Middle-Class Morality

I’ve been away from church responsibilities now for two months. I'm taking in new things in a new place.

The K.S.U. campus community is diverse, it may even be more apparent in summer when some who have traveled furthest to participate remain. My dog, Coco, and I have retrieved balls for international students playing cricket, we’ve exchanged greetings and nods with all sorts of people, we’ve visited university staff members during breaks from their preparations of the campus for another year.

One day a few weeks ago a line from a movie came to mind, it’s from G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion (and it’s more recent adaptation, My Fair Lady). Shaw has written them as the words of Alfred P. Doolittle, a man bewildered by a change in his fortunes:

“Who asked him to make a gentleman out of me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everyone for money when I wanted it, same as I touched him. Now, I'm tied neck and heels, and everybody touches me. A year ago, I hadn't a relation in the world except one or two who wouldn't speak to me. Now, I've fifty, and not a decent week's wages amongst the lot of 'em. Oh, I have to live for others now, not for myself. Middle-class morality.” (quotation courtesy IMDb)

‘Middle-class morality’, Alfred’s concluding words, the phrase has been sticking with me. I’ve been wondering just how much of what we present as faith is really middle-class morality, more a reflection of our place in local culture than our place in God’s wider community.

There are targets which for me which are easy: preferences for church music and church decor, much of what is familiar in the particular sanctuary experience with which we have become most familiar. I suspect we compromise the broad invitation issued by Christ, by inserting the particular specifics which have become comforting to us.

Here in Kent I’ve found another interesting place to watch people. As I’ve watched others I’ve been thinking about faith in God, and the possibility that my own conceptions of middle-class morality may unduly influence understandings of what it is to seek to walk with God. Wondering to what degree perceptions then affect what I as an individual disciple invite others to.

God gave us something simple to do: to love God and others. Yet to invest in God’s purpose and method of love is humbling. It seems against human nature to be humble; we want credit for being humble, perhaps even to have others notice how well we do humble, introducing a destructive compromise at a fundamental level. There is virtue in the practice of humility. The humble withdraw from outsized self-importance to see themselves in context of interrelatedness and interdependence. But the realization is only apparent to those who draw close to humility.

Humbly serving God, recognizing the ‘other’ as God’s receptacle for love right before us, broadcasting love is our central task. The task of establishing a local ‘footprint’ of outward-radiating love should take a higher priority than perpetuating local church practice, in many instances our form of middle-class morality.

I’m suggesting there are unintended layers we followers attach to following.

Jesus distilled the commandments to two: loving God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength; and loving neighbor as self (Mk. 12:29-31). The charge is both simple, and in the idealistic practice of love, totally consuming, as is the nature of the whole of faith. We are to be people who are known by love, who set the stage through loving acts for still others to find abundant discovery and growth in God’s unconditional love. We may believe that others prevail by taking advantage of love, but better that should happen than we become proponents of methods that are not of God, and in so doing, compromise the message of the One we represent.

Should we expect others to experience God as we do? How can we introduce them to a path which reflects God’s love above all else? Must they be effectively ‘circumcised’ into our conventions and practice?

How much of our current practice is about providing comfort to our selves, how much to expanding the circle and loving?