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I am a Christian ethicist, but there's something wrongheaded about much Christian social ethics. In graduate school, I learned to examine some social problem in detail, then bring Christian principles thoughtfully to bear on that problem. Curiously, this process most often results in statements about what government—not the church—should do about the particular problem.

Mainline Protestants have dominated the discipline of Christian social ethics from its beginning, but today it is conservative evangelical Christians who are most vocal and visible in telling government what it should and should not do. Sometimes this involves analysis. Often it merely involves raised voices.

Now certainly, the United States government should not be the primary audience for Christian ethics. Over the past 40 years, ethicists beginning with John Howard Yoder and then Stanley Hauerwas have strongly objected to this development. There is something quite wrong, they say, when the intended audience for Christian moral reasoning is the secular world and the institutions that govern it.

This simply does not fit with the biblical witness, especially in the New Testament. The ethical exhortations offered there are articulated for followers of Jesus Christ by Jesus himself or by his apostles. New Testament moral teachers aim to instruct Christians in what manner of life is worthy of those whose identity is bound up with that of Christ. Think, for example, of Paul's great ethical exhortations in Romans. Having been chosen by God and baptized into Christ's death and resurrection, we are to offer ourselves a living sacrifice, not conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds.

The New Testament writers show great confidence that the world is being transformed through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. But they show no confidence whatsoever that the powers and principalities of this world serve as the agents of that global transformation. No, the redemption of the world is God's activity, occurring in God's good time. It is an ongoing process in which the church is intimately involved, through faithful pursuit of its mission, but also, quite simply, through its quiet daily practice of God's will.

Generally speaking, American evangelicals have a poorly developed theology of the church. We also produce a variety of expressions of church life that do not emphasize rigorous moral commitment. Our pietistic individualism creates a "Jesus and me" ethos that often weakens any loyalty to the community of faith or any willingness to submit to a disciplined covenantal vision. The church is where I go to get my spiritual needs met—you have no right to tell me what to do as I pursue that quest.

The moral mediocrity of this kind of church can leave us hopeless about the church as the center of God's redemptive enterprise in the world. How can we truly believe that the world's transformation is happening right here, right among us, when we can't stop divorce in our midst, or abortion, or greed, or internal church conflicts?

Ironically, we turn to the state to enforce the values we can't seem to advance in our own churches. We're rightly concerned about our collapsing families, internet pornography, decadent movies and music, and the weakening of sexual morality. But we often can't seem to prevent the encroachment of these problems in our own Christian families and congregations. As if in response, we keep trying to change our nation's laws.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11