Great Moral Issues of the Day?
Posted by Anne McCrady
In case you haven’t heard, there is a debate rumbling in American evangelical circles about what constitutes “the great moral issues of the day.” With the presidential race heating up and the Republican party struggling to find its way forward, the Religious Right is jockeying to decide what should matter most to its constituency.
This spring, after evangelical leader Reverend Richard Cizik suggested global warming might fit in the category with other social concerns, a group that included the esteemed James Dobson and others chastised Cizik publicly, suggesting Christian involvement in the environmental debate might take away from, you guessed it,
the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage, and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.
Of course, this is mostly code for abortion, homosexuality and teenage sex, which continue to mesmerize conservative Americans. While I pray for the day when abortions are unneccessary because birth control is available to any woman anywhere, when marriage is always more than an act of convenience or oppression and when the kind of sex people want to have is not a government issue, I do think, as they have done for the past two decades, that the Far Right has missed the point on “the great moral issues of our time.”
For one thing, what happened to the one great moral issue: our humanity, the moral covenant we have God and with one another as God’s people? How can that be less important than race, nationality, religious traditions, gender or anything else?
In a recent God’s Politics blog, best-selling author and Sojourner editor Jim Wallis offered his own rebuttal questions to Dobson’s group:
- Is the fact that 30,000 children will die globally today and every day from needless hunger and disease a great moral issue for evangelical Christians?
- How about the reality of 3 billion of God’s children living on less than $2 per day?
- And isn’t the still-widespread and needless poverty in our own country, the richest nation in the world, a moral scandal?
- What about pandemics such as HIV/AIDS that wipe out whole generations, or the trafficking of massive numbers of women and children?
- Should genocide in Darfur be a moral issue for Christians?
- And what about disastrous wars such as Iraq?
I would add a few questions of my own, some echoed by several of the Democratic candidates (John Edwards for one, speaking about poverty):
- Isn’t it a moral issue that in America, Black and Hispanic children are much more likely to fail in school and their parents more likely to die from preventable medical conditions than in Anglo families?
- What about America blowing up an entire country because its leader was dangerous? And worse that a few industrialists made a fortune in the process?
- And can we justify CEOs taking home billions of dollars when their employees are counted among the working poor without medical coverage or retirement accounts?
- Isn’t it a moral issue that economic and military violence has filled our prisons to capacity where young men are tortured emotionally and physically?
Well, back to the controversy that stirred up all this talk about “the great moral issues of the day,” namely, the environment. All I can offer to that is the question we should ask anytime we consider morality, the environment, poverty, violence, inequity, cruelty, etc:
What must God think?!
Blogs are meant to be a conversation. So what about you? What do you think are the great moral issues of the day? What issues determine our humanity? What should we care about most?
We know we need a national and international dialogue on morality.
Let’s get started! I await your thoughts!
The Endeavor Can Be a Blessing!
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