A few thoughts about religion and postconventionality
(revised 04-21-03)
Students sometimes question my assertion that religiously based morality is higher on Kohlberg's scheme than secular morality. In fact the reality is slightly more complex than that: secular moral reasoners tend to be at level 5, while religious thinkers are perhaps a mixture of level 4 and level 6 thinkers. But religion at its best is inherently postconventional (level 6). Here's why.
A
few examples may make my point clear. Is
it a conventional act to sell all your possessions
and give them to the poor? (Ask
your financial planner if that is standard investment advice.)
Is it conventional to love your enemies?
(Call the Pentagon and ask them what the official military position is on
that question.) Is it conventional
to take your mental life so seriously that you treat anger as if it were murder,
lust as if it were adultery? (Our
culture foolishly tells us that our thoughts are our own and don’t matter;
yet every act ever committed, whether good or bad, invariably began with
– what else? – a thought.) Is
it conventional to be prepared to give up anything and endure anything,
up to and including torture and death, for something you can’t even see?
(Our culture defines the good life in terms of how much you have and how
well others think of you, or what a pastor friend of mine calls the “three
B’s” – Beauty, Brains, and Bucks.) It
seems obvious to me that religiously based moral principles are inherently
postconventional. They call into
question the fundamental assumptions of our culture, such as the notion that the
highest human good is the pursuit of temporal happiness.
One
of the mandates of religion is to stand above and apart from the culture.
Indeed it is difficult to imagine what, if anything else, is capable of
doing so, since social institutions in general are so imbedded in the culture
that they take its assumptions for granted.
(Fish, it is said, do not know that they are wet.)
But the religionist can say to the entire culture, “You are
wrong” – because s/he has a transcendent reference point that does not
depend upon the culture itself, that can survive the death of the culture.
This is why governments in general treat religion like ancient Athens
treated Socrates – by using force to try to subject it to the authority of the
culture. Cultural authorities
don’t like what they can’t tame, can’t control, can’t predict.
And authentic religious faith is unpredictable;
the wine keeps bursting the wineskins, the fire won’t stay in the
fireplace.
Of
course, there is always a danger that religion will lose sight of its
transcendent purpose and allow itself to become a mere handmaiden of the
culture. (“If salt has lost its
savor, it is good for nothing but to be trampled under foot by men.”)
But that is a distortion of religion, not its essence.
Marx was simply wrong when he said that religion was an opiate;
the one thing all the martyrs had in common, as Chesterton
notes, was that they died with their
eyes wide open.
Of course religion can lose sight of its prophetic function and can be co-opted by cultural conventionalism -- the "civil religion" of the Eisenhower years comes to mind, and indeed, this phenomenon is most likely to take place during Civic- or Adaptive-dominated eras. But the abuse of a thing is not a fair argument against its proper function. Religion is inherently transcendent (the province of Idealists) and thus postconventional in its essential character.
I’m not saying that religion is the only form of postconventional moral reasoning, though in fact it is the only one that has ever succeeded in making a dent in the culture. (Perhaps – a rather large perhaps – abstract philosophy can do the same, but how many abstract philosophers can you even name?)
In
other words, while religious faith can be co-opted, it is not inherently
conventional. My own faith commitment was, as I see it, an act of rebellion
– not conformity. (How could a child of
the 60's see it otherwise?) The result may have been what some
might (wrongly in my view) choose to call "conservative", but the
process was nothing but. Religious
belief is radical in the deepest sense of that word (from the Latin word radix,
meaning “root”): it gets to the
root of things, the heart of the matter. It
reminds us of the difference between what really matters and what only seems to
matter. Culture lies and says that
its institutions and assumptions are essential;
religion looks at them and says, sic transit gloria mundi (and, as
Rex Stout wryly noted, Tuesday is usually even worse).
That is why social psychologist Roger Brown says that humor and faith are
twins. Both can look at the
universe and laugh. Those without
either are too busy taking it too seriously even to crack a smile.
Naturally, as a person of faith, I have a bias in this matter. Swimming upstream against the culture as those of my generation live to do -- can you say contra mundum? -- I cherish my role as a moral absolutist, an island in a sea of relativists. One of the weaknesses of Kohlberg's model in my view is that he fails to address (in fact, quite explicitly sidesteps) this most important of moral questions: are ethical principles something we discover (i.e., they are inherent in the very nature of things), as scientists discover physical laws that predate them and are not dependent on human reasoning as such; or are they something we invent, as a creative artist invents something wholly new and, in the final analysis, wholly arbitrary? (Note that the former view is Kohlberg's level 6, the latter is level 5. However, I think he failed to recognize the philosophic implications of this fact.) I leave it to you, the student, to decide which viewpoint you think most justified, but please don't mindlessly default to the relativism of the current cultural Zeitgeist. It leads to strange ends, as to the fact that 20% of college students in one 1990's-era sample refused to condemn the Holocaust on the grounds that, while they did not personally like genocide, they did not feel that they had the right to "impose" that values on others. "Who am I to say that, just because ethnic cleansing isn't 'my thing' [they no doubt used some different slang term of which I know nothing], it is wrong for everyone?" If this doesn't send a few chills down your spine and motivate you to take a second look at absolutism as a viable philosophic alternative, please seek professional help immediately.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled lecture notes.