Pour Over: The Basis of Morality

What is morality? Who defines it? How do we separate the moral from the immoral? If I were to make a list of 30 actions and ask 20 random strangers to write moral or immoral next to each action, I would get a lot of conflicting responses. When a society cannot agree on what is moral and immoral, and there is no source from which that society determines morality, you are left with anarchy. Each individual is left to determine morality for themselves, and this has disastrous consequences.

If you do something I find immoral or vice a versa, we have a problem. For example, if you think smoking weed is wrong but I think it’s perfectly fine, we will have conflict if I smoke around you or your family. Multiply this by the countless number of “grey areas” in our society, and it is a massive breeding ground for conflict. Our country prides itself on freedom, but there must be a standard that reigns our freedoms in to protect the society. We are free only to the point that our freedom produces a detrimental effect on someone else.

“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”

-Galatians 5:13

In order to maintain peace and protect the rights of individuals, we have laws. Laws technically infringe on our freedom. For example, the law says you cannot consume alcohol before the age of 21. This law is meant to protect the young individual from doing harm to their own brain development as well as protect others from the consequences of an immature intoxicated person making very unwise choices. However, this also inherently disrupts the freedom of the young individual if they believe they are mature enough and should be able to drink alcohol. No society can have completely unbound freedom; otherwise, they would collapse into chaos. Therefore, laws have to be in place to prevent that from happening. A society’s definition of morality determines these laws. So, now we are back to the question, “who defines morality?”

An interesting shift has happened in our country in recent years. It is well known that our country was founded and established on Biblical principles. The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendments and other articles at the very core of our country are teaming with Biblical principles. Even our money has the words, “In God We Trust” printed on it. Obviously, not every fabric of our nation was Biblical from the beginning, and some of those things have been addressed as time has progressed. The abolition of slavery, for example, was a necessity that took far too long to happen, but changes like this have also had an unintended consequence. They have opened the door to look at every fabric of our country and put it into question. Problematically, in the years since our country was founded, our society has slowly moved away from Christianity and morphed into a post-Christian country that decides its own morals. The combination of a society that lacks a defining entity for morality and a need for that society to dissect every law in place has caused the intense polarization we see today as people fight and debate over the morality of each law and action.

“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

-Judges 21:25

We are at a point where we clearly have no king setting the standard for us. Our founding fathers fought for the freedom and right of every individual to have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness within moral standards. Let’s be honest for a minute; there are people out there who find happiness, as dark as it is, in harming other people. If we all have a right to pursue happiness, how can we punish those people for acting on this freedom? We can punish them because we have defined this as an immoral act which negates their right to be free to do it. However, we have reached the point in our society where the line of immorality is being pushed farther and farther because there is nothing firm on which we are defining this line. It wasn’t long ago that same-sex marriage, abortions, and marijuana were considered immoral and therefore illegal. As I said before, our society has never been completely based on Biblical principles, so my goal is not to say these three things are immoral or moral necessarily. Instead my goal is to point out that the defined line of immorality is clearly becoming increasingly blurred as time goes on, and that is extremely dangerous. Without a defining line, where does it stop?

Anytime the Bible is brought up in regards to politics, people cry out for the separation of Church and State. This was never intended to leave the Bible out of the equation though. It was meant to keep the Church leaders from operating in the political landscape so they couldn’t force everyone to follow Jesus because everyone has the right to choose whether or not to do that. However, everyone does not have a right to define morality. Some immovable standard must be set and followed; otherwise our country will continue to descend further and further into disarray as people’s opinions change daily. So, the question I leave you with is, “if the Bible is not our standard guideline for morality, what is?”