We beseech thee also, so to direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian Rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion, and virtue.
I continue my series of very personal reflections on my vote for the up-coming primary season. How should I vote? As a Christian, I want to draw what wisdom I can from my faith before making this decision.
I have chosen to reflect on a prayer that millions of Christians in the West have prayed a very long time. What can the wisdom of the Church at prayer teach me about God and government?
Already it has shown me a limited, but positive role for a leader. It has broadened my choices and clarified the issues that are most important. My vote must be for a candidate who accepts the deep wisdom of Western civilization based as it is on centuries of reflection about the nature of government. My vote should be for a person who can sing without a hint of irony:”As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free . . .”
The next President must truly and impartially administer justice. He will grant all people the dignity of their humanity and in that regard treat them equally. He will be able to discern where humans are not equal and give them justice in those areas as well. Each will receive from the law what he deserves.
In the last post, we dwelt on the positive job of the ruler who provides this just space for liberty, but the prayer moves quickly forward and acknowledges why such “space making” is necessary. It is “to the punishment of wickedness and vice.” If there were no wickedness, then there would be no need for government. Humanity only needs protection and someone to do justice, because of our brokenness.
We all want better than we can do. If we are healthy and could do to others what a good man would have done to him, then the state could wither away. Sadly, we shan’t live in such a world before Jesus Christ returns.
Government does not give us our basic rights, they come from our Creator. Government does not give us life, that is a gift from the Creator through our parents. Government does not give us wealth, it comes as a gift of God.
God has given us so much that we should not need government. We could “grow up” to graduate to Paradise without any need of anything other than God’s law and nature’s bounty. That is not, however, the way things turned out. We aren’t a perfect Adam and Eve in the garden, but Adam and Eve outside the garden trying to live with Cain (the first murderer), Abel, and Set. Let to it, Cain would kill Seth and Cain’s rotten soul would destroy Cain in the long term. Humanity would wither and die . . . as short term evil destroyed good while the long-term laws of “sowing and reaping” eventually wiped out evil men.
Government exists to allow people the freedom to do what is good and protection from evil. They punish Cain in order to save Seth.
The State and Wickedness and Vice
I am looking for a president who will execute justice on the wicked. He will not hate terrorists, but he will show them true and impartial justice leading to the punishment of their wickedness and vice. Where Constitutionally appropriate, he will not let the good suffer in neighborhoods while gang members destroy the community. Instead, he will side with the honest business woman and bring punishment to the thug who stuck her up.
The President will act to preserve the Union in the face of the chaos of the rebels against the law and the Constitutional order.
Mafia-run Russia proves that the ability of citizens to be libertine without the freedom from the terror of criminals is not liberty. The first job the President is to enforce the law with truth and impartiality to the punishment of wickedness and vice.
We are right to celebrate diversity. Too much sameness gets dull and lacks the creative spark that drives progress. A culture that is all the same would be like eating a Wonder-bread sandwich with Wonder-bread as the filling. Difference cannot be evil, since God created so much of it. The cosmos is awash in difference . . . from galaxies to protons, from hummingbirds to canaries, from you to me.
Underneath the difference, there is a unity that allows for the celebration of diversity. The Russian can learn from the Englishman and the Englishman can learn from the Russian. This is because both are human. There is a unity deeper than the difference that makes sense of difference. The Russian language could not be learned by an Englishman, if men’s minds did not have so much in common making men’s languages so similar at their very core.
Science finds many wonders, but is always involved in the long process of showing how each wonder is unified by an underlying reality. The difference is no less real or important, but it is framed and kept coherent by the structure.
The celebration of diversity can only take place when we can take for granted our basic unity. It might be that we are so keen to see our individuality that we have forgotten the importance that our nation makes many “one.” Our national motto is not, after all, “out of one many.” Diversity is, in one way, cheap and finding unity hard. It too little for men to recognize the disharmony of the cosmos, but it has taken centuries for us to begin to see the deep unity. A multitude of voices is easy to collect, but forming a “university” is hard.
Good government provides the fences, the agreed on limits to individual behavior, that allow for the maximum liberty for all. God is sovereign over each person’s body. He is their Lord and can take what He wills to take, but nobody else can demand of any person their innocent life or liberty.
Liberty is the absolute right to do good . . . against doing good there can be no legitimate law. There cannot be a right to be wicked, even if one is allowed to be wicked.
