The Incoherence of Post-Christian Morality

I was having a chat with a colleague recently, reflecting upon the moral sensibilities of our college students. Specifically, we dissected what we felt to be an incoherence in the moral sensibilities of post-Christian culture that our students have internalized.

On the one hand, there is the post-modern impact upon morality. There are no "meta-narratives," no real or final "Right versus Wrong." Values are personally curated and cultivated. We have to accept that our moral worldviews are pluralistic. In such a world, the moral imperatives are acceptance and tolerance. You need to step back, without judgment, and allow people to live their own lives however they see fit.

But on the other hand, post-Christian morality is very moralistic and judgmental. This is most clearly seen in social justice rhetoric, progressive activism/protest, online shaming, and cancel culture. As I shared years ago (see also this post), there is a puritanical aspect to post-Christian morality, a social justice inflected "purity culture."

As I reflected with my colleague, there is an profound incoherence here. There are no moral meta-narratives, until there are. There is no ultimate right versus wrong, until you do something wrong. We are to be tolerant and non-judgmental, until you need to be canceled. The post-Christian culture swings back and forth between moral relativism and moral absolutism. A non-judgmental moral libertinism is fused with an unbending and puritanical moral ferocity.

In his book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre aptly described this incoherence as a wreckage. With the shipwreck of Christianity in the West, what we find floating in the water of post-Christian culture are random bits and pieces of moral thinking. Tolerance is a moral good, but it's just floating around aimlessly on the waters of our culture. Moral absolutes are also a moral good, but these imperatives are also just floating around without direction or purpose. Post-Christian morality just lurches from flotsam to jetsam, grabbing and cobbling together random bits of morality to stay afloat. That post-Christian morality makes no sense, is characterized by nonsensical randomness, is, according to MacIntyre, evidence that some sort of moral shipwreck has occurred.    

To be clear, I'm not one of those Christian intellectuals who pine nostalgically for a long lost Christendom. My interest, if you've followed me closely over the last few years, has been, rather, to remind my progressive, liberal, and humanistic brothers and sisters that their moral worldview makes no sense. As I described it in a post a few months ago, they are wannabe prophets who no longer believe in the Lord. That is to say, my progressive, liberal, and humanistic brothers and sisters are very moralistic--just listen to them declaim about climate care or oppression--but they are trying to erect these moral absolutes upon a foundation of post-modern sand where no meta-narratives can securely stand.