I recently remarked to my wife that most of what people take for their morals are really just the product of their circumstances and the demands placed on them. What people value depends on the necessity or luxury to being able to value them, and so they vary according to the situation. So most people who imagine themselves as sitting in one place would find themselves just like everybody else in another situation. You do what you need to do and you do what you can do. And most people aren’t much better than whatever those demands and opportunities allow.

“Doesn’t that make you a moral relativist?” she asked. “No,” I said, “it makes me a moral psychologist. Understanding why people believe what they believe isn’t the same thing as saying there isn’t anything they should believe, after all.”

“I don’t know, she said. It sounds like you’re justifying some pretty terrible things. It’s not easy to square that with being a Christian.”

And to that, I also have to disagree. I can’t summarize what I said at the time, but I can summarize what I think. In point of fact, I think Christianity leads you right to the very position that I was expressing.

First, as a faith, Christianity has never been afraid to tell the hard truths about the world and about ourselves. It tells a rough and complex story about all kinds of people struggling through a very confusing and challenging world. Neither the picture of God, nor of the world, nor of people that the Bible offers has the simplicity of a cut and dried ideology. They are astonishing and terrifying in turn. They surprise and disappoint us continually, as real people do.

One of those hard truths is the sinfulness of all, men and women, young and old, modern and ancient. You’re not better than anyone who has ever lived, innately. All have fallen, all have gone astray. It is the central fact of Christianity that mankind is in need of saving and is capable of things it can hardly comprehend. If you haven’t come to terms with that about the human race, the entire human race, including your favorite bits of it, including yourself, then you haven’t come to terms with either the fact of sin or the need for grace, and therefore have not in any real way grasped the message of the Bible.

You could argue that Christianity cannot, in fact, cure the disease it diagnoses, that its hope of salvation is a false hope. In fact I think you could take that position and still have succeeded in grasping, if not believing, the gospel of the Christian faith. Regardless of whether you think Christ has the power to save us from our sins or grant us eternal life, I think it is undeniable that Christianity has correctly diagnosed the disease. And even if the disease is uncurable by the means it proposes, diagnosing it is still an accomplishment, and it at least takes a good stab at managing a terminal condition.

I don’t think there has ever been a more accurate and complete picture of the problem of human existence as the Bible presents, and I have certainly looked. It presents it in many unusual ways, through stories and poetry and songs and history and speeches and biographies. So much of the content is locked up in forms other than mere declamatory prose, and invites exploration and thought rather than mere collection. The truths it teaches cannot merely be taught, they must be experienced. In fact one of the problems, from a structural point of view for its later followers, is that the book doesn’t tell you what to make of it. It leaves you with an obligation to consideration, which leads to a great variety in interpretation, and so to much disagreement.

Often modern Christians, as well as the critics of Christianity, try to sell us in turn on the idea of the faith as something either absurdly meek and wishful and effete and vague and indulgent and open, or as something absurdly harsh and draconian and confrontational and unequivocal and demanding and discriminating. And they will happily describe Christians as both sheep and wolves in turn. This strange scism, both in advocacy and in criticism, is perfectly understandable. You will find plenty of fodder for both interpretations in there.

In any case, a nonbeliever who has truly grasped the reality of sin may be closer to the kingdom than a pious priest of a more naive and self-righteous cult. Cults are what happens when the great seething, terrifying, glorious mass of the faith gets cut down to a more mangable ideology, a reduction of its being to a single element, a limited truth, a limited purpose, something more manageable and containable for human minds and hands. That is why cults are so easily steered to someone’s personal ends, while the greater faith as a whole is so hard to contain and direct and is so messy and diverse.

The temptation to limit the scope of the Bible is always the greatest temptation. We wish to cut it down to our own size, to something we alone could have thought of and can interpret fully. That eliminates our reliance on others, as well as any pesky reawakenings or contrary notions the text might try to force on us. We don’t just desire truth, after all, we desire a truth we can possess. And if we can possess the truth, then we can also possess the way and the life, and that’s halfway to becoming God. And the prospect of God becoming something far more manageable and containable in us is far more appealing than letting ourselves be split and torn open in the impossible task of trying to become more like him.

