“For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Galatians 5:13-14, NRSV)

Recently, my teenage daughter stunned me to speechlessness when she asked, innocently, if it was wrong for multiple people to have sex with one another at the same time. Somehow, she’d heard about this possibility in passing, and though her instinct was to judge it as wrong, she wanted to check that against my moral judgment.

The question made perfect sense considering our experiences in the church I’ve been helping to pastor for the last several years. Our church has become a safe(ish) space in which people from across the political, socioeconomic, mental health, and sexual spectrum can come together and seek God. Our loyalty to freedom of conscience and our willingness to wrestle with some of the most difficult questions concerning God, human purpose, and the meaning of life has repelled more folks than it has attracted. The wildness of ministry “outside the camp” (Hebrews 13:13, NRSV)¹ has altered my family and, apparently, has allowed my daughter the freedom to ask me a question I would never have uttered to an adult when I was her age. 

As I gazed into her earnest, beautiful brown eyes I was struck with an almost primal instinct to protect us both from this loss of innocence by defaulting to a well-worn answer: Yes, it’s wrong. Why? Because the Bible tells us so. I knew I could make a biblical case for monogamy within the confines of marriage, and I could certainly invoke a few scare tactics to demonstrate how dangerous promiscuity is for human beings. But I also knew that this path would leave us both unsatisfied and rob us of important opportunities. If we took the shortcut around this question, we’d miss out on thinking deeply and critically about some of the most sacred aspects of human existence. We’d never get to explore together things like human love, faithfulness, and God’s notions of sexual pleasure and personal responsibility. Perhaps most importantly, though, if we took the wide road of moral oversimplification, we would have missed the chance to explore what personal freedom is for and what are the best ways to steward it. 

I drew a shaky breath as I realized the tightrope of moral leadership I’ve been endeavoring to provide for my church is not confined to that context after all. As much as I crave a breather from sitting in tension and plodding through grey areas, the world around us isn’t simply going through a phase of pushing against traditional boundaries. Yes, my ministry has perhaps hastened the arrival of these challenges to my own front door, but they would have come calling eventually. This is the particular time in which we’ve been called to live and lead and, without the social safety net of a thriving Christian majority and widespread agreement on the nature of biblical authority, this cultural moment feels increasingly fraught.

There is no liberty without morality and no freedom without social responsibility. We must ask what is good for 'all of us together.' Share on X

In 2024, the American citizenry is deeply divided along moral lines of all kinds, even regarding ethical behaviors that would have seemed outlandish only a decade or two ago. Likewise, American Christians, in many cases even those inhabiting the same pews on Sunday morning, do not share agreement on important moral and doctrinal issues. And it’s no wonder. The information age has made it possible to listen to diverse theological, historical, biblical and political voices who are opening worlds for us that we never knew existed. Add to that the fact that knowledge and education now fall squarely in the realm of consumerism. We have the freedom to listen obsessively to certain voices while completely tuning out the voices of others. The freedom to gather, and even purchase, information at such a large scale has shaken our collective moral foundation. When we can click on endless arguments and counterarguments, and when we can find expert sources to directly contradict one another on almost any issue, falling back on one person or organization’s opinions becomes almost impossible. And when we consider how to apply moral prescriptivism to daily life, everyone’s authority is in question. 

Furthermore, scriptural interpretation that has historically been widely accepted as morally prescriptive can now be effectively challenged, debated and even dismissed by the post-modern discoveries of scholars, and my teenagers’ favorite TikTok creators alike. No sacred nooks and crannies are being spared careful and creative public scrutiny as new cultural boundary lines are being drawn. And to many, these new lines don’t feel much like boundaries at all. The question then becomes how do we calibrate our moral compasses, individually and collectively, while being exposed to so much nuance, contradiction, and human bias? How do we navigate the tension of moral, ethical, and legal dilemmas that seem to shift like sand under our feet daily?

What are we meant to do with all this freedom of body, mind, and soul?

