What is a Moral Compass?

Date Published: 10/05/2009

Back on July 8, I posted an entry commenting on how the moral failures of liberals Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards and conservatives John Ensign and Mark Sanford remind us that we are all vulnerable and need to be vigilant and accountable. The return of Michael Vick to the National Football League and his anti-dog fighting speaking circuit has raised again the question of sports figures as role models. The arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland and the on air confession of David Letterman have prompted a number of commentators to ask about moral compass in entertainment and art. I have been personally confronted by serious moral misconduct by enough of my clergy colleagues to know that we are far from exempt, without even talking about the cases that become nationally notorious. Because we clergy are supposed to stand for righteousness, the damage we cause can be much greater. Just this afternoon (October 5), we heard that the defendants in the Dallas City Hall corruption case were all convicted, and at lunch I heard people bemoan that Dallas once had clean government when the whole city council was elected at-large. (I’m sure not everyone would agree.)

We recoil at the morals police enforcing Shari a law in Muslim societies, and few would really want to turn the United States into a quasi-Christian theocracy. Subjecting a whole society to what any one religion considers a divinely revealed moral code is so un-democratic as to be impractical if not impossible.

Pre-Christian Greek philosophers wrote about “natural law,” which seemed to accord with what the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:19-20, “What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.” But you don’t have to go much farther in Romans 1 to encounter material that we find at best uncomfortable. And then in Romans 2:1, Paul turns the tables on judgmental Christians when he writes, “you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” If “natural law” was to be the basis of a society’s moral compass, it would need to be obvious enough to shape a consensus, which we clearly do not have.

I’d like to think that Jesus gives us a solution to this dilemma when he said the greatest commandment was “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Mark 12:30-31) Of course, in a pluralistic society we’d have to allow people to identify which God they considered Lord, and we’d have to allow atheists to define a non-theistic moral center. I wouldn’t fuss too much about that, but as the plethora of moral failures all around us demonstrate, it still would not seem to prevent people from rationalizing treating someone less well than they would want to be treated. An unfaithful spouse may say they are treating their paramour as they like to be treated, and even suggest that their infidelity is not an injury to the spouse but only a reflection of the way the spouse treated them, but that barely masks the deterioration of moral principle.

As drastic as it may seem, I don’t believe a reliable moral compass, in the form of a principle or rule, is possible, not in a secular, pluralistic democracy nor in a totalitarian theocracy. Instead, I suggest that the Church as a community is called to be a moral compass. With all the fights and division between and within denominations and congregations, that may also be impractical and unreliable, at least if we think of it in terms of the Church speaking with a single voice on the major moral questions of our time. But I am suggesting something different, something far more radical. I am suggesting that the Church understand itself as an alternate society with the magnetic field of its compass aligned with Jesus. Even when we do not agree on an issue (maybe especially when we do not agree), we keep saying to ourselves and to the larger society that what we are after is to orient our life as a community to Jesus, and we welcome those who find that appealing. I am suggesting the Church as a community of refuge who will welcome the victims of both pluralism and absolutism with healing and direction that seeks to follow Jesus with the grace of knowing we don’t get it quite right but Jesus goes with us. Such a community becomes a kind of moral compass for the broader society by demonstrating there is a better way to live than either individual autonomy or imposed absolutism.