Men and morality

I drove that street nearly every day. César Chávez Street cuts through the heart of Austin, Texas, stretching from the western edge of the city, across downtown, and out the other side. You cannot avoid it. The city named it after Chávez not long after his death in 1993. And for years a mural of his face greeted everyone entering East Austin from that end of the road. I passed that corner more times than I can count.

Now the wall is blank.

Cities across the country are covering murals, removing names from schools, canceling birthday celebrations. An icon is being erased. What cannot be erased is what The New York Times reported.

Ana Murguia claims that Chávez first assaulted her when she was 13 and he was 45. Debra Rojas alleges that he raped her at 15, after first groping her at 12. Both were daughters of longtime organizers in the movement. Dolores Huerta—Chávez’s closest collaborator and co-founder of the United Farm Workers—has said that he coerced her into sex in 1960 and raped her in 1966, encounters that resulted in pregnancies. She had been his partner in one of the most celebrated labor movements in American history.

These are not anonymous whispers or partisan attacks. These are on-the-record allegations from women within Chávez’s own movement.

What is especially disturbing is how closely the allegations track with Chávez’s public philosophy. Journalist Maria Hinojosa put it plainly: “Cesar Chavez was a very strategic thinker. That's why he was able to build a movement. … The horror is to realize that this man was also very strategic in how he was setting out to abuse girls, teens, and women.”

The United Farm Workers made nonviolence their public creed—a moral framework, drawing on Gandhi and King—that used ethical credibility as its primary weapon. It worked. The nation watched and was moved. But if these accounts are true, that same moral credibility functioned in private not as a principle restraining harm, but as a shield against exposure.

This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense of inconsistency. It suggests something more disturbing: that the movement’s moral authority could become a form of insulation. The very status that made Chávez a credible advocate for the vulnerable may also have made him difficult to accuse.

Christians should not be surprised by this. The doctrines of original sin and total depravity teach that deep and pervasive corruption extends to every person. No one is exempt—not even leaders we most admire.

This is not a new problem. Christians have long had to reckon with the sins of those they otherwise esteem: Augustine abandoned the concubine with whom he had a son. Luther’s later writings descended into vicious anti-Semitism. Calvin supported the execution of Servetus. Jonathan Edwards owned slaves. Karl Barth carried on a decades-long affair with his secretary, who lived under his roof alongside his wife.

And John Howard Yoder—author of The Politics of Jesus, the 20th century’s most celebrated theological defense of Christian nonviolence—spent decades sexually abusing women in his orbit while his denomination looked away. After his death in 2019, similar revelations emerged about Jean Vanier, whose work among people with intellectual disabilities made him one of the most admired Christian figures of his generation—even as he used spiritual authority to exploit women. In each case, a public posture of moral seriousness—whether nonviolence or sacrificial service—functioned as a form of insulation, making it harder for victims to be heard and easier for communities to look away.

Does this mean we discard The City of God, the Institutes, The Nature of True Virtue, or The Politics of Jesus? Do we abandon the cause of farmworkers because their founder was, if these allegations are true, a predator?

We should not. But we must hold together two truths that are often pried apart.

First, victims must not be sacrificed to preserve the movement. There is a recurring temptation—in activist communities and in churches—to protect institutions and legacies because “the work is too important to jeopardize.” The goodness of a cause does not license us to treat poorly the victims of its leaders.

Second, the truth of a cause does not depend on the virtue of its champion. Workers deserve fair wages, safe conditions, and dignity because they bear the image of God—not because César Chávez was worthy of being made an icon.

These revelations should prompt a deeper question: not whether we honor leaders of righteous causes, but why we so quickly place them beyond question. Every person bears the image of God, but an icon is something more—a life we fix in place and treat as morally decisive for a cause. When admiration hardens into hagiography, we begin to treat a sinner as if he were a standard. That is a danger both to his soul and to those under his influence.

Scripture commands us to honor the image of God in every person. It forbids us to make an idol of any of them.

There is, in the end, only one name whose legacy will never require revision. Not because its bearer was merely a champion of the poor—though He was—but because He was what no activist, organizer, or theologian has ever been: sinless. His cause was not simply a movement for reform, but the Kingdom of God—the renewal of all things and the redemption of sinners before a holy God. That work required not only solidarity with the oppressed, but a perfect obedience none of His followers have ever achieved.

So we do not lose heart when human beings fail. Their failures do not nullify the truth they carried, the causes they served, or the King they imperfectly represented. Deal honestly with their sins. Seek justice for their victims. But do not build your hope on any icon carved from human hands.

They all come down eventually. He does not.