In Defense of Christian Ethics, Part 2

In this second part of this series, I will continue to respond to some objections modern Western non-Christians commonly make against Christian ethics.

Wastes Resources

The Objection: Christianity causes people to waste resources.  Christians waste time, energy, and money on Christian buildings, Christian religious rituals, Christian writings, Christian theological teaching, and Christian evangelism.  In a world with scarce resources, we should be using this time, energy, and money to help the poor and establish social justice, rather than spending it on religion.  The use of resources on the Christian religion is therefore unethical.

Response: It is not true that we live in a world with scarce resources.  The truth is that we have far more resources than we need, but they are unevenly distributed because rich countries like America spend far too much money on selfish, frivolous things.  It is true that the preaching and teaching of the Word of God, the practices of Christian worship, the construction of Christian churches, and the production of Bibles and other Christian writings takes time, energy, and money.  However, if one is going to criticize something as a waste of resources that should be given to the poor, religion is one of the last things that should be criticized.  Americans spend over 700 billion dollars on entertainment a year,^[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/237749/value-of-the-global-entertainment-and-media-market/#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%20the,billion%20U.S.%20dollars%20by%202020 over five times as much as they give to religious organizations.^[2]https://balancingeverything.com/church-giving-statistics/  Just for halloween costumes for their pets, Americans spend an estimated $490 million dollars a year.^[3]https://nrf.com/blog/halloween-shopping-trends-then-and-now  There are countless frivolous activities one should criticize as wasteful before criticizing the church’s activities as wasteful.  

Furthermore, pitting church activities against caring for the poor is a false choice.  The church is an entity that works to transform its members, so that they will act more ethically in every aspect of their lives, including caring for the poor.  Statistics show that people who regularly attend religious services are more likely to give money to other charitable causes, and more likely to give more money to those causes.^[4]https://balancingeverything.com/church-giving-statistics/  The ministry and worship of the church is not a distraction from the cause of helping the poor; it is actually an activity that contributes to the cause of helping the poor.

Psychologically Harmful

The Objection: Christian ethics sets up impossible standards that no one can possibly meet.  Jesus tells his followers that they must be perfect (Matt 5:48).  He tells them that they must love their enemies (Matt 5:44), and that they must avoid even having thoughts that are lustful (Matt 5:27-28) or hateful (Matt 5:21-22).  All of this is quite impossible.  Especially egregious is Christianity’s teaching that human sexuality should only be expressed in a lifelong marriage between a man and a woman or in a life of celibacy.  This extreme, impossible standard leads to harmful sexual repression that is psychologically damaging.  If people try to follow the standards of Christian ethics, it just leads to unnecessary guilt, self-hatred, and psychological harm.  Therefore, we should reject Christian ethics and instead advocate a more reasonable, realistic set of ethical standards.  

Response: It is not at all clear that having high ethical standards and failing to live up to them necessarily leads to psychological harm.  Some people might experience psychological distress when they struggle to live up to their own ethical standards, but other people are able honestly to face their own moral shortcomings without descending into self-hatred.  How a person responds to their ethical shortcomings depends upon their psychological state and what kind of person they are.  As for the idea that sexual abstinence necessarily causes psychologically harmful sexual repression, this argument is based in a pseudo-Freudian pop psychology that has no intellectual merit.  Even Freud himself did not believe the only options were to act on one’s sexual desires or to repress them; he believed one could sublimate one’s sexual desires and channel them into non-sexual activities.  

For argument’s sake, though, let us assume that the high standards of Christian ethics do lead to psychological suffering.  Even if this were true, it would not prove that Christian ethics is untrue.  Almost all non-Christians will agree that sometimes doing the right thing ethically means that we will have to suffer.  For example, one may have a moral duty to put oneself in danger in order to save the lives of other innocent people, and this could lead to one’s own physical suffering and death.  Compared to this, psychological suffering is a small price to pay for striving to act ethically.  It is morally reprehensible to lower our moral standards simply so we can feel better about ourselves.

