It bears saying that moral outrage can be expressed on any side of a particular issue. Abraham Lincoln was exercising moral leadership when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and gave the Gettysburg Address, and he was assassinated because of the moral outrage of those who held opposing views...

Whose moral authority do we fear?

 In an article in the Washington Post entitled “Afraid of the Dalai Lama?

China's Chance to Turn Toward Dialogue on Tibet”, columnist Maura Moynihan writes:

“Yesterday the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest civilian honor, and China is throwing a fit. ‘We are furious,’ the Chinese Communist Party's secretary for Tibet, Zhang Qingli, declared this week. ‘If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world.’ In recent days China has abruptly withdrawn from a summit on Iran and canceled a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who received the Dalai Lama in September. Beijing, which according to The Post ‘solemnly demanded’ that the Bush administration cancel Washington events planned for the Dalai Lama, is determined to punish and intimidate anyone who might pay tribute to Tibet's Nobel laureate.

Why is the mighty People's Republic of China so petrified of this 72-year-old Buddhist monk? True, the Dalai Lama is no ordinary scholar and teacher; he is the living symbol of the Buddhist faith. It seems that Beijing's cadres fear his moral authority and do not want the international community to examine their record in Tibet, because they have a lot to hide.” (Thursday, October 18, 2007; Page A25)

As I read these words, reprinted in my local Sunday newspaper, I wondered to myself about the Chinese outrage. I am not personally prone to such extreme behavior. I tend to experience, reflect, internalize, analyze, and maybe come to the conclusion that things need to change. But I don’t generally fly off the handle, or throw tantrums, or rearrange my life to thwart the plans of others. So I found myself thinking about outrage at moral authority.  Could I think of other instances of moral outrage?  The names of Terri Schiavo, Matthew Shepard, and Martin Luther King, Jr. came to mind. It bears saying that moral outrage can be expressed on any side of a particular issue. Abraham Lincoln was exercising moral leadership when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and gave the Gettysburg Address, and he was assassinated because of the moral outrage of those who held opposing views.

How can this be? How can both those for slavery and those against slavery be morally outraged at each other? My eighth grade social studies teacher made us learn the definitions of norms and mores: mores are the accepted traditional customs and usages of a particular culture or social group; norms are a standard model or pattern of behavior regarded as typical by a particular culture or social group.  Norms determine what is considered normal and mores determine what is considered moral. So in the American Civil War, the greatest pain was discovering that the existence of slavery created two distinct cultures within a nation that was striving to be unified. Within each culture, a different set of norms and mores prevailed: In the Confederacy, slavery was considered moral while in the Union, it was not. This is how among those on both sides of the Dalai Lama award question there are, indeed, likely to be found good and just people by social custom. One important lesson from history is to see that to some extent, norms and mores are fluid; they can change over time and adapt to new cultural circumstances. For example, women may now vote, men may use the YWCA, and pants may be worn by both men and women.

One is right to say that is too simplistic. There is an important factor missing that plays a part in this particular chapter of American history and in the question of moral outrage. For people of faith, there is a set of norms and mores considered to be absolute. These norms and mores apply to all cultures in all times and places and supercede any cultural principle that would negate them.  So, for example, even though in the current American culture gambling (lotteries, games of chance, casino games, etc.) is considered normal and moral-- with proceeds funding children’s education and care for senior citizens—in the Christian culture, it is considered immoral and abnormal because it contradicts the norms and mores established by God’s Word, the Bible.  Gambling breaks the Seventh Commandment (You shall not steal) by taking what belongs to the neighbor and giving him/her nothing in return. And for Christian culture, the normative moral prohibition applies to every state and country, and cruise ship (and soon we’ll add space ship) in the world. So when the issue of riverboat gambling or local casinos becomes part of the political conversation, moral outrage comes mostly from people of faith whose morality is driven by the faith culture rather than the political culture.

For China, as the last sentence of the quote indicates, the moral outrage is at the very presence of a leader whose political morality functions for the Chinese as an absolute morality in the light of which they would be found – by all cultures in every country – severely wanting.

For the Christian community, this absolute morality is located in . . . what?  For some, it is the Bible. For others it is the living, spoken, tangible, and written Word of God. For some it is Scripture and Tradition, the teachings of early church theologians handed down. For others it includes the papal office, or the Episcopal office, or the pastoral office. For some it is the collective assembly of believers and for others it is the individual believer who holds final moral authority.  Can it be that the inability to agree on the locus of moral authority within the Christian household of faith on the one hand contributes to the incessant conflict between and among Christians and on the other leads to a lack of moral leadership in the world? Aside from Billy Graham, who can be named as a global Christian moral leader in our time?

Perhaps as American Christians we have become tepid like the Laodiceans (Rev. 3:14ff.), or perhaps, like China, we fear being exposed to one another and to God in our sin, for we have much to hide.  But hiding is a dead-end in the long run.  So perhaps – starting with ourselves – we need to risk exposure so that we can both find our own life and give life to the world by obeying God who sent Jesus to define the norms and mores of his covenant people.

The letter to the Laodiceans concludes with these words of God given to John: “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev. 3:19-22 ESV)