I posted yesterday on this passage from Ray Ortlund’s blog:
Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.
Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.
As I was writing, I remembered a somewhat similar passage from C. S. Lewis:
It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
We may rightly call Lewis’ observation the political application of Dr. Ortlund’s point. I didn’t want to go that direction with my post, so I didn’t reference Lewis at that time. Denver Postcolumnist David Harsanyi did, though, in a recent piece (HT: Shane Vander Hart), applying Lewis’ point squarely to our president and his administration:
This week, President Barack Obama claimed his version of health care reform is “a core ethical and moral obligation,” beseeching religious leaders to promote his government-run scheme. Questioning the patriotism of opponents, apparently, wasn’t gaining the type of traction advocates of “reform” had hoped. . . .
On Team Righteous, we have those who meet their moral obligations; on the other squad, we must have the minions of Beelzebub—by which, of course, we mean profit-driven, child-killing, mob-inciting insurance companies.
Why wasn’t this multidenominational group of pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders offended that a mere earthly servant was summoning the good Lord in an effort to pass legislation? Certainly, one of the most grating habits of the Bush administration was how it framed policy positions in moral absolutes.
As CBS News recently reported, Obama has thrown around the name of God even more often than George W. Bush. Then again, no group couches policy as a moral obligation more than the left. On nearly every question of legislation, there is a pious straw man tugging at the sleeves of the wicked.
The problem with this, as both Lewis and Dr. Ortlund point out, is that it’s the ultimate version of “the end justifies the means”—if “we” are on God’s side and “they” are enemies of the right, the good and the just, then “we” don’t need to worry about any moral constraints, because the rightness of our cause automatically justifies anything we do in its service. This is the kind of thing that makes, at the extremes, a Torquemada, a Lenin, a Dzerzhinsky, a bin Laden—the people who will “torment us without end,” and do so “with the approval of their own conscience” because they know it’s for the best—indeed, because they’re really only doing it for our own good.
This kind of thing doesn’t make for good religion; it doesn’t make for good politics, either. As I said yesterday, the only real antidote to this is humility, and for all the degrees and other qualifications on display in the current White House, humility appears to be one thing that’s in short supply there. Fortunately, one good thing about democratic politics is that it’s usually pretty good about humbling those politicians as need it.
May it come soon.