Rules are traps for those who want to do less than their best

Rules often become traps for those seeking to excuse themselves for doing less than their best.¹ Rules-based religious paradigms look at life through the filter of minimum requirements instead of maximal potential. God’s rules are meant to help us understand what he is like and become like him, but instead of using rules to answer the question “what would Jesus do?” many Christians only ask “what can I get away with?” They don’t seek to do the best they can, only the minimum they absolutely have to do.

The wicked will resist new and better ideas that violate their rules, because those ideas identify the areas of their character that aren’t aligned with God, removing their ability to be wicked without feeling guilty about it.² An unfortunate number of people remain in and venerate rules-based morality simply because it provides them with the ability to pursue what they know is less than best while feeling the least guilt—though few realize it.

It’s common to hear complaints about how difficult rules-based moral systems are to keep. The real challenge isn’t the difficulty of the system, but the difficulty of following it while maintaining your desires for anything else. Perceived difficulty in rules-based systems comes from a double mind and continued choice to sin. Rules-based systems are excellent at plainly manifesting limitations in submission to God, and until those limits are removed, no person is prepared to live commandments of principle or character.

Rules-based morality requires very little energy or thought. All you have to do is keep a list of rules that someone gives you. No matter the length of the list of rules, it will always be limited to a subset of life, and therefore easier to live than any principles- or character-based morality. Observing rules-based morality has a very high likelihood of giving someone an unrealistically high estimation of their own righteousness. Rules-based morality provides unrealistically high confidence. Unlike anything else known in reality, a rules-based moral system presents only two possibilities: everything is 100% correct, or nothing is. Finally, rules-based systems provide massive self-esteem for an exceedingly low price. With a rules-based moral code, there is no need to actually become a good person or provide others with actual value; if you keep the rules, you are as good a person as anyone could ever be, and you are better than anyone who doesn’t.

While the ease of conveyance and obedience of rules makes them more accessible to more people than principles or character, each of their properties also makes it more difficult to ascend beyond them. The packaged, finished nature of rules makes the transition towards actively thinking about and testing what you believe all the more difficult for those who live such rules-based systems. Rules-based people have little practice with critical thought and feel overwhelmed in doing so. They are often taught that to question their rules is to betray God. It takes them a great deal of faith to learn to segment their beliefs and assess individual confidence measures for each of them, based on specific reasons. Their binary confidence assessment doesn’t help, as it deprives them from any subtle onramp to a better way of thinking; in order to abandon their 100% confidence, their system tells them they must accept 0% confidence, and that is something that most people are not willing to do. Finally, anyone abandoning a rules-based moral code will likely have to accept a drastically downgraded self-worth, as they will need to face the reality that their rules probably failed to make them any better than those without them, failed to help them overcome significant challenges in reality, and may have actually made them significantly worse than they would have been without them. The only way to recover lost self-worth is to actually become the kind of person you assumed you were before.