Navigating the Slippery Slopes

A favorite argument of rule-oriented legislators, jurists, and arm-chair moralists is that waiving disapproval, condemnation, or punishment of those who for any reason violate accepted codes of conduct will lead to a break-down of social values on a massive scale. Allowing our hearts or our conscience to interfere with meeting our obligations to do the right thing by following the right rules, without exception, is to begin a long, slippery, unstoppable slide into libertinism and godlessness, with only perdition at the end. A caricature of their position? Perhaps a more pragmatic --- actually, bureaucratic --- version of it would be fairer: “if we make an exception for you, we will have to make it for everyone.”

Recently, I had occasion to participate in a Memorial Service for a woman who committed suicide, to the shock and dismay of everyone who knew her. It was my task to deliver some “Words of Faith” and it was made extremely difficult by the celebratory tone of everything in the service to that point, except the final words of a beautifully rendered song offered just before I spoke: “There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” The words helped me get out other ones that simply had to be heard, too: that our friend betrayed our love and God’s by not reaching out to us as friendship demands. But the service ended as it began, rightly, by reassuring all of us that not even suicide can finally separate people from God’s love. There is no slippery slope here toward the countenancing of suicide.

About the time that this friend committed suicide, many of us were reading about an 83 year old man, dying from cancer, who fatally shot his wife out of fear that following his death, she would not receive adequate care in the aftermath of debilitating strokes. Before he died three weeks later, we were told, the man received compassion, understanding, and love from friends, neighbors, and even strangers, along with his priest’s assurance of God’s forgiveness and promise of a funeral in the church for himself and his wife together. Apparently, what trumped the act of murder in the eyes of those who knew him was the uncomplaining care he had lovingly given his stricken wife over many years. There is no slippery slope here either, this time toward the countenancing of homicide.

Both of these troubling cases suggest an important principle, not rule, of religious ethics: forgiveness is not permission, and it is not exoneration. It is grace and mercy tendered in the face of horrific culpability and destructive self-blame. It proceeds from a love that is respectful of the rules even as it reveres the persons whose struggles to obey them are sometimes agonizingly unsuccessful. It acknowledges that the basis of truly moral acts is more a purity of heart than it is a conformity of mind. To say all this in no way implies that rules are unimportant, or that church and society should sit loose on their enforcement, either in the legal or the moral sphere. The implication is only that there is more to law-abidingness and morality than knowing and mindlessly obeying the rules.

The truth about slippery slope arguments is that there really are such slopes to navigate in legal and moral decision-making. But most slip./slop. arguments misdirect attention from the single most dangerous argument of all, the “no exceptions” approach itself. This is a slope that confronts at every turn, and people can careen all the way down it before recalling how they slipped on it in the first place. All over the place these days there is a lot of such slipping and sliding going on, provoked by the-rules-period way of looking at things. While they whirl and twirl, legalists cry loudly to send all the “illegals” back where they came from, to deny access to the morning after pill for rape victims, to condemn jury nullification, to make doctrinal allegiance a condition for church membership (and in the Muslim world even citizenship), to allow hate speech to flourish in the name of freedom of expression, to preclude adoptions by gay and lesbian couples, to…

At the bottom of the no exceptions slippery slope is a legalistic mind-set that contemplates adoringly rules for the ages that bear only slightly, if at all, on the present circumstances of real people facing issues and decisions of unprecedented complexity. Jesus seemed to going after this way of thinking when he tossed in the idea that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. No wonder he got tossed out for breaking the rules.