Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s… My Kingdom is not of this World!

“Morality is not about duties or ethical rules, but about stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love.” – Iris Murdoch

Should Morality be legislated? I recently came upon a blogpost tangling with this question. After messing with the ideas myself, I concluded that framing things in this way biases one towards misunderstanding what ‘morality’ even means. The question which gets closer to the truth is: Can Morality be legislated? To capsulize the key distinction which is necessary here, one could do a lot worse than to consider the quotation above attributed to the 20th century Irish novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdock.

The question arises within public discourse in the first place, of late, in the context of the increasingly louder and hellishly oxymoronic ideal of Christian Nationalism. If you’ve not had the stomach to keep tabs on this movement, first of all I do not blame you. But second of all, here are some illustrative recent examples to set some context.

1) Pastor Wilson

I was not very familiar with Doug Wilson — in fact not with any of the three personages highlighted here — so had to go do some researching. I chose this video excerpt to present here because although brief it does touch upon several regressive aspects of Wilson’s brand of CN: the re-subjugation of womankind (referred to as ‘submitting’); the ambition to utterly annihilate seperation of church and state, eventually globally; a strictly narrow, literalist interpretation of what the Bible decrees and how it must therefore be applied to society in an unchanging manner; and a curious tolerance for slavery in some supposedly charitable form because it was featured as a custom in the Old Testament. An important additional item to mention is Pete Hegseth’s (the current “Secretary of War” chosen by Trump off the payroll of Fox News because ‘he looked the part’ and who immediately became embroiled in a security lapse scandal upon assuming office with zero world affairs experience) proud affiliation with Pastor Wilson’s umbrella organization of American evangelical churches. A new branch recently opened near the White House.

2) God doesn’t want your kids to play with black kids

Little need for commentary here. Black families are okay as long as they go to your church and you know them for years and know they love God. Otherwise — if you love your kids — sit them down and warn them. Advice for the millions of white Americans who don’t go to church? Guess they’re fucked.

3) Charlie Kirk’s analysis of advanced education for females
DISCLAIMER – For those who consider any non-acclamational comments about Kirk to be “insensitive” : You are wrong. You don’t get a period of criticism-free tribute worship for such a divisive and deliberately strident voice because he was murdered and is all over the news of an instant. The agora doesn’t work that way.
This brief video shows Kirk’s answer to an apparently starstruck high school girl’s asking for advice about higher education. Deep south universities are best, and the main motivation should be to look for a husband. Also, Sociology is complete bullshit and you should be careful not to listen to any of your professors. I did not know CK before his murder. I had heard the name, and knew it was somehow associated with the far right, but I did not know his face and hadn’t realized he had of late branched into Christian Nationalism. My research quickly discovered that he was a vocal advocate for Trump’s January 6th lies and coup attempt, and that the 2020 U.S. election results were rigged to ensure Biden’s victory. So I knew right away I was dealing with an intellectual powerhouse. The AI summaries assured me that Kirk was a noted debater and active proponent of free speech. Looking into matters more deeply, I found both of these talking points to be doubtful. His debating techniques seemed to be limited to rapidfire Bible-snippet-infested interruptions of his opponent’s train of thought. Whenever his interlocutor could simply hold his ground and deflect the noise and return to his point, Charlie seemed to uniformly lose. But the free-speech championing really was a head-scratcher. He always had the audience stacked with cheering sections of numerous Kirk-speak groupies who would drown out the proceedings whenever Kirk answered some challenge or parried a remark. And this applause track normally erupted after about half of Kirk’s first sentence. Seemed like an orchestrated MAGA rally for youth to me, or least for youthful mentalities. If you’re skeptical about the hero worship of Kirk as a martyr ballooning beyond all sensible proportion, refer to this news item out of Oklahoma’s state legislature.

Armed with examples like these from the pulpits of the extreme right, you can begin to see the characteristics of the Christian Nationalist agenda, and at the same time gather how wildly inappropriate the CN label actually is. Racist. Homophobic. Intensely tribal. Authoritarian regarding ‘Faith’. Unforgiving and ungracious. Anti-Intellectual. And I would add: Un-American plus Un-Christian. Theocracies, of course, are examples of states which at least try to legislate morality. Iran, Russia¹, North Korea², Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, ISIS-controlled Syria/Iraq a decade ago. But people who are healthy and actually awake to the pulse of the modern moment know in their hearts that theocracy is evil, wrong, and an anachronistic regressive concept for current humanity. And why do healthy souls have this perception in their hearts, in their intuition? Because of — morality! The ideas espoused under the rubric of contemporary American Christian Nationalism grate against one’s inner moral sense.

Morality does not consist in which rules or ideals we follow or sin against. (Whether or not one eats pork or falls in love, as a Caucasian, with a black person, says nothing about the degree of one’s moral development.) It is something much closer to having a developed conscience along with an inner commitment to cultivate an ever stronger one. As humanity evolves spiritually, there is more and more an element of creativity within morality. In other words, out of our own cores we are more and more called upon to find our own specific love-acts in everyday situations. This is what Christ meant by giving the disciples a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. Creative moral action cannot be constrained or determined by rules of any kind, or external impositions. It must come from within. The actual Christian knows/feels that the more Christ is permitted to enter or live in one’s heart, the more creative conscience will come to be an originator of necessary moral acts within social contexts. This is partly how modern revelation is to work. I do not believe that Pastor Wilson, or for that matter most theologians who conceive of Christianity more in terms of its perceived regulations, know this.

