The Politics of Moral Patience

Abstract

Pluralistic societies perpetually seek for ways to get along, given the reality of that pluralism. That search generates pluralistic responses which include forbearance, concord, tolerance, radical democracy, among many others. This paper begins to explore the putatively rich notion of moral patience as a way of being in the world as Christians; moral patience as a way of living with the ‘‘other’’ without reducing the importance of the Christian faith and practice; moral patience as a way of setting the stage for living with long-term difference but without terminal division; moral patience not just as a way of taking a long time to make decisions, but as the finding of a way forward and getting on with life without first coming to some form of unified resolution. Specifically, my purpose is to argue that moral patience creates time and space for the Christian community to develop an ethic of discipleship; i.e. a politics that finds its source in the patience of God, in the imitation of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Spirit. Such moral patience acts as a sort of political and ethical capacity, and encourages us to believe that because God has time, we also have time — to listen, to be vulnerable, to engage in important conflicts without becoming violent, to refuse to be driven by the speed that society seeks to impose on us, and to resist the notion that the world and other people are directly in our control — indeed to resist the notion that we are radically autonomous individual entities. The paper concludes with a brief glance at how the Christian practice of moral patience might shape work in a number of fields of moral inquiry.