Tension at the Statehouse

A couple years ago I stood in the New Hampshire State House, waiting along with dozens of others to testify about bill under heavy debate. The issue at stake was abortion. As a Christian who believes that human life, at every stage, is sacred and should be protected, I stood with the pro-life crowd.

But standing just inches away from me were dozens of people advocating for a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. The State House halls felt too cramped to accommodate such a wide ideological divide. We were close enough to reach out and touch each other. 

Do you know how awkward it is to stand just inches away from people that you strongly disagree with?

It’s not just that you disagree with them. It’s that, staring into their faces, you know that they know that, and that you must somehow occupy the same spaces and neighborhoods. (One of the pro-choice advocates there that morning has been a guest in our home several times, and given birthday presents to our kids—a very kind and generous person.)

Do you smile? Do you frown? Do you make small talk and try to ignore the elephant in the room? Do you shout slogans at them? Meanwhile, you just stand there, knowing that within a few hours you might be chatting with them across the street if you check your mailbox at the same time.

But I felt something besides awkwardness: it was curiosity. Standing across from me, advocating for choice, was a woman wearing a clerical collar, signaling that she was a minister in a Christian denomination. A Christian minister myself, I couldn’t help wondering: How can we stand on opposite sides of an issue so loaded with Christian values?

Call it awkward, but I stepped across the divide and asked her if she would mind talking. After she agreed, I explained that my understanding of the Christian faith leads me to advocate for the life of the unborn—but I had to ask: how does her understanding of the Christian faith lead her to advocate for the choice of a mother to abort her child?

She offered a response I’d heard before: She didn’t celebrate abortion, but pointed to the Bible’s teaching on compassion and the dignity of women. For some women, carrying a pregnancy means extreme suffering—poverty, abuse, or risks to their own life. Compassion, to her, means giving these women the freedom to choose what they believe is best for them, and ensuring they have access to legal options for abortion.

Chesterton’s Prophecy: Virtues Gone Mad

Anyone listening to this weaving of Christian virtues into a case for abortion rights would be justified in wondering, “Is the Christian faith so incoherent that it can support such antithetical positions as pro-life and pro-choice?” The same question extends to other debates—immigration, transgenderism, same-sex marriage—where opposing sides claim Christian support. If the Christian faith can be marshaled for such contradictory causes, is it hopelessly fragmented, or, perhaps, have we lost our grasp of its organic whole?

English author and literary critic G. K. Chesterton offers a compelling answer. “The modern world,” he writes, “is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme [i.e., Christianity] is shattered . . . it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly and do more terrible damage. . . . The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

I have found this analysis to be immensely insightful and useful. It both offers a diagnosis and suggests a remedy for the “culture wars” that ravage Christian churches, organizations, and movements. When Christian virtues are severed from the organic body of doctrine and Christian living to which they belong, they produce vices that seem defensible because they are disguised as virtues.

Compassion: A Case Study in Moral Mutation

Compassion is a Christian virtue. No one felt compassion like Jesus did. On many occasions, he was “moved with compassion,” meaning that he felt within himself that combination of sorrow, pity, and love. But Jesus’ compassion was not sentimentality. He never merely affirmed the sufferer’s feelings. His compassion was organically connected to truth, love, and justice.

Now suppose someone dissects that “whole body of the Christian life” and extracts the organ of compassion as a standalone virtue. What does this isolated compassion do? It sympathizes with the sufferer, but, having lost its connection to truth, may not suggest that suffering may be what she is called to endure. It pities the sufferer who is most visible, but, having severed itself from justice, ignores the one who is most vulnerable.

But this abstracted compassion does even more. It affirms a sufferer’s feelings, but doesn’t consider that one’s feelings, though real, might be mistaken. It listens to his desire for change, but doesn’t tell him that the change he desires will cause more harm than good. It might even require that he change what is real—his body, for example—to heal what he believes to be his source of suffering: gender dysphoria. (Now such a surgical operation may be called “gender-affirming care,” when it is actually a rejection of bodily integrity.)

