Rediscovering a Moral Vision: America’s Deepest Need

We live in a time of profound moral confusion. Pick up any newspaper, scroll through any social media feed, and you’ll find Americans locked in fierce debates about justice, rights, identity, and the common good. Yet beneath these surface conflicts lies something more troubling: we’ve lost the ability to even agree on how to have these arguments. We lack a shared moral vocabulary, a common vision of human flourishing that might help us navigate our differences.

This isn’t simply a failure of civility or a breakdown in political discourse. It reflects something deeper—a crisis of moral imagination. We have inherited the fruit of the Enlightenment’s confidence that reason alone could guide us to ethical truth, yet we’ve also absorbed postmodernity’s suspicion that all moral claims are merely disguised power plays. The result is a kind of moral vertigo: we want to make strong ethical claims about justice and human dignity, but we’re uncertain about the ground beneath our feet.

The Limits of Secular Morality

Many thoughtful people have recognized this crisis and proposed solutions. Some argue that we can build a robust moral framework on purely secular foundations—through reason, evolution, or social contract. And to be sure, these approaches can take us partway. Natural law reasoning, for instance, can help us recognize certain basic moral intuitions that seem nearly universal. Our evolutionary history explains why we have moral sentiments at all.

But these frameworks, valuable as they are, eventually run into limitations. Why should I sacrifice my interests for strangers if evolution has equipped me primarily for kin selection? Why should I regard all humans as possessing equal dignity if there’s no transcendent source for such dignity? The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, himself a secular thinker, has admitted that notions like human dignity and universal human rights have “a Judeo-Christian heritage” and may not be fully sustainable on purely secular grounds.

Others suggest we simply need to recover “traditional values” or “Judeo-Christian morality.” But this approach often devolves into moralism—a set of rules divorced from the narrative and spiritual resources that once gave them life. It treats religion as merely a useful social technology rather than as a set of truth claims about reality. And it tends toward a simplistic nostalgia that ignores both the genuine moral progress we’ve made (in areas like civil rights) and the ways our ancestors themselves often failed to live up to their professed ideals.

The Gospel Alternative

What America needs is not moralism but a genuine moral vision—a compelling picture of human flourishing rooted in reality itself. Christianity offers precisely this, though in a way that often surprises both its critics and its proponents.

At the heart of the Christian gospel is not primarily a moral code but a story: the story of a God who creates humans in his image, endowing them with incomparable worth; who sees that creation marred by human rebellion and selfishness; and who, rather than abandoning his creatures, enters history himself to bear the cost of redemption. This narrative gives us resources that neither secular philosophy nor mere moralism can provide.

First, it grounds human dignity in something more solid than social consensus or pragmatic calculation. If humans bear God’s image, then every person—regardless of ability, utility, or achievement—possesses inherent, non-negotiable worth. This isn’t a useful fiction we’ve invented; it’s a truth about the nature of reality. The biblical worldview gives us a reason to care for the vulnerable that doesn’t reduce to enlightened self-interest or evolutionary advantage.

Second, the gospel provides both a diagnosis of our moral failure and a path toward renewal. Christianity doesn’t naively assume that humans will naturally choose the good if only properly educated. It recognizes the depth of moral corruption in the human heart—what the tradition calls sin. Yet unlike pure moralism, which can only condemn, the gospel offers grace: the possibility of transformation through God’s love demonstrated in Christ’s sacrifice. This creates the conditions for genuine moral change, motivated not by fear or pride but by gratitude and love.

Third, Christianity offers a vision of the good life that transcends mere self-fulfillment. In an age obsessed with personal authenticity and individual rights, the gospel calls us to something higher: to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves. It tells us that true human flourishing comes not from maximizing our autonomy but from right relationships—with God, with others, and with creation itself. We find ourselves, paradoxically, by losing ourselves in service and worship.

Living Between Two Cities

Of course, in a pluralistic society, we cannot and should not seek to impose a Christian moral vision through political power. Augustine’s image of the “two cities” reminds us that the church and the state have different roles and rhythms. Christians must be good citizens of both the City of God and the earthly city, and this requires wisdom about how to translate our deepest convictions into the language of public reason and the common good.

But we can and should bring our vision to bear on public life through persuasion, service, and example. When Christians demonstrate costly love for the marginalized, when we build institutions that serve human flourishing, when we speak truth with both conviction and humility, we offer our neighbors a glimpse of a different way of being human.

We might point to the practical fruits that the Christian moral vision has produced: hospitals and universities, movements for abolition and civil rights, orphanages and rescue missions. We can engage respectfully with secular philosophy, showing how the Christian story actually explains and grounds many of the moral intuitions that secularists share but struggle to justify. We can demonstrate through our own communities what human flourishing looks like when oriented toward God’s kingdom.

The Humility of the Gospel

Yet we must do all this with a profound humility. The gospel itself should make us humble, for it tells us that we are all moral failures who stand in need of grace. The same Bible that gives us moral clarity also warns against self-righteousness and judgmentalism. We must never forget that Christianity spread most powerfully not when Christians held political power but when they were a persecuted minority whose love for one another and for their enemies was so compelling that it attracted a pagan world.

Moreover, we must be honest about the church’s own failures. Christians have sometimes used their faith to justify slavery, oppression, and violence. We’ve been moralistic when we should have been gracious, harsh when we should have been merciful. Any call to recover a Christian moral vision must be accompanied by genuine repentance for the ways we’ve distorted that vision.

A Path Forward

America’s crisis is not fundamentally political; it’s spiritual and moral. We need more than better policies or more civil discourse, essential as those are. We need a recovery of moral imagination—a compelling vision of what human beings are for, what the good life looks like, and what ultimate reality is like.

The Christian gospel offers such a vision. It doesn’t promise easy answers to every moral dilemma or political question. But it gives us a framework, a story, a set of resources that can guide us toward wisdom. It tells us that the universe has meaning, that our moral intuitions point toward truth rather than mere preference, and that transformation is possible.

For Christians, this means we must hold our convictions with both confidence and humility. We must be willing to engage thoughtfully with those who disagree, to learn from secular insights, and to admit the complexity of many issues. But we must not be ashamed of the gospel or apologetic about bringing a distinctively Christian perspective to our common life.

For those outside the Christian faith, I would simply say: consider whether your own moral commitments—your belief in human dignity, your hunger for justice, your hope for a better world—might actually require the kind of foundations that only a transcendent moral vision can provide. Consider whether the story the gospel tells might be, improbably, true.

America doesn’t need merely to recover “religion” or to become more “spiritual.” It needs to rediscover the particular moral vision that Christianity offers: one grounded in the character of a loving God, oriented toward the good of all people, realistic about human failure, hopeful about redemption, and ultimately directed toward the renewal of all things. This is not a retreat from modernity but a path through it—toward a society that can sustain both freedom and virtue, both diversity and common purpose.

The question before us is not whether we will have a moral vision—every society has one, whether acknowledged or not. The question is whether ours will be deep enough, true enough, and compelling enough to sustain us through the challenges ahead.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Until next time, take care of your hearts and each other.

— Steve