IB World Religions 3.6.4. Social Ethics: Poverty, Environment, Sexuality, Family, Business, Church and State Notes

3.6.4. Social Ethics: Poverty, Environment, Sexuality, Family, Business, Church and State

Poverty and wealth

1. Christian social ethics starts from texts that make the poor a test of faith. Matthew 25 makes judgment turn on feeding the hungry, and Acts 2 describes the first believers holding their goods in common.
2. Roman Catholic thinking is organised as Catholic Social Teaching, opened by Rerum Novarum (1891), in which Leo XIII defended a just wage and the right to form unions while rejecting both unrestrained capitalism and socialism.
3. Later encyclicals extend it. Populorum Progressio (1967) calls development the new name for peace, and Caritas in Veritate (2009) applies the tradition to globalised finance.
4. From Latin America came liberation theology, whose preferential option for the poor was set out by Gustavo Gutierrez and taken up by the bishops meeting at Medellin in 1968. Rome criticised its use of Marxist analysis while keeping the option itself.
5. Protestant churches work through agencies. Christian Aid, Tearfund and the Catholic agency CAFOD run development programmes, and the churches drove the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel poor country debt.
6. Domestic poverty draws the same attention. The Church of England report Faith in the City (1985) caused a political row, and British churches now run a large share of the country's food banks.

Environment and animals

1. The argument turns on Genesis 1:28, where God tells humanity to fill the earth and subdue it. Critics have blamed the verse for ecological damage, and most churches now read it beside Genesis 2:15, where the human is placed in the garden to till and keep it.
2. The result is stewardship: the earth belongs to God, and people hold it in trust and answer for its condition.
3. Laudato Si' (2015) is the fullest statement. Pope Francis addresses it to everyone, ties environmental damage to poverty in an integral ecology, and criticises what he calls the technocratic paradigm.
4. Orthodoxy arrived earlier. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, called the green patriarch, has described damage to creation as sin since the 1990s.
5. Practice follows the teaching. Congregations join Eco-Church and A Rocha schemes, keep the Season of Creation in September, and some dioceses have sold their fossil fuel holdings.
6. Animals raise a narrower question. The Catechism teaches that animals may be used but not made to suffer needlessly, and Andrew Linzey has argued a theology of animal rights that reaches secular conclusions from creation rather than from utility.

Sexuality and ministry

1. The disputed texts are few and much handled: Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26 and 1 Corinthians 6:9. Traditionalists read them as a standing prohibition, while revisionists argue they address exploitative practices rather than committed modern relationships.
2. The Catechism calls homosexual acts intrinsically disordered while requiring that homosexual people be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, a pairing that critics inside and outside the church call unstable.
3. Fiducia Supplicans (2023) allowed priests to give informal blessings to couples in irregular situations. African bishops objected strongly, and the Vatican confirmed that local judgment applied.
4. The Anglican Communion has argued since Lambeth 1998 Resolution I.10 and the consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003. Conservative provinces organised as GAFCON, while the Church of England's Living in Love and Faith process produced prayers of blessing for same-sex couples in 2023 with its doctrine of marriage unchanged.
5. Others moved further or split. The United Methodist Church removed its bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex weddings in 2024 after conservative congregations had left, while the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ already ordained and married.
6. Orthodox churches and most Pentecostal and evangelical churches hold the traditional teaching, and secular equality law meets the churches in employment and service cases rather than in theology.

Marriage, family and law

1. Christian marriage is described as a covenant, and Catholic and Orthodox teaching also counts it a sacrament. Mark 10:9 supplies the text: what God has joined together, let no one separate.
2. Catholic law therefore treats a valid consummated marriage as indissoluble. Divorce cannot end it, but an annulment can declare that no valid marriage ever existed.
3. Amoris Laetitia (2016) opened a pastoral path for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion after discernment, and bishops' conferences have applied it differently.
4. Orthodox churches permit remarriage up to three times using a penitential rite, and Protestant churches accept divorce, with Church of England clergy free since 2002 to remarry divorced people at their own discretion.
5. Civil law has moved away from the churches. England and Wales introduced no fault divorce in 2022, and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 legalised same-sex marriage while writing in protections so that no church can be compelled to conduct one.
6. Where the systems meet, cases follow. Catholic adoption agencies closed or went independent after equality legislation required them to consider same-sex couples, which campaigners read as equal treatment and the agencies read as conscience.

Money, business and work

1. Scripture is wary of wealth without being simply hostile. The Hebrew law forbids lending at interest to a fellow Israelite, and the Gospels warn that no one can serve God and money.
2. The medieval church condemned usury outright, and the word narrowed to mean excessive interest after John Calvin and others accepted moderate commercial lending.
3. Catholic Social Teaching supplies the working principles: human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, which keeps decisions at the lowest workable level, and solidarity.
4. Quakers built a business tradition on plain dealing, founding Barclays and Lloyds and running Cadbury and Rowntree with model housing and welfare schemes.
5. Churches act as investors. The Church Commissioners run an ethical investment policy screened by an advisory group, and in 2013 Justin Welby attacked payday lending and promised to help credit unions compete.
6. Congregations act as consumers through Fairtrade parishes and ethical banks, and secular ethical finance argues from justice in much the same terms without the theology.

Church, state and blasphemy

1. Two texts pull against each other. Mark 12:17 tells hearers to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and Romans 13 commands obedience to governing authorities, while Acts 5:29 answers that one must obey God rather than men.
2. The classical settlements build on that tension. Augustine distinguished two cities and Luther two kingdoms, each giving the state real authority in its own sphere while denying it the last word.
3. Arrangements vary widely. The Church of England is established, with the monarch as Supreme Governor and bishops in the House of Lords, while Sweden disestablished its church in 2000, France maintains laicite, and the United States forbids any establishment of religion.
4. Resistance movements mark the limit. The Barmen Declaration of 1934 rejected Nazi claims over the German church, and the South African Kairos Document of 1985 refused to treat apartheid government as legitimate authority.
5. Blasphemy law shows the direction of travel. England and Wales abolished the offence in 2008 and Scotland in 2021, the last successful prosecution, Whitehouse v Lemon in 1977, having already made the law look untenable to many Christians.
6. The question now runs the other way. Christians are prosecuted under blasphemy laws protecting another faith in several countries, and cases such as Eweida v United Kingdom (2013) test how far religious expression is protected at work.