Starbucks, Boycotts, and (Not) Buying Coffee: The Need for Theological Ethics

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Maggie Gallagher and the folks at the National Organization for Marriage are taking on Starbucks for their position on gay marriage, a position that they outline in the video above.

The controversy has brought up the question about whether Christians should join in on the boycotting, er, fun.  This Russell Moore has answered with a resounding nein:  

A boycott is a display of power, particularly of economic power. The boycott shows a corporation (or government or service provider) that the aggrieved party can hurt the company, by depriving it of revenue. The boycott, if it’s successful, eventually causes the powers-that-be to yield, conceding that they need the money of the boycott participants more than they need whatever cause they were supporting. It is a contest of who has more buying power, and thus is of more value to the company.

We lose that argument.

The argument behind a boycott assumes that the “rightness” of a marriage definition is constituted by a majority with power. Isn’t that precisely what we’re arguing against? Our beliefs about marriage aren’t the way they are because we are in a majority. As a matter of fact, we must concede that we are in a tiny minority in contemporary American society, if we define marriage the way the Bible does, as a sexually-exclusive, permanent one-flesh union.

Moreover, is this kind of economic power context really how we’re going to engage our neighbors with a discussion about the meaning and mystery of marriage? Do such measures actually persuade at the level such decisions are actually made: the moral imagination? I doubt it.

I've no interest in starting a theological throwdown with the good Doctor, as he'd get the better of it blindfolded with an arm tied up.  And frankly, that last paragraph above isn't only one that I wish I'd written:  it sounds startlingly close to a line of thought on this issue I have sketched out before.

Moore goes on to suggest that he's "protecting marriage in law and in culture," but also expresses worries about doing so by "lording over others with political majorities."**  Persuasion, he contends, happens by "holding fast to the gospel, by explaining our increasingly odd view of marriage, and by serving the world and our neighbors around us, as our Lord does, with a towel and a foot-bucket."

Moore's case against boycotts is compelling, yet it raises more questions about the practice than it really answers.  While Moore grants he is not opposed to all boycotts by Christians, he has left little to no room for discerning which boycotts we should pursue.  Should Christians have, for instance, boycotted BP for their gross mismanagement of the clean-up efforts on the Gulf Coast?  Or if it turned out that Starbucks was sneaking venti cups of cash into the coffers of Planned Parenthood, would a boycott then be permissible?

What's more, there is a harder question that Moore seems to answer in the final sentence of his piece:  whether Christians should buy Starbucks, even if they do not boycott Starbucks.