AS A WAY of concluding, this final chapter will consider the role that Christianity has played in the story of Western society thus far and the role it might play in the coming years. For the entire period covered by this book, that is, from a.d. 500 to the present, Christianity has been the Western World’s dominant and virtually exclusive religion. Until recently, Western people’s only general term for their society was Christendom, and every member of the society regarded himself or herself as a Christian, except for some surreptitious pagans and a smattering of Jews. The centrality and universality of Christianity render it a useful theme for summarizing this inquiry into the kaleidoscopic transformations of morality and their co-causal relationship to governance.
In accordance with the general pattern of continuity and discontinuity that has appeared so often in the foregoing discussion, Christianity, although recognizably the same religion throughout the course of Western history, has been interpreted quite differently in the different periods that the first half of this book has identified. Co-causally, it has played different roles in both governance and morality. In the Early Middle Ages, from 500 to 1000, governance was steadily privatized and the morality of honor co-causally established and elaborated (Chapter 1). Christianity was only a secondary or subsidiary force during this period. Politically, bishops were important leaders, particularly in the cities, but they functioned as part of the decentralized military elite that had replaced the Roman governors.1 The same was true for churches, monasteries, and convents, which were often regarded as part of a donor’s fief and served as a means by which he could secure his property from the depredations of his enemies.2 Thus, religious institutions were entangled in the privatization process of the era. The Catholic Church was highly localized as a result, and the Pope little more than the Bishop of Rome, exercising scant hierarchical control over the far-flung bishoprics. Rome itself was significant primarily as a pilgrimage site, a city dotted with ancient churches and suffused with martyrs’ blood.3 The most important political action by any pope during the Early Middle Ages was probably Leo III’s coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, but this seems to have had limited effect, and Charlemagne probably regarded the title as more of an annoyance than an accolade.4
The morality of honor that predominated in this era owed relatively little to Christian thought or doctrine. Its contours paralleled those of equally decentralized non-Christian societies, such as Dark Age Greece or Early Medieval Scandinavia, and perhaps even some contemporary urban areas like the Chicago housing projects. Essentially, honor morality was the culture and belief system of the same warrior elite that controlled the local estates and bishoprics. It valorized strength and loyalty, emphasized protection of one’s followers and retaliation against one’s enemies, and deployed generosity and hospitality to forge alliances for these unsettled times. In a largely illiterate society, it relied on personal reputation to communicate with others, reputation which itself became an invaluable asset that the warrior was obligated to protect through further aggression and generosity. As long as the privatization of governance continued, this morality prevailed, and over the centuries, it acquired the glitter of romance and chivalry that adheres to it until this day.
Christianity adapted to this reality. Having already undergone the transition from a severely, albeit intermittently, repressed revolutionary movement to the official religion of a unified and triumphantly dominant empire,5 it then underwent a further transition to the one unifying force in a frequently invaded and increasingly fractionated remnant of that former empire. Having learned to address the members of an educated, somewhat desiccated bureaucratic and landowning elite, it then taught itself to address—and convert—the illiterate, aggressive warriors who succeeded them.6 Rather than providing protection for the weak, it was now seen as an inspiration for the strong. Jesus was transformed into a triumphant leader, inducing saints and bishops to crush recalcitrant heretics and pagans underfoot as He had trampled Satan in the harrowing of hell. The cross was no longer a reminder of His sacrifice but an emblem of His power, a device that could heal the sick, save the crops, and make demons cringe in fear.7 Christian moralists achieved some notable successes in ending the games and gladiatorial contests and in closing the brothels, but only when the urban culture that supported these activities began to wane. They inveighed against divorce, with very limited success, and against enjoying sex, with no discernible effect. Magic was recruited to serve Christian purposes; practices that an educated Roman might have dismissed as meretricious parlor tricks were now regarded, by people who did not have parlors, as a sign of grace.8
In the following era, described as the High Medieval and Early Modern periods, and dating from 1000 to 1800, Christianity played a much more central role in both politics and morality (Chapter 2). The publifying process that enabled Western Europe’s centralizing monarchies to wrest power from the nobility was paralleled by a similar process that enabled the papacy to gain hierarchical control over the Church. For the monarchs, the leading strategy was an alliance with commoners in the burgeoning cities and the use of the financial resources that this alliance provided to hire mercenary troops and, through policing, establish civil order in their realms. The papacy’s equivalent was an alliance with the burgeoning class of educated people, often commoners as well, who filled numerous episcopal and monastic offices with leaders loyal to the Pope and who provided a skilled administrative staff through which his centralized control could be asserted.9 The prohibition of simony and imposition of clerical celibacy by the eleventh-century Gregorian reformers advanced this control by disentangling bishops, abbots, and even priests from the surrounding society. It did not stop them from buying their positions or from having sex, but it did prevent them from bequeathing those positions or their wealth to the products of their various delinquencies.10
The Church’s institutional advances in the High Middle Ages were co-causally connected to an increasingly purposeful religiosity. Since there were no more pagans to convert, the reorganized and reinvigorated Church could devote its energies to a series of politically and socially momentous enterprises. Perhaps inspired by the Peace of God, the social movement that had sprung up among local clergy in the preceding century, it initiated the Crusades. Church-sponsored or approved Crusades were not only Europe’s most impressive collective effort since the Roman Empire was at its height, but also a powerful means of intervention in internal European conflicts, like the one between the French monarchy and the Cathars.11 At the same time, religious impulses that the Church developed or endorsed created the first universities, filled Europe with vast cathedrals, and generated new mendicant orders—like the Franciscans and the Dominicans—to preach among the people.
