When Christians talk about legislating morality and how it is both possible and necessary, what do they mean?
Almost invariably, they mean that traditional Evangelical sexual ethics should be made the sexual law of the land.
Abortion? Outlawed. Homo- and bisexuality? Illegal. Transgenderism? Criminalized. Pornography? Banned.
While I hold to these same sexual ethics in my life and doctrine, I do not see a clear path or a good reason to force them on an unwilling, non-Christian, populace through secular means.
Firstly, I am always concerned with reprisals, or maybe I should say reversals. If a secular government that is currently neutral—from a historical perspective—to the practice of religion can become the active and authoritative weapon of a specific religion, then what happens when that weapon changes hands and the servants of a different deity start to impose his or her will? What happens if irrelegion takes control and the force that once imposed morality should come the means to compel immorality?
There never seems to be a good answer for that. “That can’t be. We were founded on this or that…” is usually the beginning of a lot of ahistorical pretense. Our founders were primarily men who adhered to some form of Christianity and all had come of age in a culture infused with Christian ideas and values, but let’s not forget or understate the fact that the Christianity that they professed was, to varying degrees, content to see human beings deprived of their freedom, humanity, and bodily autonomy for the economic benefit of Christians. I don’t think our founding was as Christian as we have been led to believe.
And so, absent that fig leaf of “Christian legacy” with which many have justified a move toward an American theocracy, I think we would all do well to at least contemplate what a reversal of fortunes in the area of government and social control might look like.
Secondly—and perhaps I should have started here—when addressing the idea of legislating morality, many Christians will argue, “Murder and theft and a whole host of other things are both immoral and illegal. It is possible to criminalize sin.”
This is very true. It is possible to criminalize sin, when the sin is committed against some externality. Every single sin has a victim. When we sin against ourselves, we are the victim. When we sin against others, they are the victim. In the first instance, the sin is against an internality, ourselves, and so, we are the guilty victim. In the second, the sin is against an externality, the innocent victim. For obvious reasons, it is far easier to criminalize sins that victimize others.
However, the moral violations that Christians most regularly want to be criminalized are violations against oneself, or, at least in the case of abortion, within oneself. As such, they are not only impractical to police from a temporal perspective but also unproductive of life change, from an eternal perspective. Sins that victimize our own selves/souls are nearly impossible to police. For starters, who will press charges? Who will testify as a witness to the crime? Also, if we actually believe the Bible, then maybe we can trust that the majority of the sin committed in the world will be punished by God, not the police.
Let me be clear: I’m in no way defending these actions as right or righteous. I am simply saying that the method by which many Christians would see these actions halted is a mistake.
If Jesus made anything clear to us in His teaching, it was this: externally imposed morality actually impedes the work of eternity.
External threats against immorality push the evil deeper within, creating an external pseudo-sanctity, with the corruption thriving within. This, then, makes the corruption harder to identify, address, and remove.
And yes, it is corruption, a corrupting of the divine image granted us by our Creator. That’s why sin is wrong: it seeks to alter or destroy what He personally imparted to us: our unique, finite reflection of His personality. Of course, by this same reasoning, the Christianity and the Christians who permitted, endorsed, promoted, or worse yet, profited from chattel slavery were guilty of the same corruption for denying and destroying the divine image of the humans they supposed themselves to own.
Aside from all of this, we should also ask why so many Christians have such a limited understanding of the demands of God’s law.
In the Old Testament, laws demanding justice and support for the poor and the foreigner were listed right alongside the laws demanding sexual purity. Looking at the New Testament, we see a similar pattern that forces us to ask more questions.
Why only impose sexual ethics? Why not also impose all Christian ethics? Why not compel all of society to share what they have, to hold all things in common so that none have too much and none have too little? (You could try to rebut that point by claiming that we pay taxes as part of living out this ethic, but I would only respond by pointing out how often Christans complain about those taxes and look askance at any attempt to use “their” tax dollars to help those who have too little.)
We make much—arguably too much—of the negatives of faith, the don’ts. Furthermore, we always seem to find ways to negate or mitigate the positives, the dos—at least when they might be interpreted in a way that would force us to actually live like Jesus. (It did get Him killed, after all.)
Christians in America have, for too long, sought political power in order to force our sexual ethics upon the country, but in so doing, we have done damage to the gospel. First, by seeking an earthly savior instead of trusting in our heavenly one, we have denied the name of Christ by which we are called. Second, by reducing the gospel to behavior items that we don’t struggle with—or that we struggle with under a deep shroud of secrecy and NDAs—we can put on the appearance of righteousness while ignoring the other commands of God, such as justice for the poor and oppressed.
As the Church, we need to either pursue the whole of God’s holiness or be honest about the true goal of our political efforts: we want control more than Christ.
“But making Christianity powerful is not the same thing as making the country authentically Christian. Our goal should be promoting the gospel to bring people into the family of faith, not pandering to political leaders so that they might let us share their podium. Christian ‘values’ – a term open to notorious abuse – should not be reduced to trite slogans. Nor does promising to privilege Christianity compensate for a lack of character or for policies that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.”
NT Wright and Michael F. Bird
Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies
Capitol Photo by Cole Miller on Unsplash
Cathedral Photo by Nguyễn Hiệp on Unsplash