Our Public Morality
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There is a public morality in every age. Each society assembles pieces of a broader worldview. Most people can identify an example of total evil, an original sin, or the peak of morality. I tend to think that part of God’s writing eternity on our hearts means that we have an innate hunger for the gospel story (Eccl. 3:11).
Antonio Garcia Martinez put it far better than I could; “The Western mind is like a tuning fork calibrated to one frequency: the Christ story. Hit it with the right Christ figure, and it’ll just hum deafeningly in resonance.”
So it’s no surprise that even secular people try to fill spiritual categories. In every culture, there is an awareness of sin, efforts toward atonement, and punishment for wrongdoing. Sometimes this is overtly Christian and sometimes it’s not.
Our culture has a version of this. The Nazis play the role of absolute evil and Hitler has replaced the devil as it’s ultimate manifestation. But things are changing. This is not because the Nazis are gaining in popularity, but because this vision of good and evil is not durable enough to last.
On this topic, Alec Ryrie has written one of the must-read essays of the year in November’s edition of First Things. In the second half of the 20th century, something shifted in the consciousness of the West. Whereas before, the West was powered by religious understandings of good, evil, and significance, the aftermath of World War II provided a new model for understanding the world. In this new religious scheme, Hitler became the evil of evils, the concentration camps became the worst example of human cruelty, and defeating the Nazis became the eschatology of good triumphing over evil.
“So if we ask why Christianity went into retreat in the West from the early 1960s on, there is a simple answer: Christianity’s one crucial and virtually uncontested function in Western societies had suddenly failed. Whatever else Christianity had become by then, it was still our store of value. Believers and unbelievers alike accepted the authority of Jesus’s ethics as reflexively as we accept the notion of human rights now. But once a new set of values was in place—once a new lodestone had reset our moral compass, so that what had pointed towards Jesus now pointed away from Hitler—the adjustment of our coordinates made the old maps redundant. And so they were abandoned, or simply and quietly fell out of use.”
In this new moral framework, Ryrie observes, the positive values of Christianity were replaced with the negative values that went something like, whatever you do, don’t be like the Nazis. As religion slipped away from the public square, the assumption that we all know what’s good and evil, right and wrong, the inherent dignity of human beings, and the necessity of rights slipped in. This worked as a social unifier temporarily.
Now, cracks are beginning to appear. Do we really all agree about rights? Personal dignity? Does evil always surface as a Dark Lord? Is the answer to wage war against him? “Our myth is that we live in a secular age, based on self-evident truths such as human rights. But in fact, we live in the age of Hitler. Our religion is World War II.
And now, in the 2020s, it is that faith that is crumbling.”
Our culture is looking again to answer a question posed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “If religion, our traditional arbiter of right and wrong, was to be cast off like a worn-out garment, what should replace it?”
Ryrie suggests this might be a good thing. Not because he disagrees that the Nazis are bad and serve as a boundary marker for the worst of human evil, but just that this moral vision is not robust enough. Hating the Nazis does not teach us what to love, and that is necessary for morality. We have to love something enough to pursue it both as individuals and as a society and the predicament of the West is that there is no unifying love.
“In this century we will face perils ranging from climate breakdown to economic and demographic turmoil to the impact of artificial intelligence—to say nothing of old-fashioned nuclear weapons. The values we learned from World War II will be essential for confronting these evils; but they will manifestly not be enough. We will need to draw on our deeper cultural wells, namely our religious and philosophical traditions, which offer positive rather than negative values. Our anti-Nazi values separate the world into the black and white of good and evil, or, if we are being sophisticated, into shades of grey. It’s our deeper traditions that show us full color, so that instead of merely passing judgment, we can see beauty. In particular, those deeper traditions teach some of the virtues that we will most need in order to navigate this century, and which our anti-Nazi values conspicuously lack: humility, repentance, and forgiveness.”
Both the left and the right suffer from this vital deficiency. Only determining what is worth our love - dare I say, worship - is going to lead us through the culture wars and reintegrate our society. And it’s no certainty this will happen, but it’s possible.
“When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle, Oct. 31, 1517, you opened a door to a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It was a back-to-the-Gospel movement—a renewal that preceded Luther and continues till your return.”
The major reform in the Reformation was justification by faith. No amount of works, no church official, and no righteousness of our own could make us right with God. It is grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone that makes us right with God. Happy Reformation Day! And soli deo gloria!
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Dr. Cole Feix is the founder and president of So We Speak and the Senior Pastor of Carlton Landing Community Church in Oklahoma.