But the Church suffered from its political importance by becoming enmeshed in the grimy rivalries and conflicts of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. As a result, the deeply felt religious sentiments that had fueled its transformation in the eleventh century turned against it in the sixteenth. The Protestant Reformation obviously represented a loss of influence for the Catholic Church but certainly did not reflect any decrease in the political importance of Christianity in general. Indeed, for the next two centuries, religious differences dominated Europe’s political landscape, igniting civil wars, inducing foreign aggression, shaping alliances, and generally establishing the conceptual framework by which the centralizing monarchies understood their internal identities and international objectives.
Christianity was not only a commanding political presence during the High Medieval and Early Modern period but also a commanding moral influence. While the Church had accommodated itself to the prevailing morality of honor in the preceding period, it partially defined the prevailing morality in this one. The morality of higher purposes, unlike its predecessor, was religious in its basic conception. It declared good behavior in general as being directed to the salvation of a person’s soul, and particular types of good behavior as directed to goals that were established by that overarching standard. Thus, violence should be used for the defense of Christianity, sex restricted to procreation within marriage, and parenting designed to produce devout and responsible adults. To be sure, not all morality was religiously inspired. This period also saw the development of a secular morality that conceived the centralizing monarchy’s control, glory, and prosperity as the purpose of political action and an enticingly unavailable woman as the goal of true romantic love. But these aspects of morality, even if they supported the Church’s political rivals or conflicted with its standards of behavior, were homologous with the religious morality of Christianity. Higher purposes morality was a mode of thought established by religion, even though it co-causally evolved in other areas or could be applied to objectives other than salvation.
In response to its institutional successes and as part of its increasingly important role in defining the new morality of higher purposes, Christianity shifted into a notably more spiritual mode. Intense devotion replaced strength as a prevailing value, and Jesus was transformed from a supernatural warrior into an intensely human manifestation of God’s love. The Virgin Mary emerged as an inspiring religious presence, and scenes of her nurturing the infant Jesus replaced an enthroned Christ as the dominant iconographic image. Saint Francis, the era’s most beloved religious figure, did not direct most of his energies to converting nonbelievers, who could be reached only through arduous overseas travel by his time, but to intensifying and spiritualizing the beliefs of the Christians who were all around him. His personal and deeply felt relationship with God betokened the increased interiority of the religious experience, repeated later in the century by St. Thomas’s idea that belief was an adumbration of the beatific vision of God that occurred after death12 and a century later by William of Ockham’s emphasis on intentionality as the proper test of Christian virtue.
Although Christianity remained enormously influential as the Early Modern period proceeded, the Reformation changed its role from an all-embracing framework institution to a contestant in political and social conflicts. But Protestantism, which continued the spiritualizing process, represented no more than a partial reinterpretation of the prevailing Christian doctrine. In some sense, it revived the aspirations of the Gregorian reforms, which had lost momentum as the papacy gained temporal success. Luther’s abhorrence of simony echoed Pope Gregory VII’s, and his rejection of clerical celibacy was based on the frequency with which it led to the same concupiscence and concubinage that Gregory condemned.13 Eliminating the priest from the pathway between the individual and God was obviously a major change, although perhaps a natural outgrowth of the more subjective approach to belief developed by Francis, Aquinas, and Ockham. The Protestant emphasis on faith and Scripture, however, was at least a partial reinterpretation in that it rejected the complex intellectual machinery of the Church fathers and encouraged individuals to read the Bible for themselves. Subsequent versions of Protestantism that reduced the Eucharist to a commemoration, ended confession, and emptied the churches of iconography certainly altered the atmospherics of the religion and at least portions of its doctrine in addition.
In High Modernity (Chapter 3), Christianity was further demoted from a contestant to an interest group. Once the publification process intensified and European governments became more secular, conflicts between nations, as they are now properly regarded, were no longer conceived or justified in religious terms. Even more significantly, since any justification for international conflict is often little more than an excuse, the civil conflicts within nations, which had been truly motivated by divergent forms of Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, came to be shaped by secular conflicts between economic and social classes during the nineteenth. As both Catholic and Protestant leaders aligned their institutions with one side of this conflict—the conservative side—their political role gradually diminished into support for an essentially secular political position. In this setting, denominational differences began to be effaced, not through any doctrinal rapprochement, but because Christianity’s subordinate role in the alliance rendered doctrine less significant than politics. The papacy remained in control of a much-weakened Catholic Church during this period, but as a result of the nationalistic impulses that reunified Italy, its area of independent control was reduced from a province to an office building.14
The advent of the administrative state—that is, a government with an articulated structure and articulated social goals—reduced the influence of Christianity still further. As Europeans moved out of their rural villages and into industrial cities or snake-infested colonies,15 they left behind the parish church, with its day school and its poor relief, and entered into a mass society where these services could be provided only by the administrative government that developed co-causally with their migration. For reasons connected with this pragmatic situation and also with the belief system that High Modernity had spawned, people began to perceive government as a source of services, rather than a higher purpose. This reconceptualization was co-causally related to the development of representative democracy, a mode of governance designed to make the administrative rulers responsive to the people’s needs. Decisively secular in the United States and openly antireligious in France when it first emerged during the crucial quarter century between 1775 and 1800,16 it engendered a countervailing hostility from Christian leaders. But even in nations where the confrontation was absent or muted, such as Britain and Sweden, Christianity remained separate from this momentous political development. Nor was there any Western nation where it was able to restore its former social role, in fields such as education or public welfare, within the framework of the rapidly emerging pattern of administrative governance.17
Co-causally with the advent of the administrative state and representative democracy, the morality of self-fulfillment rose to dominance within the Western World. Christianity, which had readily accommodated itself to the morality of honor and defined the morality of higher purposes to a significant extent, did not attempt to reinterpret itself once again but held fast to its previous interpretation and set itself in almost immediate opposition to the new morality. Even before Freud, Christian leaders perceived its focus on the individual as hostile to the morality of higher purposes that had become so closely associated with their religion. In addition, they perceived the new morality’s inherent egalitarianism and organic connection to representative democracy as hostile to the social structure that had nurtured that religion. Freud intensified the antinomy by defining the morality of higher purposes as a disease and designing treatment modalities to free people from the sense of guilt by which Christianity chained people to its strictures. Subsequent rejection of those modalities by other psychologists, on the grounds that they are ineffective or unnecessary, generally did not reflect a reconciliation with religion, but an equal antagonism or a casual dismissal. Like the morality of honor, the morality of self-fulfillment is essentially non-Christian in conception. Unlike that former morality, it is explicitly recognized as such by its proponents and explicitly opposed by Christian leaders.
