Abundant Lives

Introduction

They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid. (Micah 4:4a)

Dream God’s dream. Holy Spirit, help us dream Of a world where there is justice and where everyone is free To build and grow and love and to simply have enough. The world will change when we dream God’s dream. (Bryan Sirchio, Dream God’s Dream)

In November 2022, an antigay, anti-trans shooter targeted Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in my city. Five people were killed and twenty-five injured. It’s a nightmare that happens over and over and over again in the United States—hundreds of times in 2022 alone (List of Mass Shootings, n.d.). Broken-hearted, I went to the memorial that had been set up in front of the club where the shooting took place to see how people were responding to the violence. I was not sure what to expect, but I was hoping for a few flowers and maybe a sign or two.

Instead, I found hundreds of flowers and candles, dozens of stuffed animals, signs and balloons and Pride flags running the length of a city block, a magnificent riot of color. One sign read, Hate has no home here. Another sign read, We stand with our LGBTQIA+ Community. A third sign read, simply, Faith. Hope. Love. Memorial posts had been put up for the five people who had been killed; each post had a heart on it on which people had written notes. Chalk was available for mourners and the sidewalk near the memorial was covered in chalked messages: God loves you. We care. Hate is evil. Love endures forever.

As I arrived, I saw a mother hand her young daughter a bouquet of flowers, instructing her to put them with the other flowers near a Pride flag. A man wearing a politically progressive t-shirt explained to a local news reporter that it was important for heterosexual people to be present in support of the Club Q community. Some people wept loudly; others offered quiet words of consolation. There were easily fifty people there when I arrived, and another twenty made their way over as I left. To say that the tragedy and beauty of humanity was on full display sounds clichéd, yet I cannot think of a better way to describe the experience.

Our world is full of pain and joy, violence and creativity, cruelty and kindness. How should we live? What should our actions be? We make decisions about who to be and what to do, minute by minute, day by day, lifetime by lifetime. What wisdom, what hope, what courage should guide those decisions? How shall we respond to the good we encounter? To the evil? These are ethical, moral questions, some of the most important questions we can ask given the unspeakable good and the terrifying evil around us—and of which we ourselves are capable.

One answer might be that we should respond with love, but that answer only raises more questions. What does love look like in our day and time? How can we love ourselves, other people and the God of our understanding in ways that make a positive difference in a magnificent and struggling world? How can those of us who seek to follow Jesus do so in a way that embodies and brings to life his dream of a world of peace and joy in which everyone has what they need?

In this book, I attempt to answer both sets of questions—the classic ethical questions about how to live a moral life and the urgent contemporary questions about how we can embody and enact love in a world desperately in need of it. My answer to both sets of questions is the same:

We should commit ourselves to living out an ethic of flourishing in which our values, actions, and social institutions are centered on helping all people to have good lives and on minimizing the avoidable suffering that makes people’s lives harder.

This answer is neither simple nor obvious, and I will spend the next seven chapters clarifying what I mean and indicating how we might move toward living out this commitment.

Most approaches to ethics focus on principles or abstract values such as justice, freedom, duty, or virtue, often using hypothetical situations to make their claims. In contrast, my approach puts people ahead of principles. As I’ll discuss in chapter 1, principles and abstract ideas can be used for ill as well as for good, to harm as well as to help. If our goal is for all people to have the opportunity to have good lives, we must understand even our most cherished principles, ideas, values, and beliefs not as ultimate goals, but as the way we reach the ultimate goal: a world in which all people have a real chance to flourish.

In such a world, to recall progressive Christian songwriter Bryan Sirchio’s words from the epigraph, there would be justice and everyone would be free to build and grow and love and to simply have enough. And in such a world, to paraphrase the words of the prophet Micah, no one would need to be afraid because no one would need to harm anyone else. In such a world, mass shootings such as the one at Club Q would be a thing of the past. Can you imagine living in such a world? I can, and it is stunningly beautiful. Would it not be worth the considerable effort it will take us all, individually and collectively, to draw closer to a world in which all people—and ultimately perhaps all beings—have the opportunity to thrive? I believe that it would be worth the effort, which is why I wrote this book. Humanity can move toward a world of human flourishing if we understand the steps we need to take and the work to which we are invited. This book introduces us to some of those steps and to some of that work.

