Pressing Questions

You abandon the commandments of God and hold to human traditions.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 7:8

Misery loves company, or so the saying goes.  I'm not so sure that I'm glad to hear about other religions being in the same boat as American Christianity at the moment, but there was this in the New York Times today.  For all you TL;DR people out there, it talks about how conservative, religious Muslims, having finally obtained power in Turkey after years of oppression, are now worse than their secular predecessors in terms of corruption and immoral use of power.  I have to say I found myself transposing what he was talking about to Christianity and America a little too easily.  The question of the headline is "Does Religion Make People Moral?"  And I have to tell you that until fairly recently I would have said that it definitely does, but lately I'm not so sure.

The decidedly moral questions that we must answer as a society: how do we create a just system of governance? How do we participate in a truly equitable economy? How do we protect those who are vulnerable in our midst? Are in many cases being answered immorally by self-identified religious people.  I'm not talking about differences of opinion here either, you could argue (and many do) that a corporate tax cut will create economic growth and a rising tide lifts all boats.  You could also argue (as I happen to believe) that supply side/trickle down economics is a failed doctrine that has led us to a place where it is demonstrably more difficult for successive generations to achieve upward mobility.  Neither one of these positions is necessarily morally right, but the fact that people go hungry and homeless, while others have more than they could ever need is a moral failing of our society.  You could argue about who is worse: Bill Clinton or Roy Moore, but the fact that our society has protected sexual predators based on utilitarian principles is a moral failure.

Religion, as the article points out, does not seem to create a morality that is immune to the corrupting influence of power.  And while trickle down economics is a crock, the trickle down effect of immorality is no joke. People who were notably and righteously aghast at Billy Clinton diddling an intern less than half his age, say outright that Roy Moore doing the same thing to a sixteen year old girl is somehow different, because it happened way back, because he will help appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, because he will hold on to the GOP majority in the Senate, because he will "Stand for God," yeah I'm calling shenanigans on that last one, but the other ones are pretty thin as well. The immorality of the people at the top seeps down to pollute and stain the people at the bottom, money seems to flow up hill in our world, but crap still rolls down hill.

Donald J. Trump's megalomania convinces a bunch of church-going grandmas who live by a code that says name-calling and bragging are bad manners, end up voting for a man who has made name calling and bragging into a personal brand. Why? Because he is on "their side," whatever that happens to mean.  It reminds me of how much I hated Terrell Owens until he played for the Eagles (that didn't end well and it's a possibility that Trump might go out the same way).

The really sad thing is that, while the people who have been claiming the moral high ground for quite some time have been revealed as a brood of vipers, there really isn't anyone with the credibility to take their place.  Democrats? Yeah, not so much, thanks Franken and Conyers.  We might have been able to actually put Clinton in the past if it wasn't for your handsy ways. Is it the church? Probably not, as the article in the Times makes clear, religious people aren't actually much more moral than anyone else when you dangle power in front of them.

As with a lot of things, this is a systemic failure, and thus it is hard to even figure out how to fix. We have been letting our moral structure erode for an awful long time. Besides that, I think it is spurious to think that we can simply reconstruct the "good old days" and end up with a truly moral society.  Remember that a lot of the things that are symptoms of our moral decay: greed, licentiousness, hubris, have been around for a really long time.  We needed advancements in women's rights to see how pervasive sexual harassment had become.  We needed the aristocracy to collapse and a sense of equality to arise before we could come to any sense that perhaps the benefits of society should be shared more evenly (work in progress).  We needed a sense of human dignity to arise before we could even realistically raise questions about prejudice and racism.

Moral codes must adapt to these sorts of changes.  It was, once upon a time, morally acceptable to own slaves, it no longer is.  Maybe in the future exploitation of the poor and working class will be seen with the same derision.  It would seem that maybe these powerful men who have taken liberties with women thought that such behavior was morally acceptable, they are finding that assumption to be a mistake.

It's hard to say if our moral codes will ever advance to the point where we can move beyond the greed and consumption of capitalism (communism does not seem to have worked out).  It's hard to see how we will ever be moral enough to resist the corruption of power.  Maybe the moral crisis of the moment will eventually lead to growth of some sort (I'm hopeful because that is generally how growth happens in a spiritual sense).

The distinction that Aykol makes between self-education and self glorification is a useful one in this regard, because I do feel that my Christian faith has shaped my moral awareness, but I had to move past a place where it made me feel like a privileged member of an in group and towards a place where it challenged me to take up my cross and follow.  I believe that religion has within it the raw materials for moral formation, but those things are not always put together in a way that leads to growth.

It occurs to me that power is perhaps the most destructive force to moral formation.  I have mentioned power and corruption several times in the course of this blog, and I know that it's not a new connection.  But I see in American Christianity at the moment, the same thing that has reared it's ugly head throughout history.  The desire to be in charge is antithetical to submission to God's will.  You cannot serve two masters.  You cannot serve God and Mammon, you cannot serve Christ and your own ego.  Serving the masters of greed, pride, power and violence will necessarily lead into immoral behavior and ultimately to destruction.  My feeling is that if your religion doesn't lead to morality, you're probably doing it wrong, and that appears to be true across the spectrum of faith traditions.  We're more alike than we want to admit.