You see how this process began with compassion, but in reality, from the very moment it was abstracted from the whole body of the Christian life, it ceased to be compassion and mutated into something else, for it had lost its connection to truth, and justice, and a host of other Christian values.

The abstraction and mutation of compassion is just one example of what Chesterton would call a “virtue gone mad.”  But there are many others. Abstracted from the body of the Christian life, humility mutates into self-loathing, justice into vengeance, patriotism into national idolatry.

Why Balance Is Not the Solution

What is the solution to this problem? It would be easy for us to assume that the remedy is balance. This idea has a venerable history, going back at least to Aristotle who taught that virtues are the perfect midpoint between two vices. Courage, for example, stands at the center of the scale between cowardice and recklessness. By this reckoning, if compassion gets out of control we should balance it with a dose of callousness. If freedom gets out of control, stricter discipline is the remedy. If sentimentality gets out of control, add some sternness—and so on.

But might this attempt at balance, instead of solving anything, make the problem worse? Balance means fighting insane compassion with heartlessness, legalism with lawlessness, unrestrained inclusivity with unrestrained tribalism. Now instead of a few rogue virtues, we have many virtues gone mad, each trying to push out its opposite mad virtue.

The solution to the problem of virtues gone mad is not found in balance but integration—seeing how the virtues fit into the Christian life as a whole. The Christian life is defined doctrinally and lived experientially, and unless both the doctrinal and experiential components are present, mutations are sure to occur.

The Compassion of Christ

I realize that is a claim that would take much more than a short essay to adequately demonstrate. But a look at Jesus’ life provides clear examples.

Jesus felt compassion, not in conflict with his passion for truth, but because he knew the truth. The people, Jesus knew, were “like sheep without a shepherd”—a vivid illustration of people who are morally wayward. In other words, they were sinners. This is why he invited them to come to him; not to affirm them but to transform them. His care for them was informed and motivated by the truth about them—truth which he was willing to tell them, even when it conflicted with their deepest feelings.

Once a wealthy young man asked Jesus what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus, knowing full well that this man was in love with his wealth, told him to sell it all and give away the proceeds. Jesus was not unaware of the man’s feelings—in fact, the Bible tells us that “looking on him, he loved him” (Mark 10:21) Still, his love did not lead him to affirm the man’s attachment to wealth, but to challenge it. Compassion called for him to forsake anything that stood between him and God.

And, yes, Jesus talked about hell, and his descriptions are vivid. His point was not to simply terrify his hearers. Rather, he loved them too much not to warn them about it.

In an especially gripping incident, religious leaders brought to Jesus a woman who was guilty of adultery. They challenged Jesus to say whether or not she should be executed by stoning as the law required. His reply is rightly well-known: “Whoever is without sin, let him be the first to cast the stone.” What is not so well-known is what he told the woman: “Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11). Jesus’ compassion did not exclude holiness, and his holiness did not exclude compassion.

In Jesus there is no tension between the virtues. “The Word”—that is Jesus, God’s Son—”became flesh and dwelt among us. We beheld his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Notice it does not say, “a balance of grace and truth,” but full of grace and truth, implying that one can be filled with both grace and truth at the same time and to the same degree.

Christian Faith and Living Is An Organic Unity

G. K. Chesterton truly was prophetic. The modern world is full of “wild and wasted virtues,” and it’s not just abortion rights disguised as compassion but also unrestrained allegiance to power disguised as righteousness.

The Christian faith is not a warehouse stocked with ideological supplies to be ransacked for anyone’s personal, social, or political purposes. It is truth, an organic unity. The entire thing—including God’s creating of the universe, humans’ fall into sin, God’s sending his Son to rescue us, and his imminent return—is unified whole, calling for our whole allegiance to Christ.

Take the whole thing or nothing at all, but do not cut it up. You cannot have cannot have the limbs without the body, and you cannot have the body without the heart. Likewise, you cannot have the Christian virtues without the Christian faith, nor the Christian faith without Christ.