Where Do Your Ethics Actually Live?

I told you, back in the first chapter, that there was a question I wanted you to carry with you. I asked you to keep it in your pocket while we walked through the history, and the Book, and the long ledger of things a movement has done in a name it did not earn. If you have made it this far, you have carried it a long way.

I am going to ask you to take it out now.

For most of these pages I have tried to stay to one side of the frame. I laid the Bible on the table. I laid the movement next to it. I let you look. I did not want to stand between you and what you were seeing, because I trust what you were seeing more than I trust anything I could have shouted at you.

But there is a moment, in a book like this, when staying to the side becomes its own kind of dishonesty. This is that moment. I am going to ask the question straight, and then I am going to be quiet, and let you answer it in whatever room you are reading in.

Where do your ethics actually live?

Not where you would say they live if a friend asked you at dinner. Not where the cross around your neck says they live, or the Bible on the shelf, or the sign that went up in your yard last October. Where do they actually live, in the place where actual decisions get made? When a stranger shows up on your street. When a leader lies and you feel the reflex to defend him. When a poor family down the block asks for something. When a family you have never met walks north across a desert and shows up, exhausted, on a news broadcast. What are you reading from, in the second before you answer?

Is it the Bible? Or is it the version of the Bible that a certain American movement has, across a hundred and fifty years and a lot of quiet edits, reshaped into something it finds easier to live with?

That is the question. Whatever else I have written in this book, that is the sentence I have been trying to get to. And your answer will tell you more about your faith than any doctrinal statement you ever signed your name to.

Two books on the same shelf

Let me put it this way. There are, in America right now, two books that both go by the name of the Christian Bible.

One of them is the actual Bible. It is the book we have been reading together, chapter by chapter, in these pages. It is a long, strange, uncomfortable library that begins with a garden and ends with a city, and in between it tells the story of a God who keeps showing up on the side of slaves and widows and foreigners and children, who keeps warning the powerful, who keeps announcing good news to the poor, and who, in the person of Jesus, walks into an empire, refuses its weapons, refuses its wealth, refuses its lies, and lets it kill him rather than become it. That is one book.

The other book has the same cover. It has the same table of contents printed at the front. It is bound in leather and sold in the same stores. But when you open it and watch what actually gets read, what gets preached, what gets quoted, what gets applied, and, above all, what gets ignored, you find that it is a different book. It is a book in which God's chief concerns turn out to be the same concerns as a particular political party. It is a book in which the poor are lazy, the immigrant is a threat, the enemy is always outside the tribe, the leader is beyond criticism, the flag is a sacred object, the wealthy are blessed by their wealth, and the parts of the actual Bible that would embarrass any of that have been quietly folded shut.

Both books sit on the same shelf. Both books are called Christian. And every person in this country who claims the name of Christ is, whether they know it or not, reading one of them.

The question I am putting to you is not "are you a Christian?" I am not the one who gets to ask that question, and I have no interest in trying. The question I am putting to you is: which book?

Ethics do not live where we say they live

Most of us like to think our ethics come from our convictions. We like to think that we hold our beliefs, and then those beliefs produce our behavior, in a straight line from the head to the hand. It is a flattering picture. It is almost never true.

The honest picture is the other way around. Most of the time, our behavior comes first, formed by the tribe we belong to, the fears we have absorbed, the loyalties we have inherited, the enemies we have been handed, and the comforts we do not want to lose. Then our beliefs arrive, later, to justify what we were already going to do. The tribe teaches us the answer. The Bible gets brought in afterward, opened to the right page, to bless it.

This is not a Christian problem. It is a human problem. Every group does it. Every ideology does it. But it becomes a specifically Christian problem the moment we start claiming that our behavior is not the product of our tribe, our fears, and our loyalties, but the product of the pure, unmediated Word of God. Because then we are not just acting on our biases. We are painting God's face onto our biases and daring anyone to argue with the picture.

That is the move I have been describing, chapter after chapter, in this book. It is the move that lets a Christian nod through a sermon about welcoming the stranger on Sunday morning and cheer through a rally about deporting the stranger on Sunday night without noticing the contradiction. It is the move that lets a Christian condemn a president's dishonesty in one decade and celebrate a president's dishonesty in the next, and call both positions "biblical." It is the move that lets a Christian read, out loud, a passage in which Jesus tells his followers to put away the sword, and then walk into the parking lot beneath a bumper sticker that thanks God for the Second Amendment. The move is invisible from the inside. That is what makes it so powerful.

The only way to break the move is to ask, straight out, the question I am asking now. Where do your ethics actually live? When your tribe and the Bible disagree, and they will, and they do, which one wins? Not in theory. In practice. In the way you actually vote, actually speak, actually treat the people God has actually put in front of you.

The test the book has been building toward

Everything we have looked at together is a way of asking this same question in different clothes.

When the Bible says, on nearly every page of the Torah, "you shall love the foreigner as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt," and your movement says the foreigner is a threat to be repelled, which side of that contradiction do you actually stand on?

When Jesus opens his mouth on a hillside and calls the poor blessed, and warns the rich that they have already received their comfort, and your movement teaches that wealth is a sign of God's favor and poverty a sign of laziness, which side do you actually stand on?

