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Many years ago, my wife and I were having a marital "moral discourse," and I was becoming increasingly agitated. In my fury, I yelled at her and aimed my fist at a section of the dining room wall. Unfortunately, the Holy Spirit failed to guide my hand between the studs, as he usually had done, and instead I hit a stud right on. I broke a knuckle.

A deathly silence settled in the room. While I came from a family in which nothing got done until someone yelled, Barb came from a family in which yelling brought things to a standstill. She was not going to speak to me for weeks. As I writhed in physical pain, I also writhed in emotional pain. I was a moral failure of a husband.

Recently, the front page of the Chicago Tribune showed Al Gore testifying before Congress about global warming. The accompanying article said, "Gore was at his most passionate when he spoke of a 'moral imperative' that members of Congress have to act in light of new evidence that global warming is getting worse."

This strong language was surely chosen deliberately by Gore. A moral imperative is a command from a higher authority—presumably God, the architect of all morality—and leaves little wiggle room. If we fail to obey a moral imperative, then, logically and naturally, we are guilty of immorality, or sin.

There was similar story on that same front page. Gay activists were dismayed by Senator Barak Obama's initial hesitancy to distance himself from the comments of Peter Pace, who had said, "Homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral." In the days following, the general was called everything from "insensitive" to "bigoted."

One Obama supporter said, "[Obama's] inability to make strong, declarative sentences in support of our issues is disheartening … . I hope he shows a little bit more moral courage for his friends." Eventually, Obama announced he found nothing immoral about homosexuals, and thus he was temporarily rehabilitated—redeemed politically by distancing himself from an immoral general.

The ironies—which are legion here—are not my point as much as how we use the word moral in the public square. That day, the morality card was mostly played by liberals, but on other days, it's conservatives who pull it out to intimidate the opposition or to cajole allies into line. It is practiced within parties, across parties, and across nations.

Christian activists, as we might expect, often pull this card out of their tunics, especially when they get in a prophetic mood. They are getting in this mood more and more lately, making everything and anything a great moral issue. The budget has become a "moral document" to some, as the Federal Marriage Amendment is to others. For many Christian activists, Left and Right, moral posturing has become politics as usual.

This is surprising considering how biblical teaching runs in precisely the opposite direction. For the Christian, moral discourse begins by focusing not on the sins of the other but on one's own failures. "O God, be merciful to me, a sinner." It is the publican's humble prayer that is accepted by God, and it is the Pharisee—who is confident of his morality and the other's immorality—who is condemned. Moral discourse begins, as Jesus said, by taking the log out of our own eye.

Rarely do we hear a politician publicly concede wrongdoing. A stunning exception to this was demonstrated to me last year in Vietnam. I was part of a delegation that was pressing the government to grant more religious freedom. One official in the ministry of foreign affairs startled me when he said, "On our part, we're not saying that we are error- or mistake- free. That is why we very much want to improve things."

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April (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51