Light Brings Salt
Volume 2, Issue 27 July 11, 2004
Dedicated to the
Systematic Exposition of the Word of God
The greatest moral question hanging over
Secularization, the process by which a society severs its ties
to a religious worldview, is now pressed to the limits by ideological
secularists bent on removing all vestiges of the Judeo-Christian heritage from
the nation’s
culture. They will not stop until every aspect of Christian morality is supplanted by
the new morality of the postmodern philosophers—a morality with no absolutes, and
without God.
How bad is it? Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz,
an influential liberal partisan in the Culture Wars, rejects the idea that
belief in God is necessary for moral goodness. In Letters to a Young Lawyer, Dershowitz argues that obedience to the God of the Bible
can often be immoral. We should not be good because we fear divine punishment, Dershowitz argues, but because we aspire to good character.
“In
deciding what course of action is moral,” he instructs, “you should act
as if there were no God. You should also act as
if there were no threat of earthly punishment or reward. You should be a person
of good character because it is right to be such a person.”
Of course, this begs the question of character itself. How do we
know what character is without an objective reference? If human beings are left
to our own devices and limited to our own wisdom, we will invent whatever model
of ‘good
character’
seems right at the time. Without God there are no moral absolutes. Without
moral absolutes, there is no authentic knowledge of right and wrong.
According to the new American secular orthodoxy, no reference to
God or faith—no
matter how vague or distant—is allowable in public conversation, much less in governmental
policy making. The end result is a total collapse of moral conversation. All
that is left is a burlesque of moral nonsense with endless debates going
nowhere in particular, except away from Christianity.
For example, we are
now told that concern for sexual abstinence is just another imposition of a
Christian morality. Planned Parenthood and the proponents of teenage sexual
activity oppose abstinence-based sex education as “inherently
religious.”
That is, the only arguments against teenage sexual promiscuity are based on
religious convictions—which
are forbidden grounds for public consideration.
In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union has successfully fought
abstinence-based programs in several states, arguing that such programs violate
their radical notion of church/state separation, and put the public schools in
the position of teaching ‘religion.’
This nonsense would be laughable if its results were not so
devastating among
Are moral values now off limits just because they may be
affirmed or shared by Christians? As columnist Mona Charen
asked, “Have
we reached the point in
If abstinence-based sex education is “inherently
religious,”
then so is the criminal code which outlaws murder. After all, “Thou shall not
kill”
was first inscribed on tablets of stone by God, not contrived by a secularist
lawmaker in
The sheer nonsense of this makes it difficult to take the
argument seriously, but courts at the local, state, and federal levels are
heeding these secularist arguments. Our ability to conduct any meaningful moral
discourse is fast evaporating.
Just how far we have come is made clear by a glance at the most
formative legal commentary which lies behind this nation’s legal
tradition, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. English common law is,
after all, the basis of our own legal doctrines. Just before the American
Revolution, Blackstone wrote: “Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to
the laws of his Creator, for he is an entirely dependent being.”
The legal tradition which gave birth to this nation, formed the
background of its Constitution, and sustained our laws and their interpretation
for a century and a half, is now itself ruled out of bounds. Any moral
tradition which even whispers the memory of the Almighty is now ruled null and
void. But can Americans be
good without God? Can we even entertain the fiction that citizens can create a
totally secular morality? Nonsense. There is no
secular morality of any substance. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky acknowledged, “If God is dead,
everything is permissible.”
So, we live among the ruins of a moral value structure destroyed
by the wrecking ball of a radical secularist agenda, but already weakened by
compromise from within—even
from within the Church. The Church of England
and its sister church in
With Friedrich Nietzsche, Holloway wants modern humanity to be
freed from “slave
obedience”
to the morality of the Bible. In Godless Morality, the bishop insists that we
must just learn to live with moral ambiguity. As for Scripture, it must be
abandoned as authoritative moral guidance, for “it no longer conforms to our
experience of truth and value.” The same rejection of biblical morality is all too common on
these shores as well. Liberal theologians and church leaders display the same
embarrassment over the moral teachings of the Bible. Among evangelicals,
outright rejection of biblical authority is more rare (at least for now), but
too many pulpits remain empty of biblical content and moral confrontation with
the issues of the day.
In the confused public
Evidence of the inevitable confusion that results is seen in the
nation’s
nonsensical moral fireworks over Michael Jackson’s arrest for child molestation.
Americans seem certain that
Several years ago, a group of boys at