Ethos Optional?

In a recent article called "The End of the Anglican Communion," Catholic conservative George Weigel writes of the stresses that today threaten to tear apart the Anglican Communion: the worldwide group of churches that historically look to the Church of England as their center of gravity. The Episcopal Church in America is the branch of Anglicanism we hallow here. Since the national Episcopal church has recently ordained a gay bishop, for that and other related reasons many local Episcopal congregations are considering affiliating with an evangelizing African bishop, outside the Episcopal Church USA, rather than sticking with a homegrown hierarchy who seem to them to have abandoned all vestiges of traditional Christian morality.

Mr. Weigel writes of

... an Anglican [i.e., Episcopal] church, St. Luke’s, a few blocks up Old Georgetown Road from my parish in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [that] recently posted a large sign on the church lawn: “No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, you are welcome at our table.”

Mr. Weigel takes this ecclesiastical open-door policy as a token of something he rues: "the Episcopal Church USA's determination to bless same-sex unions and ordain practicing homosexuals to priestly and episcopal ministry." I further assume that, to the extent that the no-matter-who-you-are proclamation at St. Luke's includes women who have had or are contemplating an abortion, Mr. Weigel objects to that as well.

I assume he objects, that is, not to the love-the-sinner aspects of such a policy — you can't seriously call yourself a Christian if you don't profess Christian love toward all people without regard to sin — but to what could be an implicit tolerate-the-sin attitude that may seem to go along with it.

Or, is there an effort being made in the Episcopal Church USA simply to redefine the sin out of existence?


Actually, there is a third possibility: to take cognizance of the fact that our society has become one which lacks a guiding ethos all of us can share.

I don't know whether I am using the word "ethos" the way social scientists do, but to me an ethos is a set of rules of moral conduct, written or unwritten, official or unofficial, stated or unstated. All members of the society simply know what these rules are — whether they are written, overtly stated, and officially promulgated, or they are unwritten, unofficial, and never stated as such, right out loud — and agree that they are the rules.

Furthermore, most members of an ethos-based society tend to follow the rules, and expect others to do the same.


It doesn't work that way here any more. While it is true that many in our society continue to observe the old moral and ethical rules, few now expect others to do the same. So, while many of us still think homosexuality is wrong, far fewer people consider that moral opinion binding on anyone besides themselves. Ditto, the old rule against having an abortion ... or, for that matter, against getting pregnant out of wedlock, or having extramarital sex, etc., etc., etc.

So let me suggest that our ethos is no longer an ethos at all, if there is no longer any reasonable assumption on the part of each person that everyone else in the society needs to, or will, adhere to the stated or unstated rules. An ethos-optional society is no different from a society that doesn't have, or never had, an ethos at all.


Christian churches, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, or otherwise, have a well-deserved reputation for being, or intending to be, ethos preservers. George Weigel is an ethos preserver. And so, as a Catholic, am I ... except that I worry that we ethos preservers and supporters are spitting into a gale-force wind.

More, I worry that perhaps the number one reason why church pews are empty today is that so many are put off by an institution, the Christian church, that promulgates an ethos they no longer feel any general obligation toward upholding. They may still personally believe in God, they themselves may live lives as chaste and pure as any professing Christian achieves, but they may feel it downright hypocritical to join a church that asks yet more: belief in a communally shared, universal system of absolute right and wrong.


By "absolute" morality I do not mean to imply that there are no contexts in moral choice. In most contexts, for example, the dictum "thou shall not kill" applies, but there is such a thing as self-defense, or just war. Still, the commandment against killing other persons is, or so I believe, absolute and universal ... that is, once the given situational context has been factored in in a way that itself stands up to objective ethical scrutiny.

Today, however, one gets the feeling that not committing murders is something we, most of us in this society, opt to abide by; we are, in doing so, not binding ourselves to any old-fashioned set of general, absolute moral codes or rules. We accordingly exercise our "radical freedom" in deciding to, yes, live by certain ancient but no-longer-absolute rules. If someone else takes the opposite tack and is in fact a murderer, we today oppose that (to the extent we can) solely out of a pragmatic understanding that murderers, if not stopped, may eventually threaten us and those we love.


But gone is the belief that something is right or wrong simply because it is. For each of the old rules, today there is a hyper-pragmatic attitude which says, in effect, I don't care what you do with your life with respect to that particular rule unless and until it impacts on my life and that of (say) my children, so if you want to look at porn on the Internet, fine ... as long as I have some way of making sure my kids don't see it.

What happened, then, to our erstwhile belief in absolute (albeit situational) rules of morality? Inasmuch as it's hard to imagine traditional Christian religion without them — an I'm-OK-you're-OK God, I ask you? A no-fault deity with a "whatever" attitude? — it's no wonder George Weigel thinks the no-matter-who-you-are welcome posted at St. Luke's Episcopal is tossing religion's baby out with the bathwater.