How can we act according to an evangelical social ethic? And does such an ethic even exist in the churches?

These are some of the questions raised by a dozen authors in France. They represent a range of evangelical churches and organisations and have accepted the challenge of the Evangelical Protestant Ethics Commission (Commission d'Ethique Protestante Evangélique, CEPE) to write a book addressing issues like the French Republican values, the capitalist economic system, work and technical progresses, the laicité and religious diversity, and the care of creation.

“French-speaking evangelicals are largely involved in social action, but this action is little thought out in a systematic way”, Marjorie Legendre, an evangelical pastor and ethics professor tells Evangelical Focus.

She chairs the CEPE, and she observes that “while there are many works on social ethics in English-language evangelical literature, there are few resources in French-language evangelical literature”.

Pour une éthique sociale évangélique, the 180-page book in French language published in July 2024, includes among its authors people who are experts in specific fields. All hold to an evangelical worldview. The work is intended to be accessible both for the general public and for Christians interested in questions of social ethics.

“Evangelical social ethics should be rooted in the Word of God”, says Legendre, “which is considered to be fully inspired by God and sufficient to provide not only broad principles to guide social action in general, but also answers to specific questions of social ethics (e.g. the environment, poverty, etc)”.

Challenges for French evangelical churches

From the migration debates to the struggle for power between extremes, France is going through a socio-political moment that can be at times chaotic. In this context, a challenge for evangelical Christians is to “anchor their action in in-depth biblical reflection and to assume and remain faithful to their religious roots in the context of a ‘fighting’ laicité that would like to exclude religion from the public arena”, says the author, who teaches at the Faculté Libre de Théologie Evangélique.

In the past, she laments, “we have seen Protestant and Catholic social works become secularised over time, to the point where they no longer have a specifically Christian flavour”.

This is sad since “the involvement of evangelicals in society is an opportunity to bear witness to God’s love for our contemporaries and thus to bear witness to the Gospel”.

Republican (and Christian?) values

Liberté, egalité, fraternité is probably the most known definition of French republican values. In her chapter of the book, Marjorie Legendre looks for connections with the Christian faith.

“There are certainly points of convergence between liberty, equality and fraternity as conceived by society - we could even say that this motto comes in part from the Judeo-Christian heritage”.

“But there are significant differences as well”, she adds. “To take only the example of freedom: our contemporaries conceive of it as freedom-independence to do what they want within the sole limits of freedom and non-harming of others, whereas Christian freedom is the freedom to be made capable of loving God and one’s neighbour”.

Evangelical churches who understand their role

What would change if evangelical Protestants in French fully understood their role in society, we ask her.

The free evangelical pastor believes believers would become more “consistent with the Gospel message, which is not just about the salvation of ‘souls’ but is concerned with the person in all his or her needs”.

These churches would get “greater visibility and perhaps, as a result, change the often critical (even caricatured) view of them in the media”.

Being a growing but still relatively small faith group of 745,000 in a country of 68 million citizens, the commitment of evangelical Christians with a clear evangelical ethic “would

not fundamentally change society, but it would help to make it either a little less worse (for the pessimistics) or a little better (for the optimistics)”. A goal that is worth the effort, the authors of the book believe.

More about the authors and the CEPE

The book Pour une éthique sociale évangélique has been published Excelsis in June 2024. The authors are: Rachel Calvert, Frédéric de Coninck, Robert Despré, Luc Forestier, Daniel Hillion, Yannick Imbert, Marjorie Legendre, Luc Maroni, Alexandre Nussbaumer, Luc Olekhnovitch, Éric Pires Antunes, Louis Schweitzer.

The Commission d'Ethique Protestante Evangélique (CEPE) was created in 1996. It was initially the fruit of the initiative and collaboration of two unions: the Union des Eglises Evangéliques Libres (UEEL) and the Fédération des Eglises Evangéliques Baptistes de France (FEEBF). It has since expanded to represent the wider evangelical world (UNEPREF, CAEF, Mennonites) and is now called the ‘Commission d'Ethique Protestante Evangélique’ (CEPE). It has been a partner of the Conseil National des Evangéliques de France (CNEF) since its creation.

Marjorie Legendre (born in 1986) is a pastor of the Union des Eglises Evangéliques Libres, Professor of Ethics and Spirituality at the Faculté Libre de Théologie Evangélique, President of the Commission d'Ethique Protestante Evangélique (CEPE), member of the Groupe national de conversation évangéliques-catholiques and doctoral student in social ethics at the Institut Catholique de Paris.

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