The Immorality of Morality

Lately I have been thinking a lot about morality.

Specifically, what defines a person’s morality? What makes them a good or bad person?

I can’t give a definitive answer for what makes a person moral, but let me reflect on a few of the things that people assume defines morality.

Three things resonate with me as examples of things people use to define someone else’s morality: education, virginity, and cleanliness.

When it comes to education, people assume that the more highly educated someone is, the more moral that person must be. This also works in the opposite direction, with lower education meaning the person is less moral.

If someone has a Master’s degree or PhD, people give that person a higher moral standing that someone who doesn’t have those degrees. The “uneducated” in our world are often considered to be somehow less human, and therefore less able to be a moral or good person.

Gandhi never had a formal education; Rosa Parks never completed anything higher than high school; Mother Theresa only ever received some minimal home-schooling. No college, no degrees, no “formal” education – and yet no one would question the morality these three displayed during their lives.

On the flip side, some of the world’s greatest atrocities and mishaps have been perpetrated by very smart people. Many of the doctors and leaders of the holocaust were considered to be some of the brightest scientists and men in the entire world. Those responsible for the engineering failures that led to BP oil disaster had numerous PhD’s and had risen to the tops of their respective fields.

Education does not define morality or the character of the person.

The second example is that of virginity. One’s virginity is often intrinsically tied to the person’s ability to be moral or “good.” This is mostly problematic for women. If a woman loses her virginity, she is often defined as having lost her “purity.” She has become “ruined” by many Christian standards and is now less fit for marriage than women who have not had sex.

Losing one’s virginity seems to be a permanent stain in the eyes of many Christians. You can never “regain” your virginity, and so there is always something impure about you.

We can debate whether we think it’s okay to have sex before marriage or not, but this should not be the defining factor for someone’s morality either way. People are more than their sexuality. They are more than whatever some people deem sinful.

Virginity does not define morality or the character of the person.

The last example is cleanliness. Mainly, the hygiene of the person we are interacting with.

We as Christians are conditioned (whether we know it or not) to associate cleanliness with morality. Many metaphors in the Bible relate a good person to a clean person. In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) many sins needed a cleaning ritual to be forgiven. Sins are often referred to as being “washed away.” Jesus’ sacrifice made us as “white as (clean) snow.”

If your sins are forgiven, you are “clean.”

We have carried these metaphors with us into the church today. Who would you assume is a more moral person of these two: a man who walked into a church in a full suit on Sunday morning, or one who came in with sweatpants on and unkempt hair? Whether you care to admit it or not, you would rather the man in the suit be in your church than the unclean man. We associate the unclean man with being less moral, and are afraid that he might make us “dirty” too.

Cleanliness does not define morality or the character of the person.

What we must admit is that we should not, and really cannot, try to define someone morality and character based on some outside and ancillary factor.

We really are in no place to define someone’s morality at all.

We can simply get to know the person in front of us as a whole person.

Our deeds help define us.

Not education. Not virginity. Not cleanliness. 

Besides, it is in the outcasts where we can most find God.