The result, predictably, has been a series of dramatic defeats and strategic retrenchments for these Christian leaders as the morality of self-fulfillment became dominant in Western culture. By the early part of the twentieth century, when Communism taught the Western World what real hostility to religion looks like, they had abandoned their opposition to democracy. They had also released society from the Great Chain of Being and conceded that rejecting social hierarchy was not an act of rebellion against God. This might have led to a general withdrawal by Christian leaders from the realm of politics; in fact, they have remained entirely immersed in political debate through their efforts to convince government decision makers to resist the deregulation of sex. Their continued efforts to oppose the steady progress of the new morality in redefining the legal treatment of sexual issues inevitably condemns them to more defeats. Birth control is now universally accepted in Western society, by its governments and by vast majority of people, including most Catholics who are not actually ordained as priests. Legalized abortion is nearly universal, sex education is common practice, and gay marriage is rapidly gaining ground.
In clinging to the morality of higher purposes and condemning the new morality that is rapidly replacing it, Christianity has branded itself as immoral to increasingly large numbers of people in the Western World. They will not accept a religion that fails to endorse equality or social welfare, condemns sexual self-fulfillment, demands that women give birth to unwanted children, excoriates loving relationships between competent adults, and willingly exposes teenagers to the dangers of disease rather than accepting the realities of their sexual behavior.18 Thus, Christianity’s continued resistance to the rapidly advancing morality of self-fulfillment, when combined with its institutional subordination to the prevailing nation-state, has spawned the conditions for its continued decline.
This decline is not inevitable, however. Institutions often display remarkable resilience, particularly ones as venerable and widespread as Christianity. In particular, it cannot be assumed that Christianity will remain committed to the increasingly outmoded morality of higher purposes. Having reinterpreted itself at least twice during the period covered by this book,19 it seems possible that Christianity could be reinterpreted again, that it could change to reflect the modern morality of self-fulfillment as it changed to accommodate the morality of honor and changed again to help establish the morality of higher purposes. Just as it was not required by its essential teachings to commit itself to Aristotelian physics and declare the great scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century a form of heresy, it is not required to commit itself to an ethical vision designed by eleventh-century French and Italian monks and brand the distinctive beliefs of High Modernity as heresy or sin. There is very little in its basic doctrine or in Scripture that precludes a further reinterpretation—that is, very little that is truly inconsistent with the new morality.
This process of reinterpretation may already be occurring. Although Protestantism began the struggle with Catholicism by attempting to exceed it in intolerance as well as spirituality, doctrinal fragmentation and social marginalization induced certain Protestant sects, such as the Quakers and the Unitarians, to adopt positions that at least partially reflected the emerging morality of self-fulfillment. At present, several mainline Protestant denominations in the United States, such as the Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the United Church of Christ, endorse some aspects of the new morality, as do the national churches in most northern European countries. Resistance remains strong, however. Mainline churches in the U.S. are generally in decline, while evangelical, charismatic, and fundamentalist churches that are adamantly opposed to self-fulfillment morality attract increasing membership and support.
Most significantly, of course, the Roman Catholic Church remains opposed as well.20 While grudgingly accepting some features of the new morality, such as representative democracy, toleration, and women’s equality in the secular realm, it has maintained positions associated with the previous era’s morality of higher purposes on a wide range of issues including assisted suicide, homosexuality, abortion, birth control, divorce, and women’s role within the Church. The accession of Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis I, however, may herald a new direction. It hardly seems surprising that he would choose the name of Catholicism’s most beloved saint, but in being the first to do so,21 he was at least evoking the internalized spirituality, social egalitarianism, and reverence for the natural world that characterized St. Francis and perhaps led other popes to avoid this otherwise appealing choice.
Pope Francis certainly has a charismatic style, and his expressed concern for social justice is sufficient for Rush Limbaugh to condemn him as a Marxist.22 In addition, he sent a tremor through the world when he responded to a question about homosexuality by asking, “Who am I to judge?” instead of issuing the usual denunciation. The enthusiasm that greeted him reveals a thirst for reform among the Catholics of the Western World, a reaction to which he responded by canonizing two recent popes associated with reform, John XXIII and John Paul II. All this may betoken future changes; it is hard to imagine the current Church canonizing High Modern popes who favored stasis, such as Benedict XVI, Paul VI, and Pius IX.23 But the record of real reform—and thus both the precedent set by the reformist popes and the signal sent by their canonization—is somewhat paltry. John XXIII convened Vatican II, but its most dramatic reforms involved Church practices (such as the vernacular liturgy), and he rejected a doctrinally promising proposal to end the prohibition of artificial birth control, much to the disadvantage of both the world and the Church, in many people’s view. John Paul II may have done a lot of traveling and supported Polish independence, but he was an adamant opponent of liberation theory and canonized the founder of ultraconservative Opus Dei.
