Moral Living in an Immoral World

The editors of Panis Circenses would like to welcome our friend and frequent collaborator Patrick O’Riley to the blogosphere. We are humbled by his assent to our request of publishing the following piece. We thank him whole heartedly and further request of him to keep up the good work.


The recent announcement that the evangelical world is concluding its largely disregarded and overlooked boycott against Disney set me to thinking about moral living in an immoral world. There is much talk in evangelical circles, especially among those leaders who have made it their business to serve as putative representatives of Christianity and Christian believers to the political powers that be, about “standing up for”—sometimes “fighting for”—morality, by which these leaders mean using legal, political, or economic weapons to coerce others into moral behavior. This activity is justified in the name of working to restore the United States to its erstwhile status as a “Christian nation,” and “being salt and light,” (a phrase that in current evangelical discussions somehow always has political implications, whatever Jesus of Nazareth meant it to say).

Growing up as I did in a politically and religiously conservative evangelical home, church, and school, I was an early supporter of the boycott against Disney. I believed in the fight to restore “Judeo-Christian” or “traditional family values” to the culture, and saw Disney as a prime hindrance to this project, an exponent of all the irreligious, non-traditional, anti-family values that had to be stopped. My family refused to shop at the Disney store and did not buy any movies or other products that bore the Disney label, a position several members of my family have held religiously since the boycott began.

I don’t remember ever consciously ending my own adherence to the boycott, but I believe the time I simply stopped thinking about it was when I came across a list of everything Disney owns. This list includes the ABC and A & E television networks, Miramax Films, Touchstone Pictures, Buena Vista Home Video, and so many others. It was a daunting list, and much of it new information; I realized to my chagrin that I had been violating the boycott for years out of sheer ignorance. It was around this time that I also began to realize that my family was almost alone among all the evangelicals I knew who were even trying to support the boycott. Much of the Christian world never even got on board, and many others jumped ship early on in the venture. The result of these discoveries, of course, was the dawning realization that the boycott simply was not working, and, it would seem, could not or would not work. So much for standing up for morality, at least by that method.

Looking back on this, I wonder if we evangelicals, for all our moral zeal, simply haven’t come to terms with what our political struggles are all about. It seems that somehow, we naïvely failed to remember that politics, like most things in life, is always about compromise—finding the least evil solution that appeases the largest number of people. The political arena is a poor forum for moralizing about an absolute standard. So perhaps the goals of conservative evangelical politics, which is currently the primary arena of our moralizing, simply are not attainable, and the sort of Christianesque utopia we have vaguely in mind when we enter the political fray never was a viable entity. This presumes, of course, that we actually know what our long-term goals are, that we have fully-orbed political and social philosophies and fully developed images of the ideal state. We do have many short term goals, to be sure; everyone knows that evangelicals want to ban gay marriage, outlaw abortion, and so forth. But were we suddenly able to remake American society to our own ends, completely without interference from any other groups or persons, I submit that we would have very little clue as to what we want, as the very nebulousness of the philosophically meaningless, even incoherent, term “Judeo-Christian values” suggests.

Moreover, I am doubtful that most evangelicals have given careful consideration to the kind of world we live in. Certainly, evangelicals properly hold to the sinfulness of humanity and the sin nature of human beings; many if not most evangelicals even believe in such doctrines as original sin and total depravity. But when it comes to engaging the culture, we make the fantastic assumption that we are to delve into a fight for moral values, as if the totally depraved human beings around us—from whose ranks we all came, lest we forget—were at all interested in moral values in any meaningful sense of the term. Much more dangerously, we assume that we have achieved the summit of the moral high ground ourselves.

Now, I am not at all suggesting that evangelicals know nothing about morality. Certainly, our attempts to live out the principles of Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and in the community of the Church are significant moves toward the kind of holy life God would have for us. And the project of seeking personal holiness should never be abandoned; always we should strive to be more like Christ, to think and act and live more Scripturally. But let us not forget the state of the world we live in. It is a lost and depraved world as we evangelicals are fond of saying. And all its members are tainted by that depravity—even us. We cannot live in the world and avoid it.