The Old Testament was characterized by numerous instances of explicit laws and prohibitions being given. The New Testament largely supplants this. Yahweh, leader of the Elohim, famously got this ball rolling in Eden — but good luck comprehending the actual meaning of that whole obviously allegorical episode. Did this moral legislation work? Jury still out. Moses prescribed the ten commandments, divinely inspired of course. Did they work? Well — they were not very convincingly followed. So what was the point of them then? To awaken the stirrings of conscience in the masses of Hebrews. (Another reason had to do with the Hebrew bloodline preparing a suitably pure vehicle in future generations for the incarnating of Christ, but that is not important here.) People 4000 years ago were first showing the possibility of emerging from groupthink consciousness. And the Hebrews had a special mission in this regard. The three years of Christ on Earth consolidated and fulfilled this seed by making possible in every subsequent human a living and growing conscience, and the ability to independently form moral perceptions — i.e. perceptions infused with moral aspects. By design this must occur in total freedom. Either particular human souls respond to this inner call or not. In order to behave morally, to commit “morality”, one must possess a thoughtful and developing conscience and work upon extracting oneself from any form of groupthink. And ego-driven fantasies as well, as Iris Murdoch says. In the moshpit which public social media discourse has become, the moral individual is called upon to both carefully police his inner thinking before speaking and formulating opinion, and also, exercising tact and some brotherly kindness once they do actually speak. There should be openness to other’s ideas. Conclusions should never be rigid and freeze-dried in never re-examined packets. And care should be taken to always distance oneself from encouraging or secretly luxuriating in generated viral fame. There should be a non-cursory desire to hear adjacent ideas expressed by others around what one says, for the Christ impulse works in intensely listening small groups. Even groups of two. Especially of two, I would hold.

Before letting the topic of morality and conscience go, I want to touch on one last philosophical point about it. I think it is crucial to realize, to humanly see, that the subject of morality can never be fully illuminated using the rational tools of logic and argument. You can’t arrive at moral perception via reason. This doesn’t mean that rationality is 100% divorced from moral reality, or that they are completely unrelated. But it means that very different human faculties must be accessed to make real progress on this path. This truth, which I am convinced of, leads to two forms of oppositional response, which unsurprisingly are often at rhetorical war with one another, as reflected in the ‘rational atheist’ vs. the ‘simply believe in Jesus’ factions. As the Age of Enlightenment got rolling in the West, thinkers like Kant and J.S. Mill, a century later, strove to codify principled arguments as to the why and what of their chosen distilled ethical principles for human society. I do not consider that this worked, although it generated reams of debate and minutae dissection within philosophical schools for over a century. The reason, I have argued, why these efforts fail has to do with the deliberate avoidance, academically, of the kind of more inward human faculties mentioned here, which are crucial to gaining a view of moral conscience that is authentic and in keeping with social realities. At one polarity, the stictly reasoned approach wants to arrive at moral truth by basically ignoring the most important core human aspects of it, so it can substitute a logic problem for something far more complex and flickering. At the other polarity, the follow God’s Law contingent wants to simplify everything so they needn’t exert strenuous effort or necessary virtue introspections. They want to rely upon external strictures, those interpretations which feel the most convincing to them. This is why they are so susceptible to movements like Christian Nationalism. They long for simplicity, but the truth is not simple. One can’t take shelter, however, in the hopes that at least the rationalist pole will deliver one from this pitfall, for the seduction towards eventual authoritarianism is very much alive within any judgement schemes which assess social matters according to quantitative dimensions, like economic markers or AI-generated recommendations. There is just as much reality avoidance here. The only evolution forward which honors human dignity is to have more and more individuals be responsible and interested in plumbing their own moral depths, producing a richer more loving conscience over time as well as the inclination to act accordingly.

Is all this possible to summarize without butchering the ideas? How about the following: Grasping what morality actually is forces one to conclude that it can never be legislated externally. But by extension, the same is obviously true of Christianity. Any attempts to legislate it will corrupt it into something entirely different and demonic.

_______RS

Image : I just love this watercolor painting by David Newbatt entitled “The Red Knight Meets The Fisher King”, depicting a scene from the early to middle part of the Parsifal legend. The Parsifal legend first became widely known as a result of it being published in the early 15th century — once Guttenberg had accomplished his printing press. But the work and tale actually predates that by several centuries. It is a medieval tale of a highly esoteric nature which had been composed and dissemenated by word of mouth because of a very important foresight. It was forseen that the nature of religious devotion and spiritual cultivation would need to change radically in the coming centuries — even up into our own time. Namely, it was forseen that mass compliance with prefigured dogma would have to yield place to individual spiritual questing, of a very personal nature, in the age of intellect and conscience which would soon be ushered into Western culture, and eventually the world, starting with the Renaissance.

Notes : 1 & 2 – There is a kinship between theocracy and what is operating in the countries of Russia and North Korea at present. In Russia, behind the scenes of Putin’s dictatorship lies a marriage between strongman authoriarianism and the traditional values expressed by particularly orthodox Russian Christianity. This is seen in the support for Putinism within the ecclesiastic elite as well as in Aleksandr Dugin’s public intellectual pronouncements. Meanwhile, in North Korea, the entire society’s deeply prostrate bowing to their ‘Dear Leader’ in all matters can hardly be distinguished from religious devotion, even if it is mandated.

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