Finally, if Christians are tempted to psychologically harmful self-hatred because of their moral failings, they have theological resources that can counteract this.  Christians know that they are beloved children of God who are loved unconditionally by their merciful Heavenly Father, and that, through Christ, all their sins are forgiven.  Because of this, Christians have no reason to give in to despair or self-hatred, even if they seriously struggle with temptation and sin.  Since Christians find their identity in Christ alone, rather than defining their identity in terms of any qualities within themselves, they can find comfort in Him, even as they take sin very seriously and strive to live up to Christianity’s high moral standards.

Ineffective Methods

The Objection: The methods of Christian ethics are simply ineffective at making the world a better place.  Jesus teaches that, in order to be his disciple, one needs to deny oneself (Mark 8:34) and be willing to give up everything in order to follow him (Luke 14:25-33).  These demands of Christian discipleship are so extreme that very few people will actually legitimately be willing to submit to them and to become part of his movement (a movement that supposedly is meant to bring salvation to the whole world).  Furthermore, Jesus’s teachings that we should love our enemies (Matt 5:44) and not resist an evil person (Matt 5:39) are incredibly naive and unrealistic.  In a violent, chaotic world, we simply must be willing to use violence against evildoers; otherwise, we abandon our ethical responsibility to protect innocent lives.  Similarly, the Christian Tradition’s teaching that abortion is morally wrong contributes to overpopulation and poverty.  Christianity’s extremely high ethical ideals are actually unethical in their results because they call us to abandon methods that are useful and effective in favor of a naive, ineffective idealism.

Response: It is true that relatively few people will genuinely be willing to submit to the radical and costly demands of Christian discipleship.  However, even if few, Christians can still have a significant positive effect on the world.  In spite of the fact that church history is very messy and most “Christians” in history have not been genuinely committed Christian disciples, it is historically demonstrable that Christianity has had an enormous positive influence on the moral beliefs of Western Civilization, and, to a lesser extent, the world as a whole.^[5]See Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

Jesus’s ethical teachings may seem naive and unrealistic (if we assume the Christian Gospel is not true).  However, the idea that we can truly make the world a better place by continuously resorting to violence and other moral compromises can also be charged with being naive and unrealistic.  The “justified” use of violence often fails to achieve its intended goal, and even when it does achieve its goal, it usually just perpetuates an endless cycle of violence. As for abortion, if one can justify brutally killing innocent children while they writhe in agony and tearing them limb from limb just because that seems like the most convenient thing to do, then one can justify anything, and morality is meaningless.

Even if it seems like violence and other moral compromises have been effective at making the world a better place, we must consider what problematic indirect consequences result from these moral compromises.  As Christian thinker Jacques Ellul puts it, “If men use cruel or treacherous means to achieve a good and generous end, they necessarily give rise to ways of thinking and acting which in the long run will gain mastery over what was originally undertaken, so that they will not just make it impossible to achieve the desired goal but will often increase the distance from it.”^[6]Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom, translated and edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976).  If we truly want to make the world a better place, we cannot go on making moral compromises forever.  There must be people who are willing to live a radically countercultural way of life that cuts across the grain of how society usually works, and who lead the way in showing us a more excellent way to live.

In the end, one’s ethical beliefs are based upon one’s worldview.  Christians believe that Jesus has already defeated all the powers of evil, that He is reigning now as Lord, and that He will one day return to make all things new and to fully inaugurate God’s Kingdom.  Given these beliefs, Jesus’s ethical demand that Christians love their enemies and refuse to retaliate, in order to bear witness to the nature of God’s Kingdom and God’s New Creation, makes perfect sense.  However, those who reject Christian theology and believe this world and this life is all there is will never be able fully to embrace these ethical ideals, since they will often appear from their perspective to be utopian and ineffective.  Those who hold to different worldviews will never be able to agree fully on ethical questions.  However, non-Christians can at least acknowledge that Christian ethics is coherent and that it is reasonable from the perspective of Christian belief.

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