Considering how many years ago the Puritan tribe died out, why do Liberals still take the trouble to bash them?  They do it because they are so much like them; they aspire to the same place in society.

True, Liberalism is an odd sort of Puritanism.  You may sleep with anyone, but you had better not forget to recycle.  You may have an abortion, but you had better not think of wearing fur.  Much of this is what the psychologists call compensation.  I am indignant about the killing of seal babies because I have killed my human babies.  Compassion for little animals shows that I am a Nice Person after all.

The cardinal point of similarity is that Liberals seek the same kind of psychic income that Puritans used to receive.  They crave the satisfaction of knowing that they are Nice People, and of knowing that everyone else knows just who the Nice People are.  The indispensable credential for being Nice is to hold Liberal opinions.

True, it doesn’t seem Nice to be smug, and Liberals aren’t good at hiding this feature of their character.  But they do have a mode of concealment which wasn’t available to Puritans, because Puritans confessed to having moral principles, and Liberals don’t.

Us?   Sanctimonious?  You can’t be serious.  Don’t you know that our cardinal principle is non-judgmentalism?  The judgmentalists are those other people -- the moralists, the prigs, the prudes, the haters – who should all go straight to hell.

“Decent” is one of those interesting words with multiple meanings.  It can mean “honest and moral,” it can mean “good, though not the best,” and it can mean “fitting to be shown or talked about in public.”

Decent folk find it uncomfortable to hear mention of unseemly things.  Their response to what is morally offensive is the same as their approach to bad manners:  The frozen smile that ignores it into oblivion.

In general, this response is a good thing.  It is one of a decent society’s ways of preserving purity and defending against indecency.

But it is not well adapted to more troubled times.  When society is awash in indecency, the decent do not want to hear of it.  The greater the need to speak of it, the less they desire it spoken of.  When persons of good will urge the vocal defense of what shreds of good remain, the decent are inclined to shoot the messenger.

A certain difficult delicacy is therefore necessary, a certain discretion about when to speak and how, even when one is urging virtue -- something which does not come easily to those who grieve over the ruin of Joseph.

Picking up the thread from Saturday’s post and concluding the eight-part series

It might be held that all this talk of light from revelation is bad news for natural law.  Getting people to take natural law seriously is hard enough as it is.  If it gets out that the tradition has been cheating for all these years --  that most of the so-called conclusions of natural reason are cribbed from divine oracles -- then the game is up.  According to the objector, only one cure is possible.  When God comes around with His cheat sheets, honest natural lawyers should say, “No, thank you, I’ll do my own thinking.”  Only then can they expect to be taken seriously in a pluralistic world.

There are two problems with this supposed cure.  First, it is based on a false diagnosis.  When a schoolboy struggling with arithmetic sneaks the answer key, that’s cheating; when he allows the teacher to show him how to work the problem, that isn’t cheating, but honest learning.  The kind of boost that natural reason receives from revelation is not the former kind but the latter.

The second problem with the supposed cure is that it has been tried.  That was the Enlightenment’s project.  Little by little, natural law thinkers scrubbed from their little cups of theory whatever grime of influence might have remained from the centuries of faith, whatever benefit they might have gained from the teacher’s help.  First went the idea of nature; then the idea of law; finally, in our day, the idea of thinking the truth.  In the end they found that they had scoured away the ground that they were standing on.

Where does this leave us?  In wading through the mire of an era whose inmates have tired of supposed Enlightenment and loiter at the gates of the Dark, we should not be too glad-handed with the pearls of faith -- “The Bible says!” persuades only those who are already substantially convinced.  But the philosopher should not be afraid of revelation either.  Although much of it concerns supernatural realities that the natural force of reason is too weak to confirm on its own, yet the light that it sheds on the creational realities is shed to the end that the intellect may see them for itself.  Seeing, it may show them to others.  What finally justifies our hope is that they really are there to be seen.

Although Mondays are normally reserved for lightly edited questions from students, today I’m fudging a little.  This is a question from a teacher about what his student had said.

Query:

We had a heated discussion in the government class I teach after I assigned an online article of yours in which you claimed that it's impossible to be a bad man and a great statesman.  Here's what one of my students wrote:

“I've been thinking a lot about whether a bad man can be a great statesman.  I know that this is possible from history.  David lusted after women, killed the innocent and lied.  I'm not saying I judge him for that -- I respect his choice by God -- but he did commit all these evils, and he was corrupt.  Or look at Jefferson.  I would say he was a good statesman, but we now know that he had illegitimate children with his slaves.  FDR was morally flawed -- he cheated on his wife.  I'm not defending sin.  I just have a difficult time hearing Christians criticize anyone for his actions.  Do any of these critics respond with forgiveness, as they are commanded to do?  Some, probably, but the vast majority sit on their high horses.  Their righteousness is like filthy rags.  That's why I can't agree to the author's otherwise persuasive argument.”

What do you think?

Reply :

It’s striking how readily people soak up ideas from the secular culture and then put a Christian spin on them.  Your student’s reasoning is that since anyone can be forgiven, therefore we are not entitled to judge the character of those who ask to rule us -- instead we should forgive them.  What he overlooks is that only those who repent of their wrongdoing can be forgiven for it, and that rulers in general are much

more well known for obstinate persistence in evil than for repentance.  Because some obstinate sins are even more reckless and dangerous to the common good than others, as citizens we have both a right and a need to judge the character of those who rule us.  Your student judges only those “filthy” citizens who try.

Since your student is trying to reason from the Bible, you might point out to him that the Bible actually requires certain kinds of judgment.  For example, Christ demands in 7:24, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment,” and in Matthew 7:16 he warns against those “who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.  You will know them by their fruits.”  Read in context, His famous statement in Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that you be not judged,” is not a condemnation of judgment in general, but of judging others by higher standards than we apply to ourselves.

You might also point out to your student that the sacred writings of the Christian tradition repeatedly emphasizes the need for rulers to have wisdom and virtue.  This theme runs throughout the book of Proverbs, not to mention the historical books of the Old Testament, which link every national calamity to the sins of the rulers and people.  King David was able to do great things not because of his sin, but because of his willingness to repent of his sin.  Would he have been such a great ruler if he had not listened to the prophet Nathan, who called him to judgment?

As I’ve written on this blog, it's true that a bad man may occasionally do something good.  When he does, however, he does it either because of some spark of virtue left in him, or else for some bad motive like admiration or glory -- in other words, by coincidence.  Though such things happen sometimes (rocks sometimes fall from the sky), you can't count on them.  If you want someone you can trust, you should seek a man who is wise and good.  Who could deny that? We shouldn't judge character hypocritically or self-righteously, but we must judge character.

Only a fool would hire a thug to babysit his children, and only a crook would hire a crook to balance his books.  What is it that makes this common sense inapplicable when we hire scoundrels to rule the country?

“The mystery genre is moral in itself, for in it that which was hidden is made plain, justice is achieved, and events often turn on a simple dispensation of grace.”

-- Fred Baue, "Mystery and Morality"