The Closet Professor

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

— Matthew 22:37–40

In recent years, writers have contrasted two ways of thinking about morality in Christianity: vertical and horizontal.

Vertical morality measures righteousness by obedience to divine rules—what we do “upward” toward God. It’s the language of purity codes, of who’s in and who’s out. It focuses on sin as individual failure: what you drink, who you love, what you wear, how you pray.

Horizontal morality, on the other hand, measures faith by compassion—how we live in relationship with others. It’s the ethic Jesus embodied: touching lepers, feeding the hungry, lifting up the marginalized, and challenging systems of exclusion. It’s the moral vision of the Good Samaritan, who loved a stranger more faithfully than the priest and Levite who passed him by.

Writers like Phil Zuckerman and Randal Rauser have noted that what some call “MAGA Christianity” often confuses holiness with political power. When faith becomes about defending hierarchy rather than serving humanity, it loses sight of the Gospel’s radical equality.

Vertical morality alone lets people condemn LGBTQ+ Christians while excusing cruelty, greed, and injustice. It measures holiness by outward piety rather than inward compassion. As Jesus said of the Pharisees, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.” (Matthew 23:4)

Jesus constantly redirected attention from vertical rule-keeping to horizontal compassion.

• “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)
• “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” (Matthew 5:7)
• “Let all that you do be done in love.” (1 Corinthians 16:14)

The Christian life is not a ladder reaching up to heaven—it’s a table stretching out to our neighbors. God doesn’t ask us to climb higher to prove our worth, but to reach wider to show God’s love.

For LGBTQ+ Christians, this distinction matters deeply. Too often, vertical moralism has been used to shame us for who we are, while ignoring the heart of Jesus’s message: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)

The cross itself is both vertical and horizontal—but the beams meet at love. The vertical reminds us that God’s love reaches down to us and our hearts rise to meet it. The horizontal reminds us that the measure of that love is how far we extend it toward others. When churches focus only upward, they risk becoming sanctuaries of self-righteousness instead of sanctuaries of grace.

True holiness isn’t found in who we exclude, but in how deeply we love.

This week, consider where your faith has been vertical when it might be called to be horizontal. Have we spent more time worrying about being “right with God” than being kind to one another? The beauty of horizontal faith is that every act of compassion—every word of encouragement, every defense of the marginalized—is an act of worship.

The cross has two beams for a reason. The vertical beam reminds us that God’s love flows freely between heaven and earth—unbroken, unwavering, unconditional. The horizontal beam stretches outward, calling us to carry that same love into the world. Together, they form the shape of the Gospel itself: love that reaches both upward toward God and outward toward our neighbor—a love wide enough to embrace us all.