Breaking the monopoly on morality

When I hear liberal and conservative politicians and their religious allies speaking of morality in the current budget debates, I’m encouraged, because budgets are indeed moral documents. But I’m also nervous.

I’m nervous because in some quarters I sense a dangerous level of intellectual laziness, falling into the same partisan polarities of liberal-conservative, black-white, us-them, our way or the immoral way. Lazy, simplistic, polarized political thinking got us in this mess. Lazy, simplistic, polarized moral thinking won’t lead us out of it. Neither side has a monopoly on morality.

I’m nervous because in other quarters, I sense a lot of empathy for rich people suffering under an oppressive burden of taxes, but almost no empathy for what the lives of poor people are like both here in the US and around the world. We seem to have a lot of people who believe in the Incarnation as a Christian doctrine, but haven’t discovered incarnation as a spiritual practice in regards to neighbor, stranger, outsider, outcast, or enemy.

I’m also nervous because I sense some duplicitous manipulation at play. David Brody, an evangelical himself, recently said of evangelicals, “Their world is very black and white. Not many shades of gray.” If Brody is right in his generalization, we need to be on guard against a cynical manipulation of evangelicals by evangelical leaders and the politicians who want their vote-power. They’ll bait evangelicals with “Morality, morality, morality,” but deliver something less.

I agree with socially conservative Jordan Sekulow when he writes, “Will we continue to borrow foreign money to sustain entitlement programs, fail to seriously tackle the growing national debt, and let the next generations deal with the fallout? If we do, we are unloading our problems on future Americans. That is immoral.”

But thoughtful Americans concerned about morality must also realize that our national debt has many causes in addition to entitlement programs, including elective wars and an untamed military-industrial complex, tax cuts for the rich, and corporate tax loopholes.

I’m suspicious of any liberal who won’t address the need for entitlement reform, and I’m equally suspicious of any conservative who won’t address the need for reduced militarism, tax reform, and corporate responsibility.

So yes, passing on an inheritance of debt to our children and grandchildren is immoral. But blaming the whole problem on programs intended to help the poor is no less immoral. Borrowing from tomorrow’s people to provide benefits from today’s people is indeed immoral. But so is financing today’s elective wars on the backs of tomorrow’s people. Driving the economy into the ground through excessive taxation is immoral, but so is driving hard-working people into poverty by absolving the rich from paying their fair share of taxes or paying a fair wage to their workers. Removing incentives to excel through old-fashioned obvious socialism is immoral. But so is a new, more popular kind of covert conservative socialism – where profits are privatized and costs (like polluted air, strip-mined ex-mountains, depleted soil, extinct species, degraded health) are socialized.

In my most recent book, Naked Spirituality , I explore in some detail the undervalued spiritual practice of self-examination. I emphasize how we must reintegrate the personal and social dimensions of the old-fashioned but deeply important moral category of sin. And I warn about the ever-present temptation to be morally outraged about the sins of others while remaining in denial about our own.

So I believe it’s essential to bring moral concerns into our budgetary debate. But how it’s done is as important as whether it’s done. The apostle Paul got it right when he said, “Stop thinking like children.… in your thinking be mature adults.” If we’re going to talk about a grown-up subject like morality, we’d better do it in a mature, responsible way – because there are deep, dangerous ditches on both the left and right sides of the road.

Brian Mclaren  | Apr 22, 2011 1:14 PM