When the whole prophetic tradition, from Amos to Isaiah to Micah to Jeremiah, thunders against leaders who lie, who oppress the poor, who trust in horses and chariots, who mistake their nation for God's kingdom, and your movement has learned to shrug off, or explain away, or even celebrate, a leader who does all of those things at once, which side do you actually stand on?

When the New Testament, in letter after letter, lists the qualifications for a Christian leader and puts humility, gentleness, self-control, honesty, and a lack of love for money at the top of the list, and your movement has spent a decade defending a leader whose brand is boasting, whose reflex is contempt, whose habit is deception, and whose lifelong obsession is wealth, which side do you actually stand on?

When Jesus says, "blessed are the peacemakers," and your movement blesses the war, which side do you actually stand on?

When Jesus says, "do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth," and your movement builds an entire theology around the promise that God wants you to have more, which side do you actually stand on?

When Jesus says, "whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me," and your movement teaches you to look at the least of these with suspicion, with resentment, with a locked door and a loaded gun, which side do you actually stand on?

These are not rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions have obvious answers and do not require anything of the person hearing them. These questions have costly answers. The answers rearrange lives. That is what a climax is supposed to do.

Two possible answers, and both of them cost you something

There are, in the end, only two honest answers to the question I am asking.

The first honest answer is: my ethics live inside the Bible, and if the Bible and my movement disagree, the Bible wins.

If that is your answer, then the rest of this book is not an attack on you. It is an invitation. It is an invitation to notice that a lot of what you have been handed under the label of Christian faith is not actually in the Book you say you love. It is an invitation to open the Book, all of it, and read it as if you were reading it for the first time, and to let it disturb you where it disturbs you, and comfort you where it comforts you, and, most of all, to let it tell you who Jesus is without a filter. That answer will cost you something. It may cost you a church. It may cost you friendships. It may cost you a certain kind of standing in a certain kind of room. The people who have said this answer out loud, in your town, right now, are already paying those costs. But that answer will give you back something you may not have realized you had lost, which is the ability to look at the actual Jesus and recognize him.

The second honest answer is: my ethics live inside the movement, and when the Bible and my movement disagree, the movement wins.

Almost nobody will say that out loud. It sounds terrible when it is said out loud. But it is, by the fruit of the last several decades, what a great many people in this country have quietly decided. The behavior gives the answer even when the mouth does not. If your position on the immigrant, the poor, the enemy, the leader, the war, the wealth, and the flag lines up, point for point, with the platform of a political party, and does not line up, point for point, with the words of Jesus, then the movement is where your ethics live. The Bible is where your decoration lives. Those are not the same thing, and pretending they are is the great American religious lie of our time.

If that is your honest answer, at least the fog is gone. At least the two of us are looking at the same thing. You have a religion. It is not Christianity in the sense that word has meant for two thousand years, but it is a religion, and it has its scriptures, and its saints, and its enemies, and its rituals, and it may serve you well in this life. What it cannot do, and what it should stop pretending it can do, is claim the name of the Galilean rabbi who told his followers to love their enemies and give away their coats and take up their crosses. That name belongs to somebody else's book.

The reason I write this bluntly is not because I am angry. It is because a country that keeps confusing the two books is doing terrible damage to real people, and to the reputation of a Book that deserves better, and to the name of a Man who deserves better still.

The mirror the Bible hands you

There is a passage near the end of the letter of James, a book that has spent its own chapters offending nearly everyone, in which the writer compares the Word of God to a mirror. He says that anyone who hears it and does not do it is like a person who looks into a mirror, sees his own face, and then walks away and forgets what he looks like.

That is the offer the Bible makes. It hands you a mirror. It does not hand you a flag. It does not hand you a platform. It does not hand you a candidate. It hands you a mirror, and it says, look. Look at what you have been defending. Look at what you have been ignoring. Look at whose side you have been on. Look at whose side the Book is on, and see whether they are the same side.

That is the climax of the argument, and it is the climax of the book. Everything before it has been holding up the mirror. Everything after it is about what to do once you have looked.

You can put the mirror down. Many will. It is possible to read every word of this book, close the cover, and go back to the same Sunday morning, the same broadcaster, the same yard sign, the same certainties. The mirror does not force anyone.

Or you can keep looking, long enough for the reflection to change something. You can decide that the actual Bible, with all of its difficulty and all of its beauty, is worth more than the edited version you were handed. You can decide that Jesus, as he actually is in the Gospels, is worth more than the Jesus your movement has painted over him. You can decide that your ethics will live, from this day forward, inside the Book itself, and that when the Book and the tribe disagree, the Book wins, and the tribe will have to learn to live with that, or you will have to learn to live without the tribe.

That is a costly decision. I will not pretend otherwise. In the last part of this book, we will talk about what it looks like to live that way in an American town in the twenty-first century. We will talk about the churches that are already trying. We will talk about the people who have paid for it and who would tell you it was worth the price. We will talk about hope, because a book like this one is not worth writing if it ends in despair.

But before any of that, before we move on, sit for a minute with the question. Do not answer it out loud. Do not answer it for anyone else. Answer it in the only place the answer matters, which is inside your own chest, in front of the God the Bible actually describes, with the Book actually open, and no one watching but the One who already knows.

Where do your ethics actually live?

Everything comes after that.