Counteracting ‘Vertical Morality’
It’s the great cultural mystery of our time—how can so many, so often, so passionately name themselves “Christian” while adamantly supporting rhetoric and behavior that directly violates the teachings and example of Jesus? I subscribe to three daily news services that cater to Christian ministry leaders, and this perplexing dynamic has infiltrated the church so broadly that I may have strained ligaments in my neck from shaking my head at what I’m reading. Jesus made caring for the poor, the marginalized, and the victims of injustice the foundation of our discipleship, so how can those who say they follow Him mock, punish, and traumatize the very people Jesus elevated?
To follow Jesus means to embrace the lifestyle of a “Talmid,” or disciple. Jesus tells His followers (including you and I), “Don’t let anyone call you ‘Rabbi,’ for you have only one teacher.” Later, just before he is arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, he promises them a “Friend” he’s nicknamed “the Spirit of the Truth” and the “Paraclete.” The Spirit is our Invisible Rabbi who makes a home in our soul, teaching us from the inside out. Until this moment, His influence on the disciples’ lives has been from the outside in, with spotty results. But soon, the Invisible Rabbi will be teaching them about his heart from a place of intimacy, and they will truly understand Him for the first time.
In the time of Jesus, it was a great honor to be “yoked” to a rabbi—to be under his influence and instruction. By a boy’s 14th birthday, his academic potential had been tested and revealed. The brilliant ones continued on to Beit-Midrash (the House of Study), and the less-than-brilliant ones ended their formal education and joined the family business, whatever that was. At this point, the boys who were pursuing a Beit-Midrash trajectory had to find a rabbi they respected and lobby to become that great man’s Talmid. The competition for the best-of-the-best was fierce. If the boy made it through this Survivor-like competition, the rabbi might invite the Talmid to “take his yoke upon him.”
The invitation to take on the yoke of a respected rabbi was a ticket to a bright future. It was also the start of demolition/reconstruction project that would form a Talmid’s core identity around the essence of their teacher. Once the relationship was confirmed, Talmids were required to leave their parents, synagogues, communities, and family businesses and devote every waking moment to following their rabbis. It was boarding school on steroids. And this was no conventional education; a Talmid’s goal was to immerse himself in the life of his rabbi—to experience the truths embedded in the rabbi’s heart, not merely study them in scrolls. The goal was to taste and see the heart of the rabbi, then live out his essence by modeling the man’s “core operating system”—his walk, talk, mannerisms, personal preferences, values, and affectations. The rabbi’s job was to infect his Talmid’s heart experientially, not just by focusing on the law and the prophets.
The epic journey of the Talmid—a path from obscurity to significance, from childhood to maturity, from ignorance to mastery—is our journey as well. We are all Talmids who’ve been invited to “take on the yoke” of the great Rabbi—to live with him, learn from him, and become just like him. If we embrace this invitation, Jesus will make it possible for us to immerse ourselves in his presence, experiencing him in a way that goes far beyond intellectual pursuit. As we yield ourselves to the forming influence of the Spirit of Jesus who is at home inside us, we slowly adopt the patterns of thought and behavior he has already modeled for us. It’s this immersive influence that forms in us a spiritual backbone. Submission to the Rabbi Inside, to the Spirit of Jesus, fuels our willingness to trust Him. And trust is the key to experiencing Him.
So… back to our cultural conundrum. If following Jesus means conforming our life, our thoughts, and our agency in the world to the values, priorities, and lifestyle of Jesus, why are so many in the church so (apparently) unconcerned about their clear, repetitive violations of the Kingdom culture Jesus came to establish? In her long and thoughtful piece for HuffPost titled “‘Vertical Morality’ Might Describe Why MAGA Christians Seem So Unchristian,” writer Caroline Bologna offers a key to understanding this apparent contradiction. “Vertical morality,” she writes, “measures righteousness not by goodness to others, but by something more simplistic.” She quotes Tia Levings, a former Christian fundamentalist and author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy: “Vertical morality teaches that authority, power and a moral code of right and wrong, or acceptable and unacceptable, come from ‘above’ ― an external superior who designates rules, systems, and tenets that must be obeyed by those beneath.”
