Ethics in our time

HAUERWAS: We need to remember that most people in churches do not care about "social ethics" as it has been taught in the universities and seminaries. Most people do not care, for example, about whether retributive or distributive notions of justice are more adequate. What they want to know is whether sexual intercourse is all that significant.

In some ways, we are unprepared by our tradition of social ethics to answer those basic questions. They haven't been on the agenda. People have just assumed that something like bourgeois Christianity is OK and that everybody must know that, for example, divorce is a bad thing. If challenged as to why they think divorce is bad, people do not know how to give an account of why a certain kind of sexual behavior is fundamental for the character of their ecclesial communities. If you don't have ecclesial communities shaping people to think about marriage--or war, for that matter--then a course in social ethics is not going to help very much.

Our model of a Christian ethicist has so often been that of someone working for a denomination's social justice board. These boards are still a kind of model for what goes on in the Society of Christian Ethics. The focus is on making public-policy decisions. The real challenge, as I see it, is to do the kind of work Emilie is talking about--actually going into churches and talking with people. Most of the people trained in social ethics don't do that very well.

TOWNES: I don't know of a more appropriate place than the church to be having those kinds of conversations. When I was growing up, the church was the only place that gave me a clue that it was OK to be black. And it allowed me to ask the question, "Why do people hate me just because I'm black, when God loves me?"

In any case, the social justice activities I'm most encouraged by are local and community-based. For example, in Kansas City there's a program called reStart. It's a homeless ministry started in the basement of a United Methodist church. It not only provides shelter but tries to give people the resources to live on their own again. It helps people negotiate the system, and it helps people change the system. The organization has always been very active in lobbying for different kinds of legislation that will make poor people's lives more manageable. That to me is an incredible kind of social witness.

LOVIN: I think there was a time in the postwar era when the kind of reflection on social policy Stan is talking about was appropriate. But I agree that we need to change the model, and we need to make the local church the locus for social ethics. The churches in the inner city are still a logical place to think about what Christian witness means in this society. For that thinking to happen, we need to build connections between the tall-steeple churches in the suburbs and the communities in the inner city so that reflection at the grass-roots level can happen. Until then, all the policy statements coming out of denominational boards aren't going to make any difference.