To illustrate the way that Christianity could be reinterpreted, and simultaneously summarize the second half of this book, Christianity's relationship to the main elements of this new morality will be considered in turn. As will be recalled, the description of modern morality moved outward from the self in concentric circles. It began in Chapter 4 with people’s relationship to themselves, proceeded to Chapter 5’s discussion of their intimate relationships and their relationships with others they know personally, and ended in Chapter 6 with their relationship to the larger society beyond the ambit of their personal relations.
Regarding people’s moral relationship to themselves, the basic concept of the new morality is that they should construct their own life paths for the purpose of fulfillment, that is, of being as happy as they can be at each stage of that path. Although the image of a life path, with its narrative and developmental structure, is contemporary, the conclusion that people experience a series of autonomous choices possessing moral significance is familiar and indeed central to Judeo-Christian thought. What may seem jarring is the emphasis on present happiness and the idea that planning for the future is directed solely to securing present happiness upon that future’s arrival. But traditional Christian doctrine, after all, promises the righteous present happiness in heaven,24 the beatific vision depicted by St. Thomas, and the higher purpose that dominated the Medieval and Early Modern system of morality.25 While the traditional idea that one can earn this future happiness by self-denial in the present has some intuitive appeal, the transition from a self-denying life to an ecstatic afterlife appears to demand a personality change. Presumably, God can do that, but it may not be necessary to require Him to perform that particular miracle. An equally plausible approach is that people prepare for happiness in heaven by being happy here on Earth, that living a fulfilled life serves as a natural prelude to the infinite and more intense experience that follows.
Of course, religion will necessarily make demands beyond a purely secular morality. The point is that it need not conflict with that morality, that it need not set itself in opposition to self-fulfillment by treating earthly existence as a vale of tears and humans as afflicted by original and debilitating sin. To be sure, Scripture insists that people devote their thoughts to God and prohibits many behaviors that people might regard as permissible or desirable if they had only earthly happiness in mind. But the morality of self-fulfillment provides the conceptual resources to accommodate this more demanding standard by replacing guilt or shame with the anticipation of regret as the means of bringing future conditions into current consideration. The modern idea that one should restrain indulgence in the present to increase the likelihood of future happiness—in part because of its co-causal linkage to the complexity of modern society and the specialization of labor—has produced an unusually disciplined and planning-oriented populace.26 That offers fertile ground for a religious view that one should engage in further restraint by factoring the additional rewards of a joyous afterlife into the equation.
Modern morality also prescribes, as a matter of people’s relationship to each other as selves, that one should never interfere with another person’s efforts to achieve self-fulfillment. It is permissible to offer advice but immoral to compel behavior, except, of course, when the other person violates this basic standard. Thus, the general stance is that one should be tolerant, supportive, and considerate of others. This conflicts with Christian practice throughout most of Western history, which endorsed the forceful imposition of both religion and morality. Even after the Reformation shattered Christian unity, the conclusion was not freedom of conscience, but the Westphalian principle that the ruler determines the religion.27 Again, however, neither Christian history nor Christian doctrine demands—or even justifies—this attitude. Unlike Judaism or Islam, which developed as state religions, Christianity was a minority religion, and generally a disfavored one, for the first three centuries of its existence.28 As such, its growth depended on persuasion, not compulsion. Serious Christian thinkers, from St. Augustine and Boethius to St. Thomas, St. Francis, and Ockham, and on to Luther and Calvin, have all recognized that true commitment to the religion must be based on freely adopted or accepted faith. The political implications of this doctrine were finally accepted at the end of the religious wars. John Locke’s argument for toleration is not based on his political theory of the social contract, but on the theological position that forcing beliefs on people will not save their souls and actually endangers one’s own.29 To adopt this as a general principle simply places Christianity back in the political position that it occupied when it originally evolved.
The principle of toleration is closely connected to the principles of incommensurability and equality. Each person, as a self, has his or her own life path; no person’s self-fulfillment is more valuable than any other’s because there is no external standard by which they can be distinguished. This represents a break with the hierarchicalism of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, to say nothing of the hyper-hierarchicalism of the Early Middle Ages. But here, too, modern morality can be reasonably regarded as an opportunity for Christianity to recapture its first principles and free itself from doctrinally and socially questionable compromises. Doctrinally, the religion preaches that each person has an immortal soul and that salvation depends on individual devotion, not on the sorts of achievements that power, wealth, or education might facilitate. In fact, Scripture strongly suggests that poverty is preferable to wealth. The ringing words that begin Christ’s Sermon on the Mount include: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. . . . Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”30 Socially, Christianity originally spread among people of modest means; according to Robin Lane Fox, its “centre of gravity lay with the humble free classes.”31 Slaves, although only a small proportion of its converts, were never excluded from participation in Christian services,32 and even upper-class converts were in some sense members of a disadvantaged group as a result of the repeated persecutions.
In becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, Christianity quickly accommodated itself to the social realities of a highly stratified society, and it continued that concession throughout all its subsequent reinterpretations. Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas endorse this apparent contradiction.33 In the High Medieval and Early Modern periods, it was justified by the Great Chain of Being, the assertion that social stratification was part of a larger natural and supernatural hierarchy that had been ordained by God. But during the crucial quarter century between 1775 and 1800, equality emerged as both a system of belief and a pragmatic political program in the Western World. It gained force throughout the nineteenth century as theorists sundered the connection between social structure and either nature or necessity, and as representative democracy advanced in its co-causal relationship with the administrative state.