The content creator and activist Rachel Klinger Cain has made the term popular on social media: “Vertical morality is just how I describe what’s called ‘divine command theory’ in metaethics,” she says, in Bologna’s piece. “It’s basically the idea that morality comes from authority above, which is what I was taught when I was raised within conservative Christianity.”
This truncated approach to morality, says Klinger Cain, starkly contrasts with horizontal morality—a way of reorienting our focus onto the well-being of the people in our community, neighborhood, and home. April Ajoy, author of Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith, says: “Someone with vertical morality may help someone in need because they believe that’s what God wants them to do, versus someone with horizontal morality may help that same person for the benefit of the person that needs help.” Malynda Hale, executive director of The New Evangelicals, a nonprofit focused on promoting inclusivity, justice and compassion in Christianity, adds: “I think both are important in the Christian faith, but a lot of people today get hung up on the vertical as a priority and forget about the horizontal altogether.”
Jesus, of course, blends the vertical and horizontal into a moral lifestyle that is designed to transform those we are influencing—when we feed and clothe and welcome those in need, we are simultaneously caring for Him. We “love our neighbors as ourselves” to both express our horizontal morality and our vertical morality. To practice one without the other is to poison our morality. So, when we elevate empathy over obedience, or elevate obedience by desensitizing ourselves to the needs and dignity of others, we have stopped following Jesus. We may name ourselves as Christian, but we have de-coupled that identity from its source.
To counteract the slow spread of toxic morality—a vertical approach rooted in bastardized Old Testament imperatives that spiritualizes brutality and power-mongering—we stop arguing with people and point, over and over, to the teaching and modeling of Jesus. We invite people to wrestle it out with the Rabbi Inside while we step aside.
At a Lilly Endowment gathering this week, I listened as Elaine May, a denominational leader, described a gloriously subversive approach: “Trust is low in our denomination because of long, contentious debates on human morality—so when we gather ministry leaders together for training and spiritual growth, we put Scripture at the center of the experience. If we just spend time together exploring the truths of Scripture, we discover we can still be in relationship. We have two facilitators at each table with eight participants—our focus on Scripture-first creates an empty container for the Spirit to show up and fill. This is why we use the Emmaus story as our focus—diving into a transformational encounter with Jesus. On the first night we do a Bible study on the Emmaus story, and the pastors there are sort-of posturing—parsing Greek words and keeping the conversation safely intellectual. We let them do it, to get it out of their system. But the next day our process does not allow for posturing. We ask them to slow down and encounter Jesus in silence, reflection, and prayer. We ask them to wrestle with His words and actions, just as these two disciples on the road had to wrestle.”
I love what May is suggesting here—it’s a counterintuitive approach to slowly disarming people of their grinding axes. Jesus lives out a perfect balance between vertical and horizontal morality, and when we invite people to encounter Him as He really is (not who we assume He is), He sniffs out our everyday heresies and disrupts our foregone conclusions.
Klinger Cain says that, in times of cultural change, many are drawn to simple authoritarian structures because of their fear and uncertainty. “And once you’re primed for authoritarianism in religion,” she says, “it’s easy to accept it in politics.” This is why, she adds, so many Christians get on board so quickly with things that are morally questionable. Hale says: “I think that vertical morality can bring genuine spiritual depth and discipline, but it has to work in tandem with horizontal ethics. We always say faith without works is dead. Faith without action is incomplete. Personal piety can become performative if it isn’t rooted in love for others.”
Rick Lawrence is Executive Director of Vibrant Faith—he created the new curriculum Following Jesus. He’s editor of the Jesus-Centered Bible and author of 40 books, including his new release Editing Jesus: Confronting the Distorted Faith of the American Church, The Suicide Solution, The Jesus-Centered Life and Jesus-Centered Daily. He hosts the podcast Paying Ridiculous Attention to Jesus.