Our Impoverished Moral Dialogue

Against my better judgment, I want to offer a descriptive assessment about how our discourse about the war in Gaza has played out and has continued to play out. 

Before making that assessment, I want to share a passage from one of the new chapters from the paperback edition of Hunting Magic Eels, the chapter entitled "Why Good People Need God." In building the argument for the chapter's title, one of the points I make is how contemporary, post-Christian moral discourse, especially in social justice spaces, has become thin, simplistic, reductive, and impoverished. How we've come to talk about good versus evil and right versus wrong has increasingly been stripped of the complexity required to adequately address our moral crises. Here's the passage from Hunting Magic Eels:

As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Justice is just one tool in our moral toolbox. A critical, essential tool. But one tool can’t do all the moral work life demands of us. Justice is a hammer, and when you’re looking at a nail— say, oppression—the hammer is the tool to pick up. But the moral drama of our lives isn’t just about oppression. We’re dealing with all sorts of things, from forgiveness to mercy to shame to guilt to joy to truth to peace to reconciliation. And hitting mercy with a hammer just isn’t a good idea. You’ll break it.

Consider an obvious example: how the social justice movement struggles with the issue of forgiveness. With the pervasiveness of what has been called “cancel culture,” can the canceled ever be forgiven? What about problematic allies? What if someone’s moral performance for the cause is less than perfect? The social justice movement struggles here with the issues of mercy, grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. The reason for this is that justice is a hammer, and while a hammer is an excellent tool for nails, it is not so great with other moral tasks. Forgiveness is a different problem than injustice. You need different tools. The moral drama of life isn’t putting up a swing set in the backyard, easily tackled with the single tool enclosed in the box; it’s building an entire house. Moral life is cement work, brick laying, carpentry, plumbing, electrical, roofing, painting, and so on. You need more than a hammer.

This passage explains what I think has happened to our discourse about the war in Gaza. Specifically, when we reduce our moral categories to an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy we're forced to pick and choose between Israel and the Palestinians as to who should be plugged into the "oppressor" side of the equation. Plug Israel into the "oppressor" position and you're antisemitic, ignoring the historical persecution of the Jews, and have turned a blind eye to the atrocities that Hamas committed in October of 2023. Plug the Palestinians into the "oppressor" position and you're ignoring Israel's harsh and dehumanizing treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and how Israel has conducted the war. Both parties have material for oppressor and oppressed portfolios and this crosses the wires and short-circuits social justice discourse. The only moral tool available, the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, is too reductive for the conflict. So we fight about who gets categorized as the victim. A very long and complicated historical conflict is reduced to a blame game.  

But here's the thing we all know. Life isn't so simple. The long and sad history between the Jews and Palestinians is messy and complex. Our simplistic, reductionistic, and politically polarized moral discourse--Who is oppressed and who is oppressor?--is inadequate for the task of peacemaking in the Middle East. We're trying to build an entire house with a screwdriver. 

When I look at the war in Gaza what I see is a tragedy. My heart breaks for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Because Jesus calls me to love them both. 

And lest there be any confusion among the black and white thinkers, this isn't me trying to have it both ways or create moral equivalencies. This isn't me trying to shift blame around. This is me saying it's always been way more complicated than that.