Every day, I have come to realize, I make tacit allowances for living in a sinful world, just by going about my everyday activities. Indeed, in many ways, I even support values I abhor. My tax dollars go to pay for lots of things I think are immoral, including war and capital punishment, birth control programs in AIDS ravished countries, foreign aid for oppressive dictatorships—the list is long. I watch movies and television programs laced with profanity, sexual references, and violence (find some entertainment that does not have these things to one degree or another—it’s harder than you think, especially if you use an absolute standard). I invest money in mutual funds that buy stocks for hundreds of companies—and very likely at least some of those companies are engaging in activities I would consider immoral. I eat meat from animals bred and raised in appalling conditions, packed so tightly into confined spaces they can barely move, and force-fed hormone treatments. I drive my car doing useless errands, or sometimes just for pleasure, pumping a slew of pollutants into the air with every bit of pressure on the gas pedal. I use thousands of pieces of paper each year, only a small fraction of which ever gets recycled. I buy clothes that were very likely made in sweatshops—I have never taken the time or trouble to find out for sure. I drink coffee that was harvested by slaves—men and women disadvantaged by oppressive economic systems that chain them every bit as much as did the bondage of the human trafficking of previous centuries. I eat fine meals in fine restaurants despite the millions of people around the world and even in the United States who are starving, some of them to death. I spend discretionary money on movies and operas and trinkets and toys even though there are people in Africa who eke out a living on $2 a day. And yes, I consume products made by some of the many subsidiary companies of Disney, despite their open support of homosexual politics and various other unsavory things.

Just by living in the world, I violate, consciously or unconsciously, my own moral principles every day. In some of these cases, I am directly responsible; I commit immoral actions in my own personal sphere of influence. But in many other cases, I am not directly responsible; I don’t get to decide how my taxes are spent, I don’t personally raise animals, I did not take money or food directly out of the hands of the starving, I did not ask Disney to support homosexuality. And yet, I bear the stigma of involvement with immorality—I am part of the massive web of causality by which these immoral activities take place.

This is a primary reason I am cautious whenever we evangelical Christians wade into political or social matters, which is what we were trying to do with the Disney boycott. When it comes to living our values, especially in the political and social spheres, I’m not sure we are much more moral than our non-evangelical neighbors who are just trying to get by in this broken world. I could criticize Disney for its corporate stance on homosexuality, but someone could just as well criticize me for not giving more money to the poor. Both of these moral articles have clear attestation in the Scriptures, but of course, only I, and not Disney, claim that it is the Scriptures by which one ought to live.

It would be far better for us if we were to read all of those Scriptures more honestly, with a good deal more humility, especially those parts that tell us about ourselves: that we are sinful, depraved people, that we live in a fallen world, ravished and broken by sin, and that even those of us who have been crucified with Christ often don’t get it right. God alone is holy, and He alone can rescue us from who we are and the world we are part of and make us like Himself.

We should spend more time talking about that. I don’t think Scripture ever commands us to “stand up for morality” outside the believing community, but Scripture clearly commands us to bear witness for Christ to the world, and it is crucial to note that those two activities are not the same thing. Certainly we should ourselves strive to be ever more moral (I prefer the term “Christ-like”), but calling attention to our moral standards and demanding or even legislating conformity to them is an entirely different matter. The fallen world will do exactly as our theology should teach us to expect a fallen world to do. And sometimes, just because we live here and not in heaven, we will find that we too have been carried along by the world’s fallenness, perhaps have contributed to it ourselves. While this should never paralyze our attempts to grow in holiness, it should engender in us a profound sense of humility whenever we talk about morality, especially with those who are not empowered by the Holy Spirit, as we are.

Recognizing this, we come to understand that trading the Great Commission for promotion of merely “Judeo-Christian values” is a backwards step. Our task is not to make the world a little more moral and a little less fallen. Our task is not to force fallen men and women to act as if they were not so—especially since we are not so good at morality either. Our task is to keep pointing with a deep sense of grace and humility to the Christ who raises fallen men back to life. This is the only purely holy task there is on earth, and it will do what all the moralizing and boycotting and politicking can never do. Jesus saves—Jesus alone.



Patrick O’Riley holds a Bachelor’s degree in political science and is a graduate of the Leadership Institute in Washington, D.C. In his home state he was named as a delegate to the 2000 Republican convention and was a founding member of the local chapter of the Family Policy Center affiliated with Gary Bauer. He has been involved at the grassroots level with three presidential campaigns. He walked away from political and legal work to enter the ministry in 2002.