The ELCA social statement For Peace in God’s World identifies the church “as a community of moral deliberation”. And, as I discussed here in a previous Blog entry, “moral deliberation” is the task/challenge accepted by the Northern Illinois Synod (ELCA) in Assembly on June 14, 2008!
On the surface such a challenge seems appropriate. Many within the church community believe speaking to morals and morality is one of the tasks of the church. (A task which some would argue has not been well addressed in recent decades.) Teaching youth right from wrong, correct behavior, and encouraging involvement of all ages in those charitable activities that make our communities kinder and better places – certainly those are important in addressing morals.
Yet moral deliberation on the major issues today – terrorism, poverty, hunger, war and peace, health services, global commerce – is a rarity in many of our church communities. Whether from fear or hesitation to take a stand, few parishes engage themselves in searching the resources of Scripture and/or church history relative to those issues!
I think the greater reason is our (clergy and laity) lack of education and training regarding morals and ethics and the processes whereby we come to some acceptable stances. There were no classes on either morality or ethics in my seminary days. The same was true in medicine, nursing, law and almost every other area of studies. Rather there was an assumption that the candidates would just be “morally acceptable”. Period.
Certainly such an approach began to change in the healing occupations in the 1980s. Still, even with added courses on ethics the controversy over treatment decisions for Mary Schiavo indicated there is still much to be done.
Morality as an individual is a major challenge. The right and wrong options each of us face daily are manifold – and our choices, as our Lutheran theology affirms, are never 100% “right”.
Morality in politics – that is, in the public arenas of life, is an even greater challenge. In The Moral Choice [Doubleday & Company 1978] Daniel C. Maguire (a Professor at Marquette University) said:
There is a perennial dilemma surrounding the relationship of good politics and good morals… The fact is that it is necessary and moral to do things in politics that would be unjustifiable in the circumstances of private life. In the political sphere, war might have to be waged, punishment inflicted, personal freedoms limited, properties appropriated by way of eminent domain, etc. The political order has exigencies and complexities that have no part of private life. Thus, moral behavior there will be correspondingly more difficult to judge.
The problem is that because it is more difficult, the moral dimension tends to be dropped. As a result, politics often gets done without conscience. Moral values get relegated to “questions of last resort”. Outside of last-resort matters, then, it appears that one enters a moral free zone where conscience can be dropped before entering….The tendency to create this moral vacuum is the prime problem confronting political ethics…
Questions that are important in private morality are more important in politics, because there is so much more power there. Bringing moral values to bear on the uses of power is the soul of the civilizing process and the goal of ethics. (pp. 19-21)
Pastors and congregations ought to challenge each other during the next months to truly engage in moral deliberations. The focus ought not to judge who has the “right” answer or who the “wrong”. More important is to help each other identify the process and processes whereby one arrives at her or his answer.
There are resources available to help.
Go for it – and there will be changes in which all of us can have hope because public involvement is the key to making democracy work.
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