The Catholic Church, however, remained committed to its previous position. An 1832 papal encyclical complained that “certain teachings are being spread among the common people in writings which attack the trust and submission due to princes.”34 This hostility was not modified until 1885 and not explicitly abandoned until the 1944 Encyclical.35 The Church was still more obdurate regarding the equality of women; the 1930 Encyclical, Casti Connubii, insisted that family order demands “the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience.”36 Some Protestant churches were more willing to change, but many others were not. Ultimately, all Christian denominations altered their position; had they not, their decline would have been much more rapid. There was no doctrinal reason for them not to do so, and there is no such reason today that they should not enthusiastically support the equality that self-fulfillment morality has installed as a prevailing value in the Western World.
Further features of modern morality’s life path involve the choices one makes along the way and the decisions occurring at its end. Because self-fulfillment is the morality’s dominant criterion, religion is not an overarching source of meaning in the modern moral system. It is simply an aspect of life, the means of meeting spiritual needs that vary in intensity from one person to another. The current practice of denomination shopping reflects this mode of thought. Christian leaders may find it disappointing or disconcerting, but it creates no doctrinal difficulties. The distinction between clergy and the Christian laity goes back to the earliest days of the religion and finds strong support in Scripture. However insistently laypeople were importuned to turn all their thoughts to God, the religion always recognized that most of them could do so only intermittently. Even in the High Middle Ages, people generally attended Church once a week, at most, and received the non-ceremonial sacraments of confession and communion only occasionally. Their daily lives were drenched in religious symbolism, ritual, and pragmatic interactions with the Church, but this was a matter of social practice, not worship or devotion.
Denomination shopping violates the particular denomination the person leaves and probably gratifies the one the person enters,37 but it does not pose any particular problem for Christianity in general. In its early days, Christianity, even when it was not being actively persecuted, had to compete for adherents with the luxuriant multiplicity of serious religions, sophisticated philosophies, debased cults, and vulpine magicians that filled the Roman Empire—a political regime that, except for its particular problem with Christianity, was tolerant of all beliefs. Here again, the advent of secular government and the increasing multiplicity of beliefs in Western culture do no more than place Christianity back in its original political position. Tocqueville and other observers explain that Christianity has greater vitality in the United States than in Western Europe because it never became associated with the government, an institution that so regularly taxes and so often disappoints, and because its various denominations learned how to compete for members in America’s contentiously pluralistic culture.38
With respect to issues that revolve around the termination of the life path, modern Christian leaders argue insistently that their religion is pro-life. But Christianity’s central mystery of a dying and resurrected God, its defining image of the cross and subsidiary images of pietà and final judgment, its intensely felt tradition of martyrdom, and its predominantly glum approach to life on earth give one cause to question this assertion. Quite possibly, the pro-life characterization of Christianity is a recent characterization that reflects the influence of modern, self-fulfillment morality. But at least if one accepts this pro-life claim on its face, Christianity is entirely consistent with the morality of self-fulfillment. That morality favors life, which it regards as all that individuals definitively possess and thus of incalculable value to them. In fact, Catholicism’s contemporary positions of opposing capital punishment and at least discouraging aggressive war represent relatively rare areas of agreement with the progressive political positions that proponents of the new morality tend to support.
This agreement extends generally to suicide. Self-fulfillment morality abjures the idea of dying for honor or for the higher purpose of advancing the glory of one’s nation and the ambition of its rulers. It shares with Christianity a revulsion toward the Stoic view, so prominent in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations,39 that people are well advised to exit from an oppressive or wearisome existence. Life is to be treasured as long as the possibility of fulfilling experience remains, according to the new morality. The disagreement between this morality and Christianity comes when individuals can no longer expect any fulfillment from the remainder of their lives, most commonly because illness has condemned them to unremitting pain and imminent demise. Modern morality sees no value in preserving life under these circumstances and no reason to prohibit a person from obtaining assistance in its termination.
As this morality continues to advance and as life-prolonging technology makes the problem more severe, the Christian stance on suicide could alienate increasing numbers of people in the Western World. Here, too, however, there is no reason that Christianity cannot reinterpret its position. A generally pro-life stance does not necessarily insist that suffering must be continued for a few more miserable months. Neither does Scripture; while both the Old and New Testaments are quite forthcoming in issuing moral condemnations, they report a number of suicides without stating any clear position on the moral status of the act.40 Several bad people, most notably Judas, are shown committing suicide, but it is unclear whether this was a further expression of their immorality or whether they were doing the right thing in ending their immoral careers.41 Samson’s suicidal act of collapsing a temple on the Philistines and on himself—certainly one of the Bible’s most memorable scenes—is reported with apparent approbation. This would seem to definitively resolve the matter in favor of committing suicide under appropriate circumstances, were it not for the fact that Samson is a soldier. When soldiers voluntarily expose themselves to certain death, we view them as doing their duty rather than seeking their demise. In short, and perhaps surprisingly, Scripture simply does not address the morality of suicide. It thus leaves Christianity free to reinterpret its position on this subject in a manner consistent with the new morality.
