coals on their heads, divine patience. Whatever it looks like will look like that.
So let me get this straight. You're suggesting that in the culture war shaking up cans of Bud Light, God wishes to pour out His kindness on both Dylan Mulvaney AND Kid Rock? And I'm to join God in pouring out that Kindness? But I thought my primary objective, as protector of a Gospel-of-my-own-understanding, was to vehemently call out (un)righteousness as I see it. But you say Pauls says Christ says His Father says, "No, sir."
Huh. You've given me something to think about here.