Article VI Blog

Quick, don't think about it, just respond – What's worse?:

• Hillarycare
• Adultery
• The Holocaust

I'm betting you ranked them in order of bad, worse, worst just as they appear.  Welcome to the world of ethical thinking.  Despite the fact I am a Presbyterian, creedal Christian, I think we are outstripped in ethical thinking by the Jews, and I know few more articulate in that arena than Dennis Prager.  His series in defense of Judeo-Christian values from a while back is something close to a masterwork.

Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on personal salvation and grace has tended to ignore ethics in any depth.  Oh sure, we have some rules and regs, but we don't consider the hard questions very much.  Prager pointed this out in the LATimes in August of 2005.

THE RECENT BOMBINGS in London once again raise an ancient question: What is the greatest sin? One common response is that all sins are equally bad in God's eyes. But this makes little sense.

Do Catholics who believe it is a sin to masturbate believe that God considers masturbation as wrong as murder? Do Jews who believe it is a sin to eat non-kosher food equate doing so with a Jew committing rape? Do Protestants who believe it is a sin to gamble believe that God views a night at the blackjack table as sinful as abusing a child?

We Evangelicals are so focused on whether someone is going to heaven or hell that we tend not to think much about what it takes to live here, and now.  We tend to think that if everybody was just "saved" then the ethical stuff would iron itself out.  And yet, even within the confines of the church, we find ourselves confronted with difficult decisons about how to behave and what to do every day.

This focus on salvation has the unfortunate side effect of making us very clubish, "You're either in, or you're out,"  and we then judge a person ethically based on whether they are in or out.  And yet we find all sorts of people that are "in" that behave in a less than ethical manner, and contrarily, we find many people that are "out" that behave quite ethically.

Life, it seems, saved or unsaved, is far more complicated than we would like to think.  And so, when we approach the question of who to vote for, we have to consider it with a lot more data than simply "in or out."

Which takes us back to ethics. They are just the "rules of the road" if you will – the principles and practies by which we conduct ourselves in a society of many.  Because we have to enforce these rules, we have to decide which ones matter more than others, because we will have to offer reinforcement, both positive and negative, in proportion to the importance of the rule.

Prager often distinguishes between "sin" and "evil."  He has never clearly drawn the line between them that I know of, but generally "sin" is breaking an ethical rule between you and God, while "evil" is breaking an ethical rule between you and society.  To these two distinctives, I want to add another – "wrong."  By "wrong" I mean someone who arrives at the proper ethical stance via a distorted path.  So, for example, Jews and Christians have essentially the same ethical standards, so between them they would agree on the defintiions of "sin" and "evil."  (I hope so since I am relying on a Jewish thinker here!)  But Christians and Jews are going to think each other "wrong" because they arrive at these standards by different paths.

When it comes to electing someone, since no one is perfect, we have to decide what distinctives we can live with and which ones we cannot.  I think we can all agree that we cannot stand for "evil" in our elected officials.  Generally we go to war with evil governments.

"Sin"? – well that is an interesting question.  Many of our elected officials have conducted themselves sinfully while in office and yet governed reasonably, Jack Kennedy and his sexual pecadilloes would be a good example.  Others, it seems, have been relatively sinless, and yet governed disasterously, here Jimmy Carter leaps to mind – almost a little too fast.  Sin, it seems cannot be determinative in a decision about who to cast a vote for.  All things being equal, I think we would prefer the person that is less sinful, but "all things equal" is so hypothetical as to be fanciful.

So, what about "wrong?"  In Evangelical circles, there are some that consider "wrong" to be sinful.  I have a difficult time with this definition, but even if we accept it, we have already seen that sin cannot be a determinative factor in deciding who to vote for.

What we really find, is that once we eliminate evil, we must turn ourselves to other bases in order to make a decision about who to vote for.  So, for this blog, the question becomes a simple one.  Are Mormons evil?

The answer should be, "OF COURSE NOT!"  So why does this issue keep coming up?  Well, for one thing – history.  In my opinion, polygamy is evil.  It is a direct attack on the social order and threatens the underpinnings of our entire society.  So, the case can be made, in my opinion, that Mormons were evil.  But "were" and "are" are two very different things.  It is abundantly clear in everything from personal statements by Mitt Romney, to all the official CJCLDS doctrine I can find, that polygamy is now an abhorent practice among the Mormons.  So simply, they can no longer be considered evil.

Pretty much every other argument I have encountered about not voting for Mormons aside form that one does not relate to the ethical, but to the simple "in" or "out."  The "in or out" question matters a lot when it comes to how to operate a church, but not a nation.  Particularly not a nation as diverse as ours.

There are so many important questions to ask when it comes to deciding who to vote for, but "in or out" just is not one of them.  If it were, we would become that which our ancestors worked so hard to escape.  Our nation was founded in part as a refuge for those whose religion put them squarely in the category of "out."  We cannot and should not turn our backs on that heritage now.

Lowell's little post-script:  Modern Mormons will not concede that polygamy, as practiced by faithful Latter-day Saints until 1890, was evil, or that its practitioners were evil; far from it.  Even so, honest modern Mormons, I believe, simply wonder how those people did it and are glad the practice is part of the past.  But that's not John's point, as I read his post; so we need not go down that road here.  There is so much nuance, controversy, and disagreement to the polygamy subject that to explore it would  accomplish very little.  The point is, such history is irrelevant to the current presidential election and whether to vote for Mitt Romney.  That is, unless we want to make such questions relevant, and then we'd have to ask Giuliani what he thought about Pope Urban VIII and Galileo, and how that Pope began "the inquisition . . . contributing to [Galileo's] death under house arrest."  While we're at it, maybe we'd want to ask Huckabee and McCain about the checkered records of the Baptist and Episcopalian faiths on slavery during the era leading up to the Civil War.  But that would begin a ridiculous trip down the rabbit hole, wouldn't it?  Those faiths' histories are also irrelevant to voting decisions, unless we want to use history as an excuse to put a particular faith in the "out" category. As John says, we need to get past that.

[tags]wrong, evil, sin, sinful, Dennis Prager, Mitt Romney, ethics, votes, history[/tags] 

Posted in Doctrinal Obedience, Miscellany, Understanding Religion | 2 Comments » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

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