Appealing to Moral Sentiments in an Amoral Age

On evangelism to young women, progressives, and the world

Photo by Chris Dixon on Unsplash

In C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, he laments the fact that modern educators are busy trying to inoculate young people against propaganda and advertisements by denying the validity of all sentiments. In contrast, he writes,

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

For Lewis, the answer is not cutting off emotion, but cultivating the right emotions about the right objects. Now, I do think our culture is different from Lewis’s day. Progressive contemporary educators are not guilty of stifling all sentiments, but stifling some and promoting others when those sentiments follow the logic that we are our own and belong to ourselves. So sentiments expressing objective claims of morality or beauty are still, as in Lewis’s day, found to be offensive, but sentiments expressing identity are seen as sacred. But the basic idea that moral sentiments are meaningful and that they communicate real truths about reality is an important one for our time.

In a recent First Things article,

Freya India

wrote about the failure of Christians and conservatives in general to appeal to emotions, particularly young girls’ emotional experiences. It’s well established that young women have grown more progressive in their politics over the last few years. In addition, young women are leaving the church at a higher rate than young men. Whatever the causes of these shifts, the question facing conservative evangelicals is, how do we reach young women? India offers a direct response in her article. She says that what she has witnessed is that Christians and conservatives have overly relied on logic and reason to argue their position to young women. For example, she talks about being at a conference where a older man spoke about the younger generation’s “moral duty” to have children, to which all the men in the room nodded their heads. Such lectures may play well among certain crowds, but to young women who have anxiety about finding a man who will commit to marriage for life, these words ring hollow and tone-deaf. “Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room,” writes India.

Instead, India argues that Christians and conservatives need to appeal to moral sentiments—to the lived experience of young women. In her own movement toward Christianity, it was not logic but emotion that won her over:

Only in the past year have I found myself drawn to Christianity and more sure of my conservative instincts—not through reason or intellect, but through feeling. And by feeling I mean not just emotion but intuition, a nagging sense that something was wrong, that my needs weren’t being met. I’m becoming convinced that the answers I was looking for—for community and belonging, certainty and stability, love and attachment, dignity and worth, purpose and fulfilment—can be found in the Christian faith and a more conservative way of life.

But that message is not reaching those who really need it.

This approach to bearing witness to the Christian faith is what I tried to do with You Are Not Your Own and On Getting Out of Bed, to write something that resonated with people’s lived experience in the world and offered an alternative in Christ. Perhaps I could have appealed to sentiments more. In any case, I think India is correct that this is an important approach moving forward for evangelicals to take.

Among evangelical leaders there’s currently some debate over how our evangelism should be directed in America. Some seem to think that we should focus our attention and resources on political right-leaning individuals because they statistically seem more open to the gospel. Others see progressives as an open mission field, but they run the risk of watering down the Gospel in order to reach this group. I think India gives us a way of navigating this debate, retaining the centrality of the Gospel while reaching people raised with a progressive outlook (as India describes it in her article). And that is by acknowledging that the moral sentiments people have can be real indications of spiritual realities.

The anxiety a young woman feels about her identity may be a real indication that expressive individualism is hollow. The loneliness a young woman feels in vapid, greedy sexual relationships may be a real indication that sex was created for union (and procreation). Instead of treating emotions as random or irrelevant or conceding that negative emotions are exclusively the purview of the therapist and psychiatrist, we acknowledge that the felt experiences of young women are a sign pointing them to who they were created to be.

And this isn’t just true for young women. I think there are many young men who need to hear this approach as well. In this article for The Cut, Carly Lewis explores several stories of men who have wasted tens of thousands of dollars on OnlyFans and similar sites. And the unifying theme to their addiction is not just pornography, but loneliness:

Eric has always had a hard time connecting with people in person. He’s had gym memberships, volunteered, and joined clubs. He’s gone to bars. He’s gone to therapy. He hasn’t had sex in years and says he wouldn’t know where to begin finding sex workers to hire. Eric, who’s 30, first discovered OnlyFans while looking for photos and videos of women but became “undone” by its messaging feature, which allowed him to speak directly to women he was attracted to. “I had a very rough couple of years and was unimaginably lonely,” he says. “Being able to talk to another person was like pure heroin.”

The sexual content was gratifying, but much of the $10,000 he’s spent on OnlyFans went to Girlfriend Experiences, a feature that allows subscribers to engage in casual ongoing conversation that’s not about sex, similar to a text chat between friends or couples. Eric spent an additional $300 to $600 per month “just to have someone pretend to care about my day and say good morning.”

“I checked on it all the time,” he says. “In the morning, during breaks at work, in the afternoon, before bed, when I got up to pee in the night.” If the models he’d paid for Girlfriend Experiences weren’t quick enough in their responses, he’d add to his roster and hire more women to sext him. “I spent thousands on it. Enough that I feel a visceral horrible feeling in my gut. I could have bought an Omega Seamaster,” he says, referring to the high-end watch brand worn by James Bond.

In her piece for First Things, India does an excellent job expressing how young women feel anxious and inadequate because of the pornography habits of men. This article from The Cut is the flipside. I suspect a non-trivial percentage of young men turn to pornography as a maladaptive coping mechanism for their feelings of anxiety, depression, and inadequacy. Everyone feels anxious. Everyone feels inadequate. It’s the contemporary condition. As I argue in You Are Not Your Own, it’s what it feels like to be a sovereign self.

But in Christ there are ways of responding to these sentiments that don’t lead us to self-destructive and sinful behaviors. We can realize that our identities are grounded in the loving gaze of God and therefore secure. And we can develop the courage to risk rejection and strive for embodied relationships. That’s a message people need to hear.

The assumption of those who would say that we should focus primarily on conservative Christian-friendly individuals seems to be that even when a worldly lifestyle naturally leads them to suffer, people raised to believe in a progressive vision of the world would rather double down on progressive coping techniques than admit their anthropology is wrong. Maybe that’s true in some cases, maybe in many cases. But this seems true to me: our task is to proclaim the Good News to all people. Not just those who are friendly to us. And while there may come a time in a particular interaction with a person where its necessary to “shake the dust” from my feet and move on, it’s not my job to shake the dust from my feet against an entire demographic. If speaking to the moral sentiments of my neighbor helps her or him recognize their state and their need for redemption, then that is what I will do.