K ingdom Ethics Moral Excellence in the Small Things I am worrying these days about a gradual decline of Christian commitment to moral excellence in the small things. I speak of things like anger, profanity, gambling, alcohol abuse, and lack of everyday honesty. Perhaps, as a man altogether too close to turning 50, I should just accept that we are witnessing a generational change and that my cohorts’ values are being left behind. That certainly appears to be what Dave Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons found in their important 2007 book, Unchristian. They saw dramatically different beliefs on issues such as cohabitation, gambling, profanity, drunkenness, drug use, and sex outside of marriage between the 42+ (“born-again older adults”) crowd and the 23-41 (“bornagain busters”) crowd. For example, 37 percent of the 23-41 born-agains found profanity morally acceptable, while only 17 percent of the over-42 group did. On getting drunk, 35 percent of the younger group found it morally acceptable, and only 13 percent of the older Christians. Fifty-nine percent of the younger Christians found cohabitation okay, compared to 33 percent of my generation. I see these kinds of changes regularly as a professor who teaches both college and seminary students, most of whom are Baptists. I certainly see much more comfort with casual use of profanity, the regular taking of God’s name in vain, the wide practice of gambling on sports and cards, the abandonment of scruples related to alcohol use, and a seeming comfort with outbursts of anger. I also see among some a loss of any kind of clear line between right and wrong when it comes to matters of financial integrity. One recent example had to do with a case where a store employee invited a Christian young adult to pay him a reduced cash price for a store product, with no receipt. In other words, that cash was going to go into the employee’s pocket, the product was going to go out the door, and the “only” loser was going to be the company that
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did not get paid for its product. This young person seemed to see no reason at all why it might be wrong for a Christian to participate in such a transaction. It is hard to know why this generational change is afoot. I know that, in my own experience, when I entered an evangelical Christian church as a 16-year-old kid I was pretty raw. I had issues with language and anger among other things. But I recall that such behaviors were mainly sanded out of me through the ministrations of a really quite demanding program of discipleship training. It was made perfectly clear to me by both the words and example of the mature Christians around me that there are certain things Christians just do not do. It was understood that Christians are simply a different kind of people, and that this is part of what it meant to “accept Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.” It was my understanding that one reason Christians must be visibly different was that we were on an evangelistic mission. In our very secular northern Virginia schools and neighborhoods, we were to be salt and light, witnesses for Jesus Christ. I know this did not always go very well, or go over very well, but the sense of being “on mission” certainly helped motivate a morally serious way of life among many of us. It might have made a difference that in my Southern Baptist congregation we were constantly being taught something. That first summer of my new Christian life I was exposed to biblical teaching in Sunday school, morning worship, evening disciple training, evening worship, Monday night Bible study, and Wednesday night church—each week! This kind of intensive worship and teaching schedule is now a thing of the past in most churches, and I believe it shows. Not to mention that the preaching and teaching that are offered today appear much less
David P. Gushee
likely to demand anything of people, and more likely to help Christians feel better about themselves….but now I really am sounding like an old fuddy-duddy. Still, a certain commitment to everyday moral excellence appears in the process of being abandoned. You don’t get too many prayers like this one, which I just recently encountered in William Barclay’s 1959 Book of Everyday Prayers: Grant unto us each day to learn more of self-mastery and selfcontrol. Grant unto us each day better to rule our temper and our tongue. Grant unto us each day to leave our faults farther behind and to grow more nearly into the likeness of our Lord. I appeal for a return of this striving for moral excellence among Christians of every generation.
David P. Gushee is director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University, Atlanta, Ga., where he is also a professor of Christian ethics. His latest book is Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul (Mercer University Press, 2010).