Another barrier: Christian morality

In my experience another significant barrier to communicating with non-Christians about our faith and its meaning for the modern world is the popular belief that when Christians refer to morality they are really concerned with only a few sexual issues. Non-Christians often do not think that Christians have anything to say about poverty, environmental degradation, or war and peace.

When I was younger people knew better. At that time the media, and through it the general public, was full of examples of the breadth of Christian moral thinking and action. Christians such as Martin Luther King, Jr., were often in the news--and were highly controversial--because of their fight for civil rights and efforts against poverty and because of their opposition to war. Others, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, had a profound influence on the thinking of opinion leaders. Whether one agreed with them or not, few people would have been surprised by the assertion that justice was at the heart of Christian faith and morality.

Today, however, the broader culture has forgotten Niebuhr and has tamed King, so that all we know about him is a small, feel-good portion of one speech. Instead, for the past thirty years those who most loudly claimed to speak for Christian values have limited themselves to denouncing abortion and homosexuality and promoting a highly patriarchal view of the family. That is all that many non-Christians can bring to mind today when they think about Christian morality.

Yet throughout these years we Presbyterians have continued to feed the needy through our churches and the One Great Hour of Sharing, have continued to support peacemaking through our actions and offerings, and have continued to call for a just society through the thoughtful statements of the General Assembly and other actions, including, locally, our participation in Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. We have a variety of perspectives on the hot-button sexual issues, and we certainly have had and still have our difficulties over them, but unlike the stereotypes we have not forgotten the rest of the Gospel. Our understanding of the Bible and our confessions leads us to focus on all aspects of human relationships, seeking always that they reflect God's love and God's justice. We know that Jesus spent much more time talking about our use of our money and our relationships with each other than about sex, and that He told us that we will be judged primarily by how we treat the poor and the outcast, the least of His brethren. We remember that at the very beginning of His ministry He adopted the prophetic tradition, with its call for public policies and private actions that promote justice for the oppressed, as his own.

My question is similar to the one in my previous post: in a secular society that in recent years has heard only a distorted version of Christian morality, how do we get across the full nature of the Christian understanding of personal and social morality, including its call for justice for all. The experience of my congregation suggests that, when we are able to do that, we will find new members coming to join us.

For further consideration, I include links to "A Social Creed for the Twenty-First Century," which the General Assembly adopted in 2008, and to the website for Sojourners, an evangelical organization that promotes social justice.

http://www.pcusa.org/acswp/pdf/ga218summary.pdf

http://www.sojo.net