Opinion | the Southern Baptist Moral Meltdown

1. Relationships do not scale. They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance. But norms do scale. When people in a community cultivate caring relationships, and do so repeatedly in a way that gets communicated to others, then norms are established. Trustworthy action is admired; empathy is celebrated. Cruelty is punished and os

In short, several generations, including my own, were not taught the skills they would need in order to see, understand, and respect other people in all their depth and dignity. The breakdown in basic moral skills produced disconnection, alienation, and a culture in which cruelty was permitted. Our failure to treat each other well in the small enco

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; k

Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”

And don’t think for a moment that these failings are isolated to Zacharias alone or to people like Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. or Hillsong’s Carl Lentz. These powerful men were coddled and enabled by other powerful men and then automatically and reflexively defended by thousands upon thousands of angry and loyal Christian followers until

Humans disappoint, especially those we expect to share our beliefs and values. We see other believers fail to display the deep love for one another and the stranger that is commended in our sacred texts. We witness others compromise our deepest values, sacrificed for access to power. Integrity seems in short supply. We attend services where the peo

AFFECTION. We children of the Enlightenment live in a culture that separates reason from emotion. Knowing, for us, is an intellectual exercise. When we want to “know” about something, we study it, we collect data about it, we dissect it. But many cultures and traditions never fell for this nonsense about the separation between reason and emotion, a

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; k