To return to the earlier question, no, I’m not a relativist. But people are, cultures are. It’s the easiest thing in the world, and we vastly underestimate how much we have gone wandering after our own concerns, how much we merely echo the luxuries and demands of our situation. We indulge in beneficence when it benefits us, and we indulge in tyranny when it does the same. And many, probably most, people live as their particular nature and the conditions of their world demand they live, good or bad, soft or harsh, bold or cautious, considerate or calculating.

Most of us are no better nor worse than any others who have ever lived, but would do as they have done, were we in their shoes. The values we hold today are largely just the fashions, necessities, and luxuries of our time. And if our structures suddenly changed drastically, or we were transported back in time or forward into a new state of affairs by some fickle turn of history, we would find that we are little different from anyone else.

Why are we so fascinated by stories, real or imagined, of apocalypse, where the world, in some form, ends and people revert to a savage state? We don’t just feel it to be true, there is even some part of us that wishes it to be true and fondles the idea of having our constrained potential unleashed and tested. Some part of us longs for the chance to make a novel choice, to act as we truly would and not merely as a product of our present limits, and to discover that freedom or that slavery by an upending of all the established rules. It’s hard to say if this desire is perverse or noble. The outcomes, for most of us, would I think be less good than we hope. Only a tiny minority of people turn out to be genuine heroes in a pinch.

I remarked to my wife recently, on a less serious and much more nerdy matter, that the original Star Trek laid all the groundwork for the story arc of the Klingon Empire, and TNG and DS9 simply followed through. (Bear with me, this has some relevance.) We’re told quite clearly in the original series that one day the Federation and Klingons will be great friends, uniting their strengths of space-Yankees and space-Scots-Irish. At the time this seems impossible to both sides. The Klingons are clearly the villains of the galaxy, brutal and aggressive, the sworn enemies of the idealistic and peaceful Federation.

How could such enemies become friends, without completely changing who they are or giving up on their most essential beliefs and character? The guiding beliefs of the Klingons are what drive them, for good or bad, and make them what they are. Survival must be earned, is their first belief. Klingons play the game to win, is the second.

It’s one of the little surprises of life to find out that there are people who approach life differently than you do. Some people don’t truly play to win, and may even play to lose (to others). And plenty of people feel that survival and success is a right, rather than a privilege that must be earned. Agreeable and disagreeable people exist, and one of the most shocking discoveries you can make is that both qualities have their benefits and vulnerabilities and are likely to be ruined without the other.

Again, that’s not relativism. My wife, no doubt, would side unequivocally with the Federation against the Klingons and find it very hard to justify their approach or overlook their pathologies. But the Federation has its own pathologies, TNG proved that, with many episodes revealing the decadence and hesitancy and bureaucratic ineffectiveness of the Federation. And the Federation needs the Klingons. DS9 proved that. Only the caution and bravery of the Klingons was able to keep the Dominion at bay.

I’m not excusing their brutality. But it proceeds, even in its perversion, from something that is correct, something that is true, something that is good and needed. Wisdom lies in recognizing that, even in their worst moments, there is some sense and some value in radically opposing approaches. While at the same time, we recognizine that there is, even in those things we prefer and approve, the seed of something false and dangerous.

The line of good and evil is drawn down the heart of every man and woman. And in most cases, whether we approve or disapprove this or that particular action or person, they are simply following their own path, convinced that it is right, responding to their desires and needs and the demands placed upon them, whether that’s in the peaceful and benign world of the modern first-world country or in the difficult past of a more savage and uncertain time. Savagery and nobility exist in all times and places, and it is not always so easy to identify them as you would think, especially for those who will only ever consent to understand any time or any people and conditions but their own.

The moral objectivism of even many modern Christians is a ideological luxury, the product of their time, and not the result of any deep consideration of or confrontation with reality. They have never truly been tested, and because they sincerely do not believe that they are capable of the sorts of things others have thought and done, they cannot have truly grasped the nature of sin or the need for grace. So long as they imagine themselves as better or different, so long as they draw moral distinctions based on clocks and conventions, they miss the terrible and wonderful truth. That they may be driving their world and their lives into a fate no better and no less terrible than those of the past, and that they are just as able to be given grace as those of the past.