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The Disreputable Ethics of Christianity, 1978

ink with rapidiograph 00 on illustration board, 16 × 11 ¾ in. (40.5 × 30 cm)

Gift of Ward and Laurel Gasque

This whimsical ink drawing depicts Dorothy Sayers as a cork flying out of the top of a wine bottle. It was commissioned by Radix magazine as a full-page illustration to accompany a reprint of Sayers’ short essay “Christian Morality” (1947) in its May–June 1978 issue. Radix published the article under the punchier title “The Disreputable Ethics of Christianity,” drawn from part 5 of Sayers’ Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World (1969), which opens with this essay. Here, Sayers highlights a disconnect between the specific ways Jesus violated the social mores of his own days and the church’s historical patterns of reestablishing and policing those same mores. The article begins:

“Setting aside the scandal caused by His Messianic claims and His reputation as a political firebrand, only two accusations of personal depravity seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that He was a Sabbath-breaker. Secondly, that He was ‘a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’—or (to draw aside the veil of Elizabethan English which makes it all sound so much more respectable) that He ate too heartily, drank too freely, and kept very disreputable company, including grafters of the lowest type and ladies who were no better than they should be. For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian Churches have laboured, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the Communion-table, founded Total Abstinence Societies in the name of Him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatre-going. They have transferred the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and, feeling that the original commandment ‘thou shalt not work’ was rather half-hearted, have added to it a new commandment, ‘thou shalt not play.’”

Radix, May–June 1978, pp. 4–5.