Scott M. Coley, Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024), 192-193:
The reason many conservative evangelicals appear to be moral relativists is that they are moral relativists. I’m confident they would deny this, but their denial doesn’t make it any less true….It’s commonly supposed that the problem with religious fundamentalism is that its moral commitments are too rigid. In fact the opposite is true: morality based on the hermeneutics of legitimization is infinitely flexible. In the hands of ecclesial authorities who’ve insulated themselves from expert critique, sacred texts become a vehicle for legitimizing all manner of ungodliness, injustice, and abuse, in the name of an Authority that is transcendent and therefore unavailable for interrogation. Thus the moral and intellectual intransigence of religious fundamentalists is a product, not of immutable principles, but rather of the fact that fundamentalist techniques of knowledge furnish an unassailable pretext for maintaining social practices and habits of mind that are morally and intellectually bankrupt.
The Amateur Exegete 
When we keep in mind the difference between moral relativism and moral subjectivism, it’s also true that ALL conservative Evangelicals are moral subjectivists. They disagree with each other on abortion, death penalty, teaching creationism in secular schools, age of consent/marriage, how serious “sin” is, whether getting saved is or isn’t an urgent priority, etc, etc. As long as they remain respectful of each other, they cannot claim that the other Christian’s moral disagreement with them is the result of him neglecting something the bible “clearly” teaches. They know that God simply doesn’t want them to be in as much agreement about morality as God apparently wants them to agree on Jesus’ gender. Nothing spells moral subjectivity quite like “God wants us to disagree with each other on morality”.
LikeLike