Sadly, just as we face a glorious profusion of goods (united by being Good), so we face many misuses of those same goods (destroying Goodness). A culture must have some sort of unified consensus on what the Good is in order to survive. If we know the Good, then it is easy enough to see what bends that Goodness.
Where can we find such a consensus? In fact, for centuries such a consensus has existed in the United States around basic Judeo-Christian values. Most Americans have agreed about what kinds of things should receive public reproof and which should receive public benefit. Generally speaking, a culture will get more of what it rewards and less of what it punishes.
There is, so far as I can see, no place other than the broad Judeo-Christian morality that can possibly unite Americans sufficiently to create respect for the necessary restraint needed. Restraint of desires is needed for the good of others, but not everyone is going to agree on what is “good and bad.” Law exists to set a basic benchmark to protect us from those most apt to deviate from the standard.
Too much unity is tyranny, but too much diversity in morality will lead to anarchy which ends in the tyranny of the strong. If we cannot decide as a group what is right, then might will decided what is right. Broad (and hazily defined) Judeo-Christian morality permeating the culture and protected in education and the media allowed for a general consensus on what should be done.
Children are necessary to the general welfare so the state has rewarded marriage (with tax benefits for example). Stamp collecting (itself a harmless activity) is not necessary to the general welfare so the government has stayed neutral to it. The poor stamp collector cannot appeal to the public purse in order to continue his hobby.
Christians have argued whether the best way to help those hungry through no fault of their own is through government action. Most Americans (whatever I think of it) have decided government should provide a basic safety net to catch those who have fallen on hard times. Notice, however, they have wisely decided that such aide should not include buying liquor or smokes for the indigent.
One has the legal right to smoke, but Americans are not going to pay for the cigarettes. (This makes all the more intolerable the wicked subsidies to tobacco farmers in the United States.) Of course this broad Christian morality was never perfectly implemented. The wickedness of state imposed racial segregation was an intolerable hypocrisy under the Constitution of 1789. The end of segregation was a triumph of the expansion of this morality led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders from churches such as my own.
(Of course, some white Christians were content with the status quo or even tried to defend the evil, but they were defeated by the inconsistency of racism with their own beliefs. Racism can never sit comfortably in a Biblical church that must teach that all men are brothers.)
Instead of continuing this noble work of making public morality more consistent (imagine a 1950’s America without racism or legal limits to the role of women), certain cultural elites have tried to replace the broad Judeo-Christian consensus with a secular one. Since they do not agree (even amongst themselves) about human rights, what the “good” is (if it exists), or the basis for rights, it is no wonder the results have not been good.
To pick one example when the media or government celebrates or subsidizes sex outside of marriage, then it harms everyone, but especially the poor. Children need mothers and fathers not just to get procreation going, but get maturation finished. When that cannot happen it is sad and a cause for merciful help tied to repentance, not celebration on the cover of People magazine. There the rich flaunt a morality that in private (where the press agent cannot spin away soul damage) is making them miserable and in public encourages the rest of us to a libertine lifestyle we cannot afford in public or private.
Cultural “elites” in education and media have worked hard to undermine the long-standing cultural consensus about morality in certain areas. Eighty-percent of Americans are Christian, but Christian principles are attacked so that many Christians feel unsure about them. Business has also rushed in to market things that a free society should allow to be legal, but that no good person should sell or buy.
Good leaders cannot stop this by passing laws, but they can discourage it from the pulpit of high office. The President of the United States is not head of church, but he is the first citizen and as such has the duty to be an example of the best morality in the land. Of course, nobody will do this (or the rest of the job) perfectly, but I am tired of hearing that as an excuse for intentional failure.
I am glad F.D. Roosevelt was a great wartime leader. I am sorry he had affairs that when later leaked encourage tolerance vice through his well earned status as war time leader. Can’t I at least try for both?
I prefer the morality of the first Roosevelt to the second . . . and the first was as great a president.
Just because a thing is legal does not make it moral.
The undermining of general civic morality (and its wholesome civil religion) has not led to increased secularism, but to an antinomian nation. In many ways (in fact), it would have been better for one form of secularism to triumph! Most people remain Christian, but are afraid to make any judgments. The elites are mostly not Christian, but cannot agree on much of anything either (except in certain areas of sexual ethics where the libertine nature of the movement is evident). Other fighting fiercely for a nation where it is legal to kill your baby and get the blessing of the state for any sexual choice, the secular morality is very divided.
