This interesting question by a commenter at jordon’s site:

Here’s a starter - most liberal protestants and post-evangelicals think churches should remain silent when the state legalizes practices Christians have traditionally found morally suspect (e.g. abortion, same-sex marriage, lowered age of sex consent). On the other hand, when the state cuts funding to social assistance programs (which is a moral issue), most liberal protestants and some post-evangelicals think churches should dissent. So what explains the difference? That the first set of issues are only of private concern, but the second set are not? (I disagree that the first set of issues are only of private concern)

I was going to answer this in the comments, but felt that I would get out of hand. I think for me, the answer is the way in which we engage with the issue. I don’t think it is particularly useful for Christians to argue against something simply by asserting it is wrong. Engagement with a moral issue has to have more than that in order to convince and change people. Otherwise, people who disagree justifiably believe that you are trying to impose your morality on them.

Social issues such as welfare, refugees are easier to justify in non-morality language - often because there are other sectors of the community arguing for the same thing. For example, until recently our anti-gambling movement in Victoria was headed by Tim Costello, well-known for the fact that he was a baptist minister. But his primary arguments for the regulation of pokie machines were not that gambling is wrong (although this may be the source of his convictions). Rather, he pointed at the disproportionate impact that problem gambling had on poorer sectors of society, and the fact that gambling operators were targeting people that were more likely to have problems with gambling. Therefore, it became a justice and welfare issue as much as a moral one.

In cases of same sex marriage, abortion or lowered age of consent, there aren’t necessarily examples of how we can argue our beliefs in this area in a manner which does not patronisingly assume that people who disagree with us are less moral or simply wrong. I think that this is where the reticence comes from a lot of less conservative church traditions when deciding whether to weigh into the debate.

However, there are some clear examples of the way that this can be done well. Recently one of our Federal politicians who happens to be catholic gave a speech about his feelings on abortion. Whilst saying that he felt it was wrong, he also pointed to a range of factors about our abortion rate in Australia which should be of concern to those that disagree with him. As a result, it sparked a constructive debate about how the rate of abortions could be reduced in the interests of society.

Similarly the US Government’s pro-marriage programs aimed at increasing marriage rates and increasing healthy families is not based around the idea that living in sin is morally wrong (although I am sure that is part of the motivation). Rather, it is prompted by an understanding that family failure is a crisis for our community. This has been backed by objective data showing that stable married families are better for children’s development.

So perhaps that is part of the challenge of engaging in the world as a christian - we might be prompted to act because we believe something is wrong, but in order to change the opinions of others, we need to show why it is wrong, not just for christians, but for all of us.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2004 at 11:13 am by dan and is filed under challenges for the church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.