Politics (and the laws that come from politics) is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from belief.
I have been thinking about a discussion I had with students yesterday about marriage and sexuality, and when I mentioned NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association), they were (rightly) repulsed at the notion, and some asked, “isn’t that illegal?”
Sadly we Christians can’t rely on the law of the land to keep social decay from happening. Politics (and the laws we make) are downstream from culture and belief - that is, we make (or even choose to obey) laws based on what our culture believes to be right. There are laws on the books right now that make sodomy illegal, but today they are either being ignored or reversed. At one time, homosexual behavior was punishable with jail time, but gradually our culture started “looking the other way” and now, sodomy laws are all but unenforcible -- the culture simply doesn’t want to enforce them. What’s to stop us from eventually losing our revulsion to pederasty and bestiality? What is the use in saying "that's not natural?" What is natural?
The point I am making here is not about the subject of sexual practice. I am only using it as an example to reveal what we generally assume about law and government. We, almost unconsciously, think that things we don’t approve of can and will be controlled by the law and its enforcement. This view is actually backward. Our only hope for a civil society is for people to have inner limits -- inner limits that then become law as a result of majority belief. Beliefs that flow downstream into law. Laws are like locks on doors or police tape around a crime scene. They are primarily there to remind honest people of the limits of their freedom and what belongs to whom. A lock is a deterrent like a yellow police tape is a deterrent: it won’t stop you if you are determined to cross it.
Most people who keep the laws in our society today fall into one of two groups: those who obey an internal sense of right and wrong and those who are afraid of the consequences of breaking the law (the ticket, the fine, the jail sentence). The proportion of the obedient to the dissuaded in this first group becomes clear whenever the power goes out. When lights go off and electronic security systems go down, and no one can see...how many are willing to do the right thing even when no one can catch you? I have never seen statistics, but in my own head, I think we used to be about 70/30, but now we are more like 40/60. The law is no better than a door lock or police tape to stop a majority of looting when the opportunity presents itself. The only hope we have to avoid mob rule is INSIDE the person.
This interior limit is guided by a picture of what God would have us be. Better than a fear of prosecution (from God or police), we have a love for the God who redeemed us, and in that motivation, we have our civilization. Yes, you can have a peaceful civilization based on fear of penalty, but that requires putting our selves in the hands of a government that must be our highest authority, and that usually ends in tyranny (as even governors, presidents, and kings need to be under the rule of God’s law: Lex Rex, not Rex Lex).
We train our children to have an internal compass of right and wrong. They SHOULD be repulsed by certain behaviors, and attracted by others. So education (as we have said) is more than teaching facts about the world -- it is about training the heart to love the right things. Without a clear picture of this, revulsions change over time (there are some film scenes that we tolerate and even enjoy today that would have shocked and repulsed our grandparents - we usually assume this is the result of their prudery not our licentiousness, but should we be so sure?), so our sense of revulsion is poor protection from decline.
Knowing that once we are no longer repulsed we won’t enforce the law, many organizations attempt to desensitize us, or change our levels and objects of revulsion first, so that laws can be more easily changed or ignored later through the indifference of the people. The process is two fold: first, undermine this inner compass of right and wrong. The best way to do that is to undermine families, schools, and churches as these are the entities that train us. Isn’t it interesting that these three are under such pressure these days to redefine their structures, syllabi, and doctrines? Once these are successfully undermined, the next step is to sound very reasonable and compassionate and repeat the claim that the repulsive thing is not really all that bad - in fact it is beautiful. (for one example, read some of the descriptions on the NAMBLA website).
Those who defend the family, church, and school or resist the new claims will be called (at best) old-fashioned, out of step with the times, or (at worst) haters of various innocent groups (races, the poor, the sick, the oppressed) -- all the typical fear-prone words you hear used to pressure people to give up their opposition. Why do people fear being called these things? Because then they will be perceived as out of the game, no longer a part of the mainstream, isolated, opponents of progress, or success, and they won’t be invited to the right parties... but these are the temptations of our day. These are OUR tests. Are we going to stand for God and the truth, or are we going to compromise and go with the crowd? Our souls are in the balance, as well as our civilization.
We cannot not rely on our laws to keep us from declining as a civilization. Our laws are no more protection than a police tape, and are voted on by majority rule. And we can’t rely on our revulsions to tell us what laws to enforce. One generation is repulsed by what the next generation embraces. It turns out (just like the bible says) everything hinges on what we believe and whether we continue to believe it when the pressure is on. This leads to the question of what to believe, and ultimately, to the specific question of whether or not a certain Jewish carpenter came out of the grave.
