A matter of principle

Ever since November of 2016, the question has haunted me: How did the conservative Evangelicals I grew up with so thoroughly lose their principles?

And the correct answer is: They never had principles. 

But for once, I don't intend that as an insult. I mean this as a distinction between two different ways of looking at morality.

Evangelicals never had principles; they had RULES.

Because that's how their churches train them to think. They (along with the Catholics, who have fallen into the same error) are religious fundamentalists. They don't treat morality as a set of flexible guidelines that can and should change over time; they treat morality as a set of rules that are "the same yesterday, today, and forever". If the Bible said it in 2000 BCE, then it's still binding 4 millennia later (except if there's another rule that negates it, such as the "no bacon" thing being negated by Peter's vision in Acts). 

But there wasn't a "That was the OLD rule, here's the NEW rule" moment for being gay, so they still have to assume that being gay is bad. Just like a couple centuries ago there wasn't a rule change regarding slavery, so it was safe to assume that the Christian god was still okay with it. And a couple centuries before that, there hadn't been any change in the rule book to clarify that witches aren't a thing that actually exists, so the followers of the rule book had to assume that witches DO exist and have Satanic powers that cause harm if they aren't stopped by lethal force.

The problem with an unchangeable rule is that it becomes obsolete, but the rulers want to hang onto power and their power comes from enforcing rules, so they won't ever admit that the rule is obsolete because that would mean THEY are obsolete.

PRINCIPLES, on the other hand, don't ever have to change. Principles such as "Treat other people as you would need to be treated if you were in their situation" were good guidelines to aim for back in the Iron Age, would have been good guidelines to follow back in the Stone Age, and will continue to be good guidelines to aim for in the Space Age if our species makes it that far. 

What DOES need to change is our understanding of how best to follow those principles. When we know better, we do better (another excellent principle). Back when we thought mental illness was caused by malicious spirits, it made sense to try and cure it by yelling at the spirits to go away and leave our loved ones alone. Now that we know it's caused by things like trauma, brain wiring, and brain chemistry, we can do a better job treating it by working on those things. And centuries from now when we can pinpoint the exact neurons that are misfiring and the exact number of nanobots required to fix the glitch in the wiring (or whatever the newer, more effective treatment of the future turns out to be), we'll drop the psychotropic meds and start using the superior technique. But the basic principle - "This person is suffering and we want them to be well" - won't have changed an iota.

And that's where the Evangelicals got it wrong. They didn't have a principle that could be flexible and allow for thinking about the problem differently; they had a set of rules that can't ever change, not one jot or tittle. So once they establish a rule that says "Abortion is the worst evil, it's so bad that we have to vote for whoever says they will outlaw it, NO MATTER WHAT"... then they must abandon things like caring about whether the person they vote for has committed rape, or treason, or a host of other crimes. They must even abandon other rules in their rulebook, such as everything the Bible says about how to treat the poor and immigrants. They aren't free to follow principles; they are bound by this one rule, and that supersedes all the principles that caused rules to be created in the first place. If they had been following the PRINCIPLE - love your neighbor as yourself - then they wouldn't be trying to legislate rules to control other people's behavior; they would be changing their OWN behavior to help other people more effectively. The whole pro-life movement would be about addressing the systemic problems that cause people to need abortions in the first place, rather than being about enforcing rules about what women are and are not allowed to do. Their RULES would be following the principle - we should be feeding hungry babies, we should be increasing economic opportunity for single moms, we should be providing daycare for women who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it, we should be providing medical care for children regardless of whether their parents have employers that are willing to provide it.

Secular groups, and even non-fundamentalist religious groups, understand that morality isn't about rules, it's about principles. Rules are one of the tools we use to help us follow principles, but they need to be changed or discarded if we find they aren't doing that. 

For example, the laws against drug use. An abysmal failure, and everyone who's being honest knows it. We have more non-violent offenders in jail than any other country - and jail often turns them into violent offenders, and destroys their prospects for a future that would be bearable without drugs, so naturally when they get out of jail they get right back on the drugs. And for all our efforts, for all the money we have poured into trying to get people to "Just Say No", we have more addicts now than we did when the "War on Drugs" began. All because we won't let go of a rule that was already tried and failed a century ago during Prohibition. If instead we were following the correct PRINCIPLES - such as "Let's make sure that people's lives aren't so miserable that they're desperate for an escape" and "Let's get addicts treatment instead of caging them like rabid animals" - principles that every civilized country has tried and found successful - then we would have lower rates of drug use. But we keep enforcing rules that don't work, instead of following principles that do, so we keep making the problem worse instead of better.

Rules can, and should, change as we learn more, and figure out better ways to follow principles. But that can't happen if you're conflating a specific, changeable rule with an eternal and unchangeable principle. A morality based on principles can self-correct if it starts to stray from the right path. But a morality based on rules will eventually lead AWAY from morality. 

It will even lead to people electing a felon in the name of law and order, a rapist in the name of protecting women, a wanna-be dictator in the name of democracy, and the world's least Christ-like man in the name of Jesus.