Got Ethics?: Envisioning and Evaluating the Future of Our Guild and Discipline

IN LIGHT OF THE SOCIETY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS’ TWENTY-First Century and 2020 Initiatives, several ad hoc committees and working groups have examined the fate and future of both the Society and the field of Christian ethics. The stated purposes of these initiatives and their correlative task forces were to think about a new era that is ostensibly different from the state of the discipline of Christian ethics and the demographics of the Society in the past. In effect, each initiative was charged with addressing the evolving needs of our field, particularly giving attention to our mission, membership, meeting, media, management, and mass appeal. There has also been considerable attention paid to our relevance in an academy and society where underrepresented groups of color are no longer minorities in the demographic composition of the United States. Further, numerous discussions have focused on the shifting dynamics of a global and postsecular age. Each initiative therefore chose to focus its attention on the practices of the Society in order to expand our ethical conversations with ethicists in other cultures, traditions, and institutional settings. Finally, each initiative executed its own inventory, and recommendations to the board and membership emerged.

The 2016 preconference workshop titled “Got Ethics?” was a roundtable discussion that was an effort to make good on the hard work of those initiatives and the good intentions of the SCE board. Herein four ethicists—namely, Gloria Albrecht, Agnes Chiu, Gary Dorrien, and Miguel De La Torre, joined me in the quest to revisit the implications that a diverse demographic and discipline as well as the developing global context may pose for the future of our scholarship and society. Each panelist stated hard truths for these troubling times that poignantly mark both the crises of theological education and the church, and even more urgently for the future of our discipline and our Society as Christian ethicists.

Gary Dorrien offered a rigorous overview of the history of Christian social ethics that coalesced around the ever-growing gap that threatens its viability:

Today, as in previous generations, some ethicists work hard at straddling the divide between social justice activism and disciplinary scholarship. For many of us, our purview consists entirely of ethicists fitting this description. All of us up here work hard at doing both things and we struggle with the trade-offs of doing so. I have completed my assignment and my time is up, but I have a cautionary conclusion. Unlike previous generations of social ethicists, we cannot assume that our field has a future. The existence of our field is in jeopardy except in Catholic institutions. On the road I have talked with many academic administrators who are skeptical that their schools need to teach anything called Christian ethics or comparative religious ethics or social ethics. We cannot settle for merely asserting that our work is relevant and that our field has an established standing. The weight of presumption is shifting against us. The field is shrinking, and we must prove that our work is substantial and relevant.¹

As Dorrien traces the history of social ethics as a discipline, beginning with the rise of the Social Gospel and its modern social consciousness, he also causes us to reflect on our postmodern consciousness as well. Social ethics began with black and white Social Gospel ministers who preached radical social change; however, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism tempered this radical vision, moving the discipline in a more moderate direction. Today social ethics remains in a crisis of identity and relevance, caught between the need to establish itself as a discipline in its own right and the ethical exigency of speaking directly to social injustices.

As an emerging moral theologian, Agnes Chiu echoes Dorrien’s perspective by asserting that

Christian ethics is a discipline that intersects and calls for Christian engagement with the world. It enables Christianity to be relevant because it deals with issues with which the world wrestles such as justice, conflicts, and human dignity. Theologians have long warned against the danger of irrelevancy and indifference by both our discipline and the...