Lesallan | October 7, 2025
Faith, Ethics, and Moral Formation: A Personal Reflection by Lesallan Bostron
My understanding is that religion and ethics are distinct but deeply interconnected domains. Religion provides a narrative, vocabulary, and normative commitments that shape moral imagination and offer a foundation for moral duties, virtues, and ultimate purpose. Ethics offers tools for clarifying, systematizing, and testing those commitments against reason, consequences, and social coherence. Where religion supplies authority and significance, ethics supplies method and corrective scrutiny; together they form a dynamic interplay in which religious convictions motivate moral action and ethical reflection refines religiously held claims (Weston, 2011). In Christian practice, this interplay looks like Scripture and tradition supplying ends and moral exemplars while ethical reasoning, community accountability, and prudential judgment guide concrete decisions.
In ministry and curriculum work, I have repeatedly experienced alignment between faith and ethics, particularly when pastoral care required honesty, compassion, and accountability. Once, while designing a care curriculum, I faced pressure to simplify a confidentiality policy to increase program enrollment. My Christian commitments to truthfulness, respect for persons, and protecting the vulnerable made me resist cutting safeguards. Ethical reflection confirmed that transparency and robust protections were morally preferable and practically necessary for trust. My faith provided the vocational motive and love for my neighbors; ethical reasoning supplied the practical framework that justified my actions.
A notable conflict occurred earlier in my career when a congregation urged me to prioritize institutional reputation over openly addressing an elder’s abusive behavior. My instinctive religious loyalty to the church’s unity pulled me one way. In contrast, my ethical convictions about justice, the dignity of victims, and prophetic truth-telling pulled me in the other direction. I ultimately chose to advocate for investigation and care for the harmed, a decision rooted in Christian commitments to justice and in ethical principles that protect persons from harm. That choice strained relationships but preserved moral integrity and aligned with a vision of holiness that refuses concealment of abuse.
Religion shapes moral ends and furnishes motives; ethics disciplines those ends with principles, methods, and communal checks. In my experience, the healthiest moral response emerges when religious convictions and ethical reasoning work in tandem: faith fuels moral courage, while ethics ensures that actions are coherent, accountable, and protective of the vulnerable.
In Grace and Peace,
Lesallan
References:
Weston, A. (2011). A practical companion to ethics (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
