Towards a mature ethics

I was browsing the Christianity Today website recently, and noticed that they were selling some discussion material based on 24 – the hit series featuring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer. Now, I found this almost irresistible. I love 24. More than that, I love trying to work out how it fits onto a grid of Christian principles (or “into the Christian metanarrative” if you want to get poncey about it…)

24, like most films and series originating in Hollywood, is pretty clear about where its morality lies. In any given series, some person (or people) is partway through a plan to destroy life on a large scale. They are BAD GUYS writ large. The CTU (Counter-Terrorism Unit) is alive to this plan, and has Special Agent Jack Bauer on the case. Jack is GOOD. From the moment we join the action, Jack has literally 24 hours to save the planet (and, invariably, his daughter, his mistress, his idiotically naïve President, or whomever).

Let’s be clear. Jack is ludicrously hard, and achieves superhuman feats. As a child, Jack Bauer’s first words were “There’s no time!” Superman wears Jack Bauer pyjamas. When Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys, he spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he revealed where they were. You get the idea.

Aside from the suspension of disbelief that 24 so obviously requires, it’s very good. It doesn’t matter that we know Jack will win through in the end. The interest is both in the how he does it, and (as always happens in this series) which characters will turn out to be duplicitous, unreliable, or … ahem …. dead. The black-and-white approach to morality inherent in the series isn’t specific to 24, of course. Christians always seem to be deconstructing Harry Potter or the Da Vinci Code, but the same rules of engagement apply to Snow White. “Bad” is in some eternal conflict with “good”, and “good” almost invariably wins.

Although 24 is not without its own moral ambiguities, it never wavers from its bottom line. If Jack tortures a terrorist to find the location of a bomb, we may find his methods terrible, but it’s all in a good cause. If Jack shoots someone, that person deserved it. No matter that his methods sometimes slip below our moral radar, he remains fundamentally "good".

Here’s where my slight confusion comes in. I think most Christians would say that this is fine as a TV programme. But transpose the facts to real life – litmus test Guantanamo, say, or object to the removal of civil liberties – and we become hugely uneasy. The flow of rhetoric begins. The end does not justify the means. There are some boundaries we ought not to cross.

But where does this ends/means debate fit on the Christian grid? What scriptures are we turning to, to defend our starting point? I wonder if God sees things in such a civil libertarian light as we sometimes appear to. Let’s start from the only place we can: the cross. Did God “go soft” at the point of ultimate decision? No. He could not have.

He could have elected not to save mankind – and this would have been unimpeachably just of Him. He could have done as He chose to do, and allow Himself to be separated from His Son in Jesus' unbearable death. To God’s mind, the end justified the means. But the one thing He could not have done, was to “go soft” – to suspend the requirement for the price of sin to be paid, and hope that everything worked out OK in the end.

Maybe this one needs some more thought.