A Progressive Christian Ethic

The dream of a world of human well-being is not specific to any one religious tradition or indeed to religious people. Humanist traditions, for example, hold values that contribute to human flourishing when lived out thoughtfully. I believe that the ideas in part 1 will appeal to a wide range of people of many religious traditions and none. At the same time, because these ideas align particularly well with progressive Christianity, part 2 of the book connects the claims and ideas of part 1 with the biblical tradition and with contemporary progressive Christian thought.

Progressive Christianity receives much less media coverage than its conservative and evangelical counterparts, so I should say what I mean by this term. Progressive Christians can be understood as people who:

Believe that following the way and teachings of Jesus can lead to experiencing sacredness, wholeness, and unity of all life, even as we recognize that the Spirit moves in beneficial ways in many faith traditions; seek community that is inclusive of all people, honoring differences in theological perspective, age, race, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, class, or ability; strive for peace and justice among all people, knowing that behaving with compassion and selfless love towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe; embrace the insights of contemporary science and strive to protect the Earth and ensure its integrity and sustainability [and] commit to a path of life-long learning, believing there is more value in questioning than in absolutes. (ProgressiveChristianity.org 2022)

The chorus of Bryan Sirchio’s song Dream God’s Dream suggests that God’s dream is a world of human and planetary flourishing. When Jesus referred to the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven (as the terms are translated in the Gospels), he was, I believe, envisioning a realm of flourishing. Theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz refers to this vision as the kin-dom of God (Bass 2021) and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it the beloved community (Tatter 2019). Whatever we call it, it is a vision of abundant lives for all people and potentially for non-human living beings. Moreover, Jesus’s invitation to love God, ourselves, our neighbors, and our enemies can be understood as a call to work for our own flourishing, the flourishing of others, and the flourishing of non-human creation.

Ultimately, I invite those of us who find Jesus’s vision compelling to take up an ethic of flourishing as a way of responding to the good news of Jesus today. Sirchio writes, the world will change if we dream God’s dream, and I believe that sentiment. Perhaps, if enough people believe it, we can make it so.

Thinking about Flourishing

I first thought about the importance of flourishing in a secular context, informed by my sociology training, my leftist feminism, and my identity and experiences as a queer (bisexual) androgynous white woman who strives to work against white supremacy. I studied ethics as part of my undergraduate religion major and found my way back to it later in life. However, the more I read, the more frustrated I became with the standard approaches. As a sociologist, I got impatient with ethics based on abstract principles such as justice rather than on insights about what people are actually like and what we actually need to live well. I also felt that the standard approaches gave far too much positive weight to the power of rational thinking. Rationality has been a mixed blessing for humanity, contributing both to our greatest accomplishments and to our most astonishing cruelty. Moreover, as a politically progressive feminist and queer person, I felt that most ethical theories were oddly lacking in a dedicated focus on human well-being. What, I wondered, is the point of ethics if not to help all people flourish?

More broadly, this book has been decades in the making. Personal experiences of sexism and heterosexism combined over time with my growing understanding of how I benefit from white supremacy on a daily basis to shape my political commitments. Studying comparative religion in college, sociology in graduate school, and religion again in seminary helped me think about the power of meaning systems, including religion, for good and ill. My spiritual journey from secular Judaism to Unitarian Universalism to, more recently, the progressive wing of the United Church of Christ, has provided an additional venue for my deep passion to alleviate suffering and expand human flourishing. I enter into the Christian story as a non-doctrinal universalist besotted by Jesus’s vision of human well-being and striving to do my part to make it a reality. The ideas and claims here bring together my political commitments, sociological perspective, moral concerns, religious studies, and spiritual journey.

Plan of the Book

Part 1, Human Flourishing, lays out my core ethical approach without reference to religious perspectives. In chapter 1, From Principles to People, I claim that basing ethics on principles or values is problematic and propose instead a focus on human flourishing, expanding my description of flourishing from that provided in this introduction. Chapter 1 also introduces the idea of avoidable suffering as an experience that can limit or damage flourishing.

In chapter 2, Our Common Humanity, I discuss ten universal attributes of what it means to be a human being. Specifically, human beings are