Government encourages the good and discourages evil in two ways. First, it can subsidize what it wants (education of the young for example) and penalize what it does not want (”sin taxes”). This is the blunt and heavy hand of the law and taxation. As important is the second power which is to indirectly encourage the good by public commendation and avoiding (as much as possible) any action which implies support for vice.
Good leaders may not make most bad things illegal, but they have to understand what goodness is in order to know what laws to pass or what to avoid aiding directly or indirectly. Before you vote, don’t just ask what laws Hillary Clinton will pass, but who she will give prizes and commendations to. Who will be the heroes she holds up to the public?
If the secularists win, then (as France demonstrates) they will be unable to establish a moral consensus . . . careening between “rightest” and “leftist” secular definitions of morality. In these basic terms, a Roman Catholic and a Baptist have more in common than the victorious secularists will have. It is easier to get a constitutional and legal consensus about morality from an Eastern Orthodox priest and a traditionalist Orthodox Jewish rabbi than between a social Darwinist and a Bolshevik.
It is important then to ask each candidate what “the good is” in such a situation. When all the prominent members of the Democrat party declare that the Founder’s view of sexual acts is “immoral,” there is cause for concern. Of course, what one says is bad enough, but one does not just need lip service to the good.
It is at this point that the private life of a candidate can also be a clue to what he really believes. Everyone can have a bad marriage, but when a man has a couple . . . then one suspects serial monogamy and not family values. If a man says he accepts the historic American consensus on what the good is that he will help flourish, then he ought to be making a good faith effort to live it.
This can be overdone, of course, like any window into the soul of a candidate. To disqualify after a divorce would have been to eliminate the Rushmore-quality Ronald Reagan . . . whose long second marriage demonstrated that despite early mistakes Ronald and Nancy Reagan had become an ideal example for the nation of second-chance happiness.
It might seem hard to be so demanding of our candidates. Who will be able to run? I suspect that we shall find quite a few eager men and women to do so, however high our standard. In fact, a high standard just might clean up politics or (at the very least) create the happy hypocrisy which is the tribute that vice pays virtue while sparing the rest of us the details of wickedness on the evening news.
Even so, in this libertine age we must bluntly remind anyone running for President that we expect more from our leaders. We cannot do what we demand of them in all cases . . . but then we are not seeking to be leaders of the Free World.
Of all the leading Republican candidates, which one does not just say he favors “family values,” but has lived them?
While no state will make every wickedness and vice “illegal,” neither will it subsidize or encourage any wickedness or vice. All evil tends to its own punishment . . . like a disease left unchecked it will destroy the host. The state need not directly punish all wickedness, but simply keep out the way and allow natural law to do the work.
The government must be careful not to keep the checks of natural law from correcting the citizens lest worst befall them later. For example, when the state subsidizes idleness, it prevents hunger from spurring the idle to work. This continued idleness, left unchecked, will simply lead to worse evils for the lazy person later. Feeding an idle man may be worse than seeing him grow hungry.
The state must punish wickedness and vice that is serious enough that it harms the liberty of others. Murderers must be punished. Thieves must be sent to jail. The good news is that is all it gets to do.
The state can only punish. It is not called to save or heal the criminal, jobs happily left to the church and family. Placing the power to “rehabilitate” the criminal gives church power to the state. Who will say when he is “fixed?” Who will decide how much “fixing” is enough. I will be looking for a President looking to punish the wicked not provide them a secular and cruel salvation through state-run rehabilitation. Such “rehabilitation’ always veers between the overly soft and the tyrannical tormenting.
C.S. Lewis was right when he warned that “rehabilitation” opens the door to endless punishment and limitless state power.
Many of the jails of America have become horrible places. They do not reflect a concern for preserving the dignity of each human being (however fallen) that a rich nation can afford to protect. Prison should punish not brutalize, discipline not torture.
So we have seen that the best candidate for President will be one who demonstrates (in his entire life) a commitment to the old Judeo-Christian ethics (the notion of the good where God gives the rights). He will not want to make every immoral thing illegal, but he will wish to encourage no immoral thing. He will enforce the law with truth and impartiality to the punishment of wickedness and vice, bearing in mind that he is dealing with sinners and not devils.
Is there such a man? Not perfectly, this side of Paradise, but perhaps we can find the best of this lot!