Unchaining from the Sun

Moral Standards and Self-Governance

Photo by Ignat Kushnarev on Unsplash

The people at The Stream were good enough to publish my article, The Left Can No Longer Govern Itself. From the article:

The last couple of weeks have been very revealing, not just about our political landscape, but our nation’s moral landscape as well. I have a personal belief that has been reinforced by recent events: The political Left has so disconnected itself from objective ethical standards that it lacks the ability to self-govern. The Right, however, still maintains its ability to appeal to moral goods to reflect on its own movement.

And later,

This has become one of the clarifying differences between the Left and the Right: The Right still has a moral standard by which to judge evil, and the Left does not. As our political landscape stands now, there seems to be no bad idea the Left will not embrace or ignore in order to gain political advantage.

I wrote this as a reaction to what I perceive to be just the latest round of events making headlines and making my point. The last several years have been full of these kinds of events. From “mostly peaceful protests,” and the “Summer of Love,” to, “Antifa doesn’t exist,” the political and cultural Left is engaged in a no-holds-barred assault on what you can see with your own eyes.

This should be a wake-up call to rational and thoughtful people. A person does not need to go “full MAGA” to leave behind an ideology intent on banging its head against reality over and over and taking as many people with it as it possibly can. All a person needs to do is openly disagree with the moral and economic insanity being proposed.

But it doesn’t happen to any noticeable degree. And my article talks about why. The modern Left has disconnected itself from objective moral and ethical standards, so it has thrown away every conceivable ethical guardrail. The Ideology is now king. The Revolution is all that matters. The only people who can be wrong are those outside the inner political ring.

Many, of course, will reply that there are Christians who are Progressive, or on the Left. They, however, have not made their voices heard to any significant degree. The things they say in response to assassinations, riots, and child trafficking tend to be nit-picking issue-avoiding complaints about the Right. It is mostly a slippery form of victim blaming.

In order for a worldview, or a grand narrative, to have long-term staying power, it needs to be connected to objective moral truths. It needs to be submitted to reality. Reality, after all, will always win in the end. The longer an ideology denies obvious truths (the difference between criminals and victims, the difference between men and women), the more it needs to rely on lies, coercion, and gaslighting.

This is one of the grand truths about the Christian faith. It believes that the human heart needs to be confronted with truth in love. Persuasion is the name of the game, not manipulation. Sure, individuals have failed that standard, but the standard keeps drawing us back. Jesus wants us to “repent,” to “believe” in him. He doesn’t want Christians to frighten or cajole others into belief. A belief coerced isn’t true belief, after all.

The standard is our means of self-governance. Once an objective standard becomes fuzzy, the game is up.