It takes tremendous maturity to allow treasured paradigms and traditional boundary lines to be redrawn, even when it’s the faithful choice. It’s terrifying to inhabit seasons of uncertainty while looking for what is good and true. Share on X

Renowned moral philosopher and Jewish Rabbi, the late Jonathan Sacks, provides a helpful starting point in answering these questions. He posits that there is no liberty without morality and no freedom without social responsibility, writing in Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times that we must ask what is good for ‘all of us together:’

“Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal democratic politics alone. It needs a third element: morality, a concern for the welfare of others, and active commitment to justice and compassion, a willingness to ask not just what is good for me but what is good for ‘all of us together.’ It is about ‘Us,’ not ‘Me;’ about ‘We,’ not ‘I.’”²

Rabbi Sacks’s understanding of morality is reminiscent of Professor Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki’s conceptualization of sin as rebellion against the well-being of creation. In her insightful book The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology, Professor Suchocki makes the case that sin is always an act that attacks creaturely well-being, and God is a co-sufferer in every event of sin because God is so deeply intimate with all creation. Sacks and Suchocki drive home the same point regarding morality: because we are all interrelated, we have a responsibility to one another. This responsibility requires us to use our freedom to transcend boundaries that work for the ill-being of others. In this light, becoming “enslaved to one another” in love, as Paul commands us to do in Galatians 5:13-14, means using our freedom to work toward the common good, avoiding the potential sinfulness of putting my “I” before the common “we.” 

However, using the common good as the rubric by which we judge the use of our freedom is a time-consuming, messy process, and an uncomfortable one at that. It’s painfully challenging to sit with hard questions and look at all the possible answers, especially in the context of community. It takes tremendous maturity to allow treasured paradigms to shift and traditional boundary lines to be redrawn, even when it’s obviously the faithful choice. It’s terrifying to inhabit seasons of uncertainty while looking for what is good and true. It’s completely counterintuitive to put “we” before “I” when the stakes seem so high. 

It would be much easier to default to easy answers and quick fixes that never actually solve anything, simply sweeping important issues under the rug. And, of course, there’s always the easiest default of all: undermine the freedom of another by exerting control. But this is not the sacrificial model Christ has set for us to follow. 

Because we are all interrelated, we have a responsibility to one another. This responsibility requires us to use our freedom to work toward the common good, avoiding the potential sinfulness of putting my 'I' before the common 'we.' Share on X

And so, I inhaled deeply and exhaled a silent prayer for God to help me lead my daughter well as I jumped into the deep waters with her. We explored every pro and con of having sex with multiple partners at one time that our minds could conjure, and all without me providing one proof-text. I wanted to engage her in this thought exercise in a way that would honor her freedom and take her through the logic that she would find outside of Christian sources. We didn’t shy away from the awkwardness or the uncertainty of our conversation. Eventually, the focus naturally did become God’s notions of sexual morality. We talked about sexuality and the Bible, about second and third term effects of our sexual choices, and about how looking through a lens of sacrificial, other-centered love changes our view of everything. 

We both walked away from that conversation exhausted but also, interestingly, deeply settled. We agreed that it felt good to take the long way in coming to our conclusions. 

Maybe that’s what Christian moral leadership in our cultural moment is all about. Perhaps it’s about being willing to take the long way around big issues in the company of others. This kind of leadership requires keeping the common good (i.e. shalom) our top priority, maintaining a wise and mature presence as we wrestle with the prominent questions of our time, and resisting the urge to control instead of allowing ourselves and others the freedom to grow.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s about allowing ourselves to explore our own personal freedom in Christ while simultaneously living by example of how to courageously steward our freedom for the mutual flourishing of “we.” When the common good is our ultimate goal and mutual well-being is our litmus test for right and wrong, suddenly there remains no need for rigid control wrung from ethical oversimplification, because we find ourselves more truly free than we’ve ever before been. 

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Maybe that’s what Christian moral leadership in our cultural moment is all about. Perhaps it’s about being willing to take the long way around big issues in the company of others. (1/2) Share on X

This kind of leadership requires keeping the common good (i.e. shalom) our top priority, maintaining a wise and mature presence as we wrestle with the prominent questions of our time. (2/2) Share on X

*Editorial Note:  Amber’s challenging piece is the second article in a summer series that we will publish over the next few weeks, introducing our 2024 Writing Fellows Cohort in their own voices. ~CK

Footnotes    

¹ Hebrews 13:12-14 reads as follows (Bolded Italics my own): “Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:12-14, NRSV). ~AHJ

² Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 1.