Proceeding from the morality of the self to the morality of personal relations, the topic of Chapter 5’s discussion, reveals further possibilities for reinterpretation. The crucial topic is sex, often the basis of people’s most personal relations and a major source of current conflict between religion and the new morality. Christianity’s negativity about this issue and its consequent insistence that sex is permissible only for procreative purposes in a religiously sanctioned marriage do not appear explicitly in Scripture. Neither does the Catholic doctrine of original sin.42 God was apparently happy to provide Adam with a sexual partner. What caused Him to banish both Adam and his partner from the Garden was not sex, but disobedience. That is Onan’s sin as well. He never actually engages in the practice to which he gave his name; God strikes him dead for refusing His command that Onan impregnate his brother’s widow.43
Many specific elements of the Christian attitude toward sex are equally available for reinterpretation. Perhaps the single most contentious issue in the conflict between the new morality and the preceding one to which Christianity remains committed is abortion, but Scripture does not have a single word to say about the subject. It does not seem unreasonable to expect that a text that contains literally hundreds of detailed prohibitions would include one about a practice that so many modern Christians seem to find anathema. Nor does this expectation ask for an anachronism, as would demanding the prohibition of Internet pornography. The Hippocratic Oath, which explicitly prohibits abortion, had probably been in existence for more than four hundred years by the time the New Testament was written. Saint Luke, a loyal follower of Paul, was a Greek-trained physician who must have taken the Oath, but Paul does not have a word to say about the subject.44
Lacking direct textual support, Christians committed to the morality of higher purposes resort to interpretations that are optional at best and blasphemous at worst. One is the commandment that the King James Bible translates as “Thou shalt not kill,” but modern versions rephrase as “You shall not murder,” that is, engage in wrongful killing.45 Whether abortion is wrongful is, of course, the point at issue. It may not even be killing of any sort; older Christian doctrine maintains the fetus does not become ensouled until some later stage of pregnancy, which is one reason that the Catholic Church does not baptize miscarriages.46 This is consistent with the morality of self-fulfillment, which focuses on the pregnant woman as a conscious being who should control her life, rather than on the zygote or early fetus as a potential consciousness. Another often-cited text is God’s declaration to Jeremiah that “before you were born I sanctified you.”47 In the passage, Jeremiah, called by God to speak His words, voices the common objection that he is unworthy of this responsibility,48 and God reassures him. It would be strange to issue a major prohibition in this unrelated context and in such elliptical form. Moreover, the idea that Jeremiah’s existence in the womb was of any significance to God denies divine omniscience. God has known that Jeremiah was to be a prophet since the beginning of time; indeed, immediately before the quoted words, He says: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Surely, Jeremiah was not a person at that point. The obvious purpose of God’s words is not to declare a fetus’s humanity, but to give an understandably nervous and overwhelmed young man some concrete reassurance that he can fulfill the awesome responsibility that he is being given. The need for specificity results from Jeremiah’s limitations, not from God’s.49
The same could be said about the scriptural basis of prohibitions against premarital sex and birth control. There are biblical passages condemning divorce, adultery, and homosexuality, but even these are subject to interpretation. Interestingly, one of the clearest statements is the condemnation of divorce, in Jesus’ own words,50 but modern Christian leaders seem more willing to compromise on this subject than they are on others. The crucial issue, however, and the one that seems to possess the greatest potential for a reinterpretation of Christianity, is the connection between sex and love. Self-fulfillment morality domesticates love by bringing it into the marriage relationship and simultaneously destabilizes marriage by imposing the requirements of love on what was previously a property and private governance arrangement. In essence, this modern morality transforms marital sex from a conjugal duty to a source of mutual gratification and thus a means of embodying the deepest love that adults feel for each other.
Christianity could readily be understood to center its sexual morality around support for this relationship, as a number of observers have suggested.51 Saint Paul, often seen as the sternest New Testament author on sexual subjects, certainly does say that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.”52 But he also emphasizes that this is a personal choice; “I wish that all men were even as I myself. But each one has his own gift from God. . . .”53 He goes on to a famous passage translated in the King James Bible as “it is better to marry than to burn.”54 While this seems to threaten with damnation those who have sex outside marriage, modern translations say “it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” The passage can nonetheless be read as an implicit condemnation of extra-marital sex, on the ground that the unmarried are required by religion to remain sexually unsatisfied, but it can also be regarded as asserting that sex will be painful or unsatisfying, no matter how much of it one has, unless it is part of a loving, mutual relationship. Such a reading is supported by the immediately preceding statement, also famous, that the husband should “render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to the husband.” Paul then offers what would seem to be a characteristically chauvinist statement that the wife’s body belongs to her husband, except that it is balanced by the statement that the husband’s body belongs to his wife,55 producing an image of marriage fully consistent with the morality of self-fulfillment’s emphasis on equality and mutual gratification. “Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time,” St. Paul continues.56 Even more significantly, the epistle includes an inspired panegyric about love. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,” Paul says, “I have become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal . . . And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”57
Thus, Christianity might define its own position, yet accommodate the new morality, through the doctrine that sex is truly gratifying when part of a loving, intimate relationship. It need not threaten people with damnation for engaging in less gratifying sex or even with the danger that they will ruin their possibilities for future gratification. It need not treat the desire for sex as an illness or an addiction, the way St. Augustine does, or divorce for lack of sexual or emotional compatibility as sin.58 Rather, it might offer the promise that people can best use God’s gift of sexuality by making it part of a relationship that reflects the even greater love that God Himself offers to each human being.59 The idea that human love is the image of divine love could include love between two members of the same sex, as well as of opposite sexes, since religious men, at least, have generally viewed God as a man and, in the future, religious women may well view Her as a woman. Christianity could then accept modern psychology, which has branded guilt a form of illness, but at the same time go beyond it by offering rewards that cannot be encompassed in the mundane framework of mental health. Having done so, it would then be free to direct its formidable force of disapproval toward rape, marital rape, child abuse, frenetic promiscuity, spousal insensitivity, and other practices that it can join the modern morality of self-fulfillment in condemning.
