On Sacrifice and the Common Good

I am trying to only check the news once a day – if I check anymore than that I start to get overwhelmed, hopeless, and angry. The news seeps in, though, despite my attempts at discipline. Yesterday, a theme seemed to be emerging in the news: it is okay to sacrifice some people for the greater good. There was Trump’s rambling comments that the cure ought not to be worse than the sickness and that the economy needs to be restarted in weeks and not months. The Lt. Gov of Texas Dan Patrick’s made this point explicitly noting that older people should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the economic future of their children and grandchildren. I also learned that one of the editors of First Things, R.R. Reno, wrote a long editorial arguing that quarantine demonstrates a specious moralism that puts “the fear of death at the center of our moral life.” There are more pressing moral matters than protecting the weakest amongst us including art, literature, social life, and community.

These sentiments make me feel both troubled and hopeless. Who thinks this way? No one I know personally. No one. Not a one. No one of any political persuasion. If they do, they aren’t acting this way. They are praying for their Grandparents or worried about their parents. They are trying to figure out how school kids who relied on free lunch are going to get enough to eat. They are posting links on how to sew masks for health care workers (ineffective – gowns? - stay tuned). Sure, I still have some friends who think that the virus is overblown (just a bad flu, etc). Yet, no one thinks the elderly should be sacrificed for the good of the economy.

What is being suggested is so harrowing. They estimate that something like 660,000 soldiers died in the US Civil War. An uncontrolled Covid-19 could cause millions of deaths. For a generation, America tried to come to terms with the casualties of the Civil War. A vast civil religion emerged: valorizing soldiers who sacrificed themselves for freedom. There was something to this, of course. The American Civil War did bring the end to a certain kind of plantation based slavery and started African Americans on a trajectory towards full emancipation. But how would we ever justify our actions if we allowed 1-4 % of our population to die for the sake of a very particular vision of the goods of economic and social life?

I worry that societies shaped by the Christian narrative have a sacrifice problem rooted in part in a theology that downplays the agency of Jesus. We have not emphasized enough the freedom of Jesus. To follow the hard, perilous road of Jesus is to be willing to die for others. The path of Jesus is one of martyrdom. There is no greater perversion of Christianity than ideologies of public good and safety that insist that a few need to be sacrificed for the many. Somehow, however, this perverse way of thinking grounds so much our our collective conversations about far too many things: prisons, abortion, capital punishment. As Mennonites in particular we must rage against any system that instructs us to sacrifice others for any greater good.

In the last week, I have seen many people posting Martin Luther’s advice on Christian conduct during a plaque. Martin Luther insists that Christians have a moral duty to protect life. This means that every modern art should be taken up to preserve life: clean the air, administer medicine, and work hard not to get other people sick. If your neighbor needs you then you are free to sacrifice yourself out of love. This is a much better theology than Reno’s. Intentional self-sacrificial love may well ground and preserves the goods of society. It is, without any hesitation however, a disgusting heresy to ground them on a willingness to sacrifice other people.

As I noted last week, we are seeing in real time that all virtue rests on courage. This is the courage of Jesus and Polycarp. Dorothy Day, Dirk Willems, and Marua Clarke. This is an intentionally chosen path to put oneself in harm’s way, not a craven and desperate justification for demanding that other people–people who have less power and freedom and resources–sacrifice themselves for the good of the rich, powerful, healthy, and haughty.

In closing, Christianity has a lot of different ways of saying the same thing: every human life is of immeasurable worth. Sometimes Christians say this by insisting that human beings are made in the image of God. Sometimes Christians say this by remembering that while institutions of government, economy, education are temporal—human beings are eternal.

And sometimes we remember that God, Godself, chose to freely die for us and for our salvation. May this teaching help us be brave instead of cruel.