He folks, welcome back! As with last week, my initial plan for THIS week was to write a travel blog about New York. Also like last week I had another topic swirling & twirling around my brain that I felt pressing to write this week. Once more, also like last week, this blog will be a serious one, if the title alone hadn’t tipped you off to that fact already. Trigger warning I suppose to those of you who are dealing with religious trauma, post election fallout, murder/killing, religious themes, & on the flip side of that coin, may be upset by the contents of this blog. Today we will be talking vertical vs. horizontal morality.
I have had, over the last week, across numerous social media platforms & conversations, the notion or idea of vertical vs horizontal morality pop up & it actually, I think, helps to explain how certain groups can vote or feel the way that they do based on belief & history. I know, for myself, I have struggled with the idea of those who claim to live under the banner of “love thy neighbor as thyself” going to the voting booth & doing the exact opposite often condemning their ‘neighbor’ to harder lives, deportation, lack of access to healthcare, higher tax rates, or downright voting to strip their rights away. Taking that “what you do unto the ‘least’ of these, you do unto me” & really just punting it through the proverbial field goal. One creator, Rachel Klinger Cain, put it simply by saying the following:
“They are never going to care about our suffering, because they are okay with our damnation.”
This immediately struck me & got the wheels of my brain turning. She goes on to explain further stating:
“So many of us right now are sitting in the space of desperately trying to explain it to them in a way that induces the empathy. Like if we can just find the right words, if we can say it the right way, provide the right evidence, remind them that we’re human, then we can get through to them. That they’ll see what they’ve done. That they’ll see what’s coming. That they’ll be willing to stand with us when we need it, but none of that is going to work with people who have already accepted that we are going to Hell. They believe that we are going to Hell, a place of eternal conscious torment, & they don’t stand with us. They take the side of the God who would do it. They claim that they love us, but they’re fine with our eternal conscious torment & they’re fine with our tormentor.”
Now. I know that’s a lot to digest. I’m sure for some of you reading it stirred up a lot of emotions or feelings one way or the other. I challenge you to sit in those & understand what about that paragraph makes you feel that way & why you feel that way.
I will say, to my personal extent, that paragraph feels a bit atheistic & I can’t begrudge Rachel for feeling that way. Though it doesn’t necessarily align with my personal beliefs, it does align with my personal feelings & experiences around the majority of those within the evangelical base. I know the retort to that is going to be the “a few bad apples ruin the batch” argument, but I think with most things around that sentiment, Maren Morris was correct in saying “The rot at the roots is the root of the problem” (I know she’s talking specifically about the country music industry here but I’m borrowing the analogy). The bushel isn’t being contaminated by a few bad apples, I think, for the most part, the ‘good' apples are the exception from a tree that has taught us how easy it is to condemn another human being for living a life that is different than our own.
I can just hear the people clicking out of my website from this one already. I again, challenge you to bear with me going forward & really dissect the way this is making you feel. If something challenges the narrative you believe if is often a good idea to figure out why & then figure out whether or not what is stated is factual or not & reevaluate from there.
I’d like to get into the meat of this & really discuss the “why” of all of this? Why do people who spend almost every weekend being taught a book of love statistically go out & vote for candidates who perpetuate hate, division, scapegoating, gluttony, greed, & selfishness? Because of vertical morality.
I’m going to go back to Rachel here in a second because I think the discourse happening on her page outlines the differences in the two types of morality perfectly specifically using the example of murder/killing. With vertical morality you have a system of morals not build on empathy or common understanding, but instead built on authority. This idea makes the beliefs of those who post things along the lines of “well, how will children learn morals if they aren’t taught The Bible?” make so much more sense.
You see, within the discussion on her page, she is met with a man who confronts this idea by saying “Really how can something that created everything kill & slaughter if he can just ‘uncreate’ everything.” It’s this idea of ownership, that if Almighty God decided to undo creating that He has the authority to do so simply because He created it.
Using this specific example she lays out the following:
“Under a vertical moral system murder is not wrong because it harms somebody, it is wrong because you don’t have the authority to do it, but that also means that IF you have the authority to do it, you can to it. This is the problem with a vertical moral system. This is why they become violent so quickly, because all they have to do to convince themselves it’s okay to kill someone, is to convince themself that they’ve been given the authority to do it by God. ”
She goes on to give examples throughout history of this, of times in which Christianity or Christian Nationalism have sparked violent movements that led to countless deaths or allowed them to watch from the sidelines unbothered because of the authority of God or those whom he has ‘ordained’ as having the authority (i.e. kings, queens, presidents, popes, etc.). This also goes outside of Christianity to other theologies that implant vertical morality & even include the deification & idolization of leaders. Some examples that include, but are not limited to; the Holocaust, the Crusades, slavery, colonialism, manifest destiny, the AIDs crisis, the Manson Murders, Gaza.