People’s other major intimate relationship is with their children. Modern morality provides that the goal of childrearing is to enable the child to live a fulfilling life. Parents must regard their children as persons—individuals in their own right who should be guided and nurtured so that they can design their life path and get pleasure from the experiences they encounter along the way. To organize one’s parenting around some higher purpose, whether it is the family’s well-being, the good of the nation, or the salvation of the child’s soul, is now regarded as immoral. This would appear to conflict with Christianity in theory, which seems to insist on the centrality of salvation, and in practice, which traditionally encouraged repressive measures, including extensive corporal punishment, as a means of combating the child’s intrinsically sinful nature. George Lakoff regards these divergent views of childrearing as the basis of the political disagreements between progressives and conservatives, with religious people generally belonging to the latter group.60
Here again, however, the conservative approach to childrearing is not a necessary interpretation of Christianity. If children are regarded as unformed, rather than unsaved, then they need to be educated, not rescued, and the way to provide such education is by nurturance, not by trying to beat the devil out of them. Part of their education should be moral instruction, of course, but it can be teaching them to be open-minded and considerate by example, rather than close-minded and judgmental by intimidation. It is true that scattered statements in Scripture declare children to be Satan’s spawn. But Jesus said that God has hidden His judgments “from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes,”61 and when the disciples rebuked people who brought their children to be touched by Jesus, He said: “Let the little children come to Me and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”62 This more genial attitude toward children is not only consistent with self-fulfillment morality but could well be seen as improving it by modifying its tendency to over-program and over-supervise children to ensure their opportunities for self-fulfillment.
Moving outward from the self once more, Chapter 6 considers people’s moral obligations to the wider society, that is, to those beyond the ambit of their personal relationships. Modern morality, through its co-causal connection to administrative governance and representative democracy, extends these obligations to the nation-state’s frontiers. The standard interpretation of Christianity, which is that political boundaries are a matter for secular authorities to determine,63 readily accommodates this position. But here, too, Christianity might provide a helpful supplement to modern morality by counteracting several of the more parochial features of nationalism and reminding people that they have at least some obligations to humanity in general.
Within the nation-state, as the arena of obligation, modern morality demands that citizens vote for democratic leaders who support a government policy of noninterference with people’s efforts to fulfill themselves. This generally translates into the doctrine of human rights, now implemented by both legislative enactments and judicial review. Human rights, which clearly include freedom of speech and religion, prohibitions of slavery and torture, and various protections for criminal defendants, might appear to pose a problem for Christianity. They do not emerge from the Christian natural rights tradition and were often defined and secured in direct opposition to religious authorities. Those authorities not only opposed freedom of religion and of speech but also accepted slavery, provided strong support for torture, and often set themselves in opposition to the democratic governments that instantiated human rights.64 It is also true, however, that Quakers and other Protestants, although not the Catholic Church, played a leading role in the abolition of slavery.65 More generally, the Catholic Church and most other Christian groups have fully accommodated themselves to existing in regimes where human rights are regarded as inviolate.66 This is another example of Christianity’s ability to reinterpret itself under the fiat of necessity; had it failed to do so, its followers would be limited to the fringe group that currently sees terrorism and tsunamis as God’s judgment against modernity’s permissiveness.
A source of potential conflict between Christianity and the morality of self-fulfillment is so-called victimless crimes such as gambling, prostitution, and narcotics use. Christianity has been interpreted to hold that prostitution and narcotics use, at least, are either sins per se or the consequence of sinful attitudes, and the influence of this view is one of the main forces that has led to criminalization. According to the new morality, however, these activities represent individual choices; a punitive approach to them is inappropriate as well as ineffective. To the extent that engaging in them seems likely to produce subsequent regret, which is often the case for narcotics use and sometimes for gambling and prostitution, the morality of self-fulfillment would address the problem through education and treatment, not through prohibition and punishment.
There is no reason that Christianity could not accept, and indeed welcome, this approach, which is currently its way of dealing with many other sins, such as gluttony and avarice. The obvious Christian text that endorses a kindlier, more supportive approach to human weaknesses such as drug addiction is Jesus’ response to a group of “scribes and Pharisees” who want to stone to death a woman guilty of adultery: “He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.”67 Abashed, the would-be executioners, “being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one,” leaving Jesus alone with the woman. He has, of course, stated a principle that does not include Himself. The one way His human nature differs from an ordinary person’s is that He is without sin,68 so He has not precluded Himself from carrying out the sentence. Instead, He says to her: “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” In other words, He chose to minister and educate her, rather than imposing punishment.
In addition to voting for democratic leaders who support human rights on noninterference grounds, the morality of self-fulfillment demands that people instantiate the principle of equality by voting for leaders who support public programs that provide people with basic necessities for a fulfilling life: food, shelter, health care, and education. In the United States and to a lesser extent in other Western nations, those committed most strongly to the Christian religion have generally identified themselves as social conservatives on this issue, that is, as being opposed to public welfare programs. Nothing more clearly illustrates the interpretive flexibility of Scripture. If there is any single principle of earthly ethics that seems demanded by the biblical text, it is caring for the poor. In contrast to the intensely held positions by religious people about abortion, which is never mentioned, or homosexuality, which is mentioned only occasionally, Scripture contains literally hundreds of explicit commands to give charity and otherwise minister to the unfortunate. Both the Old and New Testaments urge people to give unstintingly, in all circumstances, and regardless of the recipients’ moral worth as individuals. To be sure, Catholic and Protestant Christians differ regarding the metaphysical role of charity. The Catholic Church regards it as a direct route to salvation, while major Protestant denominations believe that salvation comes through faith alone. But Protestants also believe that a person saved by faith will be naturally inclined to perform good works such as charity, so there is general agreement on the importance of such action.
