let's choose virtue and reject vice

reflections on morality in 2024

There’s an article I’ve been thinking about a lot lately by Aaron Renn. It’s called “Reject Vice” and here’s a short quote that will give you a sense of his argument:

I’m a critic of Mark Driscoll, but one of his best lines was, “Some things aren’t sinful, they’re just dumb.”* Or, as someone more respectable put it, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. We should avoid unprofitable activities. Vice falls into that category. Churches should figure out how to get in the game here. But whether it’s a church, a band of brothers, or an online tribe, finding a community with a moral ecology that rejects vice is one way to insulate yourself from trouble.

What rejecting vice means to me is: no porn, no pot, no gambling, no video games, no tattoos, no profanity.

I would encourage you to read this article. I’ve thought about it a lot over the past several weeks since it was published. I’ve shared it with some of my classes and a men’s group at my church. I think it would be fitting for us—especially those of us in the church—to think more concretely and coherently about virtue, which at least in part means rejecting vice. Renn’s list presents an interesting blend of “vices”. Some are more straightforwardly sins. Porn, for example. Profanity, most of the time. But gambling and video games are less obviously sinful—though they obviously can become sinful—and usually just stupid.

I was talking about this article with my pastor the other day, and he made the point that there are certain things we can get away with when we are younger that we can no longer get away with as we age. If a younger priest in our diocese admits to gambling on the Nuggets playoff games, it would be mildly unsettling but not ultimately damning in any way. On the other hand, if our bishop was caught up in the same the response would be much different: what are you doing? don’t you know better?

Because what Renn is predominately concerned with in this article is people in public ministry or with a public-facing career. Of course, it is not enough to merely reject vice; virtue must be the goal and, in its Christian term, holiness. But we must be conscious too about our comfort with peccadillos, small vices that distract us from our larger goals and confound our ambitions. When people see us committing vices we should have got over by now, we damage our public witness.

But this argument also applies in private spheres. Nowhere is this more apparent than in parenting. A student of mine recently told me about when he first witnessed his parents being hypocritical. It wasn’t anything major, nothing even that would qualify as a sin. His parents were anti-screens around him. They tried to enforce a mostly screen-abstinent life in their home. . . until he went to bed at night. And then they promptly turned on the TV and watched, as he remembers, Game of Thrones. And it struck him: they don’t really mean what they’ve been teaching me. It is easy enough to give lip service to an ideal, but there he was, tucked into bed, listening to people being slaughtered on the family room television.

When our kids see us engaged in vices they assume that those are what we really mean, whatever we tell them to the contrary. One of the things I’ve thought about recently when it comes to vices is my relationship to alcohol. I never overdrink and give up alcohol regularly for long periods of time. I don’t drink during October, January, and, usually, Lent. And yet, there is a comfort in my life with alcohol that I think belies the danger inherent in the substance and might be indiscernible to my children.

One of the stupidest lies Americans tell ourselves is that because Europeans have lower drinking ages they have a healthier relationship with alcohol. I’ve heard this claim since I was a kid. One trip to Europe obliterates this idea. That continent decidedly does not have a healthy relationship with spirited beverages. My point here is that we can tell ourselves as adults that we are modeling for our children a healthy relationship with alcohol. And, yeah, I mean, I guess you can do that. But I wonder about the times when my kids come downstairs after they’ve gone to bed and I’m reading by the fire and nursing a Scotch. Are they thinking, “Wow, dad sure does treat alcohol responsibly!” Or, are they thinking, “adults drink when the kids go to bed”?

In responding to Renn’s article, Brad Littlejohn makes the following claim:

Largely cut off from the rich categories of older Christian moral thought, late 20th-century evangelicals tended to think about morality in intensely black-and-white and individualistic terms. Something was either a “sin” (a violation of God’s law), or it was fine. Sins were only committed by individuals against other individuals (or against God). The older language of “vice,” though, hailed from a more complex moral universe. Vice was not exactly the same as “sin.” It was the opposite of virtue, which is to say the habituation of one’s character in a form of wise living. Such virtue ensured the flourishing of an individual, but also of a community, as others benefited from the spillover effects of virtuous living and consciously or subconsciously sought to imitate the virtuous person. Vice, then, was the habituation of one’s character in a form of foolish living. Such folly, as the Book of Proverbs teaches, cannot be reduced to a simple list of do’s and don’ts, but it is real, and it leads to destruction—not just self-destruction, but the degradation of any community in which it becomes endemic.

I think Littlejohn is essentially correct. The Bible clearly includes an ambiguous middle category between sin and virtuous acts: what St. Paul calls “beneficial.” Not everything is either moral or immoral. Some things are fine, Paul thinks, but become inappropriate in certain contexts.

Returning to a focus on virtue—and the corresponding rejection of vice that entails—would help us think more socially and communally about our choices. This is Scripture’s narrative: we are freed from our sin in order to be of use to others as we walk in our new life. When we narrow down moral decision making to anything the Bible doesn’t explicitly condemn, we hollow out the actual intent of Scripture and risk tarnishing our public ministries.

Reject vice and return to virtue. Our world needs people willing to live out Renn’s “alternate moral ecology.”