Compassion Without Authority Is a Fragile Moral Language

TL;DR:
In trying to make moral arguments more broadly appealing, the church has often traded shared authority and formation for sentiment and compassion alone. The result is a moral language that sounds humane but lacks durability—persuasive to those who already agree, yet fragile when challenged.

In an effort to sound humane, the church has slowly forgotten how to sound authoritative—and the result is a moral language that persuades less and collapses faster. Said differently, the problem facing many moral arguments today isn’t that they lack compassion—it’s that they’ve been stripped of the authority that once gave compassion weight.

I recently recorded a podcast interview with sociologist Josh Packard—his conversation on Future Christian should release a few weeks after this post goes live. In it, we talked about metanarratives versus micro-narratives. His point, if I understood him correctly, was that while we often assume metanarratives have collapsed, that’s not quite true. Instead, young people are forming micro-narratives—smaller, more personal stories of meaning—but these are often assembled from many sources rather than rooted in a single, shared framework.

That conversation has stayed with me.

I’ve been thinking lately about why certain moral arguments—especially around immigration, justice, and public policy—have lost their persuasive power. In an effort to remain credible in a pluralistic society, many moral claims have been reframed primarily in the language of compassion. That move was meant to broaden appeal. But by loosening those claims from authority, formation, and obligation, they’ve become easier to dismiss—and harder to defend.

What many leaders have attempted, I think, is to reason almost entirely from micro-narratives rather than metanarratives. Practically speaking, this looks like trying to build consensus around shared instincts—kindness, compassion, inclusion—assuming most people already carry an internal story about what it means to be a good person and how that story should be enacted.

The problem is that micro-narratives without a strong moral grounding—without a metanarrative that orders them—are fragile. They dissipate easily. They are easily distracted, redefined, or overridden by competing instincts.

An illustrative example: sanctuary cities

I should be clear up front: I’m not a lawyer or an immigration policy expert. What follows is not a legal brief, but an illustration—meant to clarify how moral language functions when it replaces moral authority rather than rests on it.

Consider the debate over so-called “sanctuary cities.”

These policies are often described publicly as acts of compassion—cities refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement out of moral concern. What many people believe is happening is fairly simple: Democratic-led cities arrest undocumented individuals and then release them, refusing to cooperate with federal authorities because they want to be “welcoming.”

What is often actually happening, as I understand it, is more technical—and more constitutional.

In some jurisdictions, local law enforcement processes undocumented individuals like anyone else. The point of conflict comes after local charges are resolved—when bail is posted, a sentence is served, or charges are dropped. At that point, ICE may issue a detainer request asking the local jail to hold the person longer. Many cities decline unless there is a judge-signed warrant, arguing that continued detention without one risks violating the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable seizure.

That is a legal argument. A constitutional one.

But here’s the complication: cities rarely lead with that explanation. Instead, these policies are often framed publicly in the language of compassion, welcome, or justice.

That framing matters.

When legal restraint is explained primarily as a moral posture, it can sound discretionary—like bending the rules rather than obeying them. Constitutional obligation is translated into ethical sentiment. Critics, hearing moral language where they expect procedural clarity, respond by accusing cities of lawlessness, even when the underlying policy is an attempt to follow the law carefully.

What’s happening here isn’t unique to immigration policy. It mirrors something I’ve watched unfold in the church.

The same pattern in the church

This dynamic feels familiar because I see it in progressive Christianity and the Mainline more broadly.

Over the past several decades, many Mainline leaders intentionally reframed the church’s moral claims in language that could resonate beyond explicitly Christian commitments. Appeals to compassion, justice, dignity, and inclusion allowed the church to remain publicly engaged without requiring shared belief in Scripture, doctrine, or even God.

The goal was not to abandon theology, but to extend the church’s reach—to ensure its moral voice could still be heard in a pluralistic public square.

That strategic choice made sense at the time.

But as with most strategic choices, it carried consequences.

From shared authority to shared sentiment

Over time, shared moral reasoning has increasingly given way to shared moral sentiment. Moral agreement is sustained less by a common account of authority or purpose and more by whether a position feels compassionate or just to a particular community. As long as those intuitions align, the framework holds. But when they diverge—as they inevitably do—the church has fewer internal resources for navigating disagreement beyond appeals to empathy, goodwill, or posture.

This shift doesn’t eliminate moral concern; it reshapes it. Compassion and justice remain central, but the theological scaffolding that once explained why they mattered, how they were defined, and what they were ordered toward becomes less explicit.

What fills the gap is moral intuition—powerful, sincere, and deeply felt, but also variable.

The unintended outcome

One implication of this shift is that disagreement becomes harder to navigate. When moral claims are grounded primarily in shared sentiment rather than shared authority, disagreement often feels less like a difference in reasoning and more like a failure of empathy or goodwill.

Another implication is that the church’s moral voice becomes harder to distinguish from the surrounding culture. When the church speaks in the same moral grammar as secular institutions, it may gain initial resonance—but it loses a clear account of why its claims are specifically Christian rather than simply humane.

In trying to speak to everyone, the church risks speaking from nowhere in particular.

This isn’t an indictment so much as an observation about how moral language functions when it is detached from formation, theological anthropology, and a shared sense of telos.

Why this matters

I don’t see this as a failure of intent. It’s a reminder that actions have consequences, and that strategies shape outcomes in ways we don’t always anticipate.

Compassion remains essential. Justice remains central. But without a clear account of authority, formation, and purpose, those virtues struggle to persuade beyond communities that already share their assumptions.

What was meant to broaden appeal can, over time, weaken durability.

That feels less like a moral failure than a cautionary lesson—one worth paying attention to as the church continues to discern how it speaks, and from where.