On the other side of that morality system lies the horizontal. This way of belief says that murder is wrong, not because you don’t have the authority, but because it causes harm to another human being.
“It’s not about authority, it’s about harm. When you have a horizontal moral system then you are criticizing a god who would kill people, because it doesn’t matter if that god is bigger or stronger. Might does not make right. It doesn’t matter if He claims to have the authority, He’s still causing harm. But under that vertical moral system, might makes right. It’s authoritarianism. & when their religion is authoritarian then that means their moral system is authoritarian. & when their moral system is authoritarian it will trickle down into all kinds of other beliefs including their politics, including who they vote for. & if they believe that God as ordained it, if they believe that the ultimate authority figure says it’s okay, then it doesn’t matter who it harms. Appeals to empathy will not work, because they don’t get their morals from empathy, they get it from authority. They’re authoritarians.”
Again, a bit more atheistic than I’d probably put it myself, but I think the point still stands.
Another creator, Theologian Ciarra Jones, piggybacks off of Rachel’s points to discuss a lecture that she gives every years at UC Berkley around Race, Religion, & Public Policy.
“I always tell students when working with Christian communities that the stakes are different. We’re not talking about systemic inequality & its impacts, we’re talking about heaven & Hell. Salvation & damnation. This focus on sin & punishment, salvation & damnation, actually cuts off most fundamentalist Christians from normative processes of empathy. Fundamentalist Christian communities have constructed God in a way that cosigns & corroborates the existence of systemic inequality.”
She then lays out an excellent example around LGBTQ rights using the following:
“If I go to a fundamentalist pastor & I say “you voting on anti-LGBTQ policies harms LGBTQ people’s safety,” they would say “well queerness itself is a sin & if a queer person wasn’t living in this way, then they would experience systemic inequality.””
I would interject here but I think the way she continues on is so eloquently stated that I’m just going to continue to quote her here!
“We have constructed God as a God that insulates power, that insulates systemic inequality & that is one the side of those who are enacting harm on marginalized communities. This makes fundamentalist Christians impervious to critiques about how their theology is related to our policy landscape.
One of the most common Bible verse I heard growing up in fundamentalist, pentecostal churches “we are called to be in the world & not of it,” means that Christians start to bifurcate themselves from non-christians. They almost cut off their humanity & empathy towards non-christian communities or towards those they believe are living in a type of sin.
This means for Christians, for example, voting on ‘pro-life’ policy, even when ‘pro-life’ policy harms particularly women of color. There isn’t any empathy towards these communities because the idea is ‘I am voting on the side of righteousness’ & in fact my ability to separate myself from humanity & vote on policies in the way that God is asking me to do is a sign of my own unique Christian divinity. It’s a sign of my commitment to God. So separating themselves from their empathy actually ends up being a sign of their commitment to God.”
I know this week was a heavy one, I know this blog also may seem like I’m over here doing the most to shit on Christians when in reality I consider myself among them as so many of us who are begging for your empathy do. We read the book. We were taught the lessons. We took them to heart & somewhere along the line that was lost amongst what I would say, & what statistics would say, are the vast majority.
Additionally, I have seen so many postings this last week & a half around the idea of “I don’t know how to convince you to care about other people” so I wanted to weigh in with the things that I learned from these two amazing female creators. They helped me to understand why the last eight years of begging friends & family not to vote the way that they do despite the damage it does not only to me, someone they claim to love, but also other communities at large have clearly gone exorbitantly unheard. Appeals using examples & proof go unheeded & unnoticed because we lack the ultimate authority of what they have decided is moral or is not.
They are not going to stand up for a right or a community that they think or have convinced themselves is sinful, no matter the amount of harm it does to the lives of their fellow human beings because the belief is that they do not have the authority to make that call, God does, & what God says (translation mishaps & political alterations included) is the ultimate scale of law & justice to which they weigh their vote, not your lives & the ways in which it may harm you.
I hope you have a fantastic week,
Much love as always,
-C
“It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong & powerful & against the weak & the oppressed. This despite the gospel.”