To argue that these prescriptions demand only private charity, not support for governmental programs, is a bit like arguing that Christ does not prohibit people from committing adultery in motor vehicles. As Chapter 1 described, the public programs of the cities that existed at the time of Christ or in the recent past, including military defense and civic construction as well as social welfare, were carried out by wealthy people’s voluntary efforts, which were called liturgies. Two millennia of privatization and re-publification have generated a very different funding structure for these functions. In modern mass, urbanized, industrial society, private organizations lack the capacity to alleviate poverty and other social ills. As a result of co-causal changes in governance policies, the administrative state possesses precisely that capability. Scripture repeatedly demands that efforts to provide for the poor should be effective as well as heartfelt. The Epistle of James says that “if you do not give [the destitute] the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?”69 In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells the unrighteous that they will be cast into the “everlasting fire” because “I was hungry and you gave Me no food . . . sick . . . and you did not visit Me . . . inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.”70 It is possible to read this passage to require people to actually visit the sick, but given the wonders of modern medicine, that is not, by itself, particularly effective, nor is it particularly practical in an era when hospitals have restricted visiting hours. The more plausible reading of Matthew is that people will go to hell if they do not support public health care for the poor.
Moreover, Scripture repeatedly asserts that charity should be given for its own sake and not for public acclaim, acclaim being the way that pagan society enforced its liturgies. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says: “Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”71 And charity should be given without hope of recompense: “When you give a dinner or a supper, do not ask your friends, your brothers, your relatives, nor rich neighbors, lest they also invite you back, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.”72 What better way to give anonymously in the modern world, and thus avoid the temptation to offer charity in order to earn the self-abasing gratitude of the recipients, than by pulling a lever in a voting booth? What better way to make uncompensated sacrifices for the poor than to impose taxes on oneself?73
The final issue that this book considers is people’s moral obligation regarding the environment. As Chapter 6 suggests, this is a strikingly, perhaps disconcertingly new issue, whose relationship to the morality of self-fulfillment and to the morality of higher purposes is currently being explored by followers of both positions. Social conservatives, for example, tend to declare that global warming is a myth on the basis of the same evidence that leads progressives to regard it as an impending catastrophe. It appears that proponents of the new morality support environmental protection because of their greater comfort with the collective efforts of modern society in general, while proponents of the old morality, who see that society steadily rejecting their beliefs, oppose these efforts. The issue is not only too new to have been discussed in the Bible but also too new to have become part of the morality of higher purposes or to have been rejected by that morality during the eight centuries of its gestation and supremacy. Christianity thus has the opportunity to define its position on this increasingly important issue without the encumbrance of history. As various observers have noted, it could certainly fashion an environmentalist position out of the scriptural idea that the world is God’s creation, plus the solicitude that St. Francis felt for natural things as our siblings, children of the same almighty Father. In doing so, it could ally itself with the moral system that is becoming dominant in the Western World and that is gradually but insistently feeling its way toward that position. If Christianity chooses to oppose environmentalism, as it opposed Galilean astronomy, it will almost certainly guarantee and accelerate its decline.
This Conclusion has used the present and future status of Christianity, the Western World’s dominant religion, to summarize the various themes presented in the preceding chapters. But the main two themes of the book as a whole may be worth reciting one last time. As the first half of the book described, morality and governance are both means of regulating and managing relations among the inhabitants of a society. We can thus expect them to be complementary—to reflect the same way of looking at the world and to endorse similar patterns of behavior. Over time, moreover, we can expect them to evolve co-causally because they are in constant, dynamic contact with each other. This was true of the privatized government of the Early Middle Ages and its morality of honor, of the centralizing monarchies of the High Medieval and Early Modern periods and the morality of higher purposes, and of High Modernity’s administrative government and its morality of self-fulfillment.
To assert this relationship, of course, is to adopt a modern social science perspective as a means of explanation. Government and morality must both be viewed as human artifacts, as products of the society where they prevail. Their relationship must be viewed as a complex set of actions and reactions, functioning in roughly the same fashion as physics or the biology of plants and animals. The prior societies discussed in this book also regarded government and morality as related to each other, but not because they were produced by those societies or interacted in a causal manner. Rather, they were perceived as divine creations and were related to one another, as depicted by images such as the Great Chain of Being, because they were produced by the same Author. This generated a world of reiterated patterns that was not only reassuring but poetic. It is not a world that anyone believes in anymore, however. If we want the sense of unity that comes from reiteration of the collective purposes of government and the individual behavior of its citizens, we must produce that reiteration through the medium of causality, as we may do with the global warming problem and environmental ethics. Each society must build its sense of unity from its own materials, just as it must devise its explanations from its own worldview. And each society can live only by the lights of its own morality.
The second half of this book attempts to describe the morality by which we live in this age of High Modernity. Although some of its particulars are well established, it is still emerging, still fighting cultural battles with its predecessor, and still new enough that its status as a genuine morality requires explanation. This period is quickly coming to an end, however. In fifty or perhaps a hundred years, we will no longer be inside the kaleidoscope of moral transformation. The old morality of higher purposes will not have disappeared, but it will be limited to insulated groups and vague cultural reverberations, as the morality of honor is today and has been for some time. Self-fulfillment and its secondary principles of noninterference, incommensurability, and equality are already accepted norms, people already troll for religions as they do for hobbies, sex is already seen as a source of enjoyment, and divorce is now as ubiquitous as friendship. Abortion laws have probably achieved a stable equilibrium in most Western nations, including the United States,74 and polling evidence suggests that the next generation will regard opposition to same-sex marriage with bewildered incomprehension.75
Even if these future times are less conflicted than the present one, however, there will still be moral controversy caused by differing interpretations of what the prevailing morality of self-fulfillment means. And if the pattern that has prevailed to this point continues, we can expect that in another five or seven hundred years, a new morality will arise that will challenge, and ultimately displace, the self-fulfillment morality this book has endeavored to describe.