Our declining Christian consensus

The world seems to be going to the dogs. But according to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, it’s going to the market, which can be the same thing. The market is great for efficiently allocating scarce resources but not so great for deciding moral matters. His book on the moral limits of markets, What Money Can’t Buy, has been in print for a few years, but our view of what is properly marketable has only become more slippery. The controversy over same-sex marriage is challenging us to face this intersection of markets and morals, and we are not handling it well.

It’s true that the more disagreements we can leave to private choice rather than legislative coercion, the safer, freer, and more peaceful our lives will be. But can all moral controversies be reduced to private market choices? Are there some subjects that must remain matters for communitywide moral settlement?

Prostitution, for example. Is it just a contractual matter between consenting adult consumers? Can’t I do what I want with my own body? If I want to exchange sex for cash, why not? A growing number are content to see it that way.

Should I be able to sell my children on the open market? Of course, they are not my property. But my parental rights are, aren’t they? If I can surrender my parental rights by putting my child up for adoption, why should I not be able to sell those rights?

I have a vote in the next election. If I don’t often use my vote and if I don’t care that much who gets my support, why should I not be able to sell that vote, whether to a fellow voter or a broker?

Once you have seriously asked these questions, you have already crossed a moral threshold. You have passed into another moral universe where everything can be bought and sold on the market and the value of everything is reducible to its market value. Nothing is priceless. When things have inherent value—your chastity, your honor, your parental or civic obligations—it is you who must submit to them, i.e., your judgment to their value. Your relationship to a thing must conform to what is appropriate for it.

But we have indeed passed that threshold. We feel guilt for “forcing our morals” on others, and so we make a market choice out of what we once viewed as what’s necessary for one’s capacity to function supportively as part of a moral community. And so people have shrunk from their communitywide judgments on issues like homosexuality and even same-sex marriage into a market-based, non-judgmental stance.

But both of these developments—commodifying ever more of life and privatizing almost every moral decision—are symptoms of the declining Christian moral consensus. The poet William Butler Yeats wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” With no substantive moral foundation to replace it, nothing remains but the market, the emptiness of personal autonomy. This is understandable for decidedly secular people, and they have to live with the consequences. But the 75 percent of the country that professes Christ needs to square with how their Lord, who will judge the nations, expects people to live together.