The Trap of the "Goodness Scale": Why Your Ordinary Christian Life is Extraordinary
Have you ever felt that your efforts to be a good person just don’t "count" enough? In our digital age, a new kind of legalism has emerged. It’s a fast-growing notion that there is what I would call a catalogue of compassion —a precise scale that measures the effectiveness of your kindness. A new form of justification, where moral worth is earned by visible causes rather than received by grace. In this modern moral economy, acts of service are ranked like Olympic events. In this hierarchy, changing your child’s diaper or being a diligent employee ranks near the bottom. To move up the scale, the world tells us we must pursue "nobler" endeavours: travelling to distant continents, championing global social causes, rescuing street dogs, adopting the latest mandatory language of the day, advocating for the right pronouns, or sharing social media posts about preserving koalas from extinction. These things can be genuine acts of love. What has changed is not that peop...
