Family Feud

So imagine a survey asking respondents to name their No. 1 favorite baseball team.

Now imagine this survey is sent out to every member of the Yankees Fan Club.

And that the bylaws of the Yankees Fan Club explicitly state that any member not naming the Yankees as their No. 1 favorite baseball team will have their membership revoked and will be shunned as illegitimate enemies of baseball should they ever respond to such a question with any answer other than "the Yankees."

What do you think such a survey will produce?

Exactly. And that's just what we have here in the National Association of Evangelicals' year-end survey asking "America's evangelical leaders" to list the "top moral issues facing America."

Survey respondents, appreciating that keeping their status as one of "America's evangelical leaders" requires them to regard opposition to legal abortion as the paramount moral issue of all time, unsurprisingly listed abortion as their No. 1 "top moral issue."

(Yep, another abortion thread for Flame War Thursdays.)

It's interesting that these leaders listed as their No. 3 moral issue: "mistreatment of others." Read what you will into the separate categories, but I think I catch a whiff there of the suggestion that concern about abortion is, for these folks, distinct from their claim that it is a form of mistreating others.

The No. 2 moral issue listed by the evangelical leaders surveyed was "moral relativism." It seems a bit ironic that so many respondents gamely playing along with a rank-the-moral-issues opinion poll would earnestly answer "moral relativism." If they don't see the irony in that, I fear I won't be able to explain it to them.

If you're surprised, by the way, that homosexuality didn't appear in the Top 3, don't be. This is covered under "moral relativism," a catchall category referring to any failure to condemn those things the speaker believes the Bible teaches we must condemn. (That's what the Bible is for, after all, providing a list of Stuff to Condemn.) Ask the survey respondents to provide an example of "moral relativism" at work and the conversation will quickly turn to homosexuality and to the horrifying failure of younger evangelicals to inveigh against it with sufficiently convincing disgust.

I'm not wholly sure what to make of the fact that the evangelical leaders surveyed unanimously interpreted the phrase "top moral issues" negatively. If I were asked to provide my own list of the Top 3 Moral Issues Facing America I'd be tempted just to crib from St. Paul and answer, "Faith, hope and love — and the greatest of these is love."

Yet love, oddly, does not seem to be what these folks regard as a "moral issue."

So to cooperate with their unspoken rule that "moral issues" must mean moral ills, I would have to reply not with my Top 3, but my Top 7: Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. (I stole that list, too.)

And the greatest of these is pride.

At least that's what we Christians have insisted for 2,000 years or so now. Just as love is the cardinal virtue, pride is the cardinal sin.

If I were further asked to supply evidence that pride remains, today, the "top moral issue facing America," I might start out by pointing to a recent survey conducted by the National Association of Evangelicals in which prominent religious leaders asked to describe the greatest moral issues of their time seized the opportunity to preach their favorite sermon, the text of which is to declare that they are themselves much, much more virtuous than those nasty, evil, baby-killing relativists.