On 15th November it was announced that the majority of Australians had voted in a referendum supporting the introduction of a bill into Parliament legalising same-sex marriage. The result was not a surprise and came in a long line of indicators pointing to a paradigm shift in the collective thinking of western societies. What interests me here is that the supporters of same-sex marriage with their message that ‘all love is equal’, portray the outcome as a moral victory. For them the result represents the triumph of the forces of right over the forces of wrong. We who are Christians need to digest this type of reaction and realise that what large numbers of people in the western world count as moral has radically changed in recent decades. We are living through a time when a new morality is coming to dominate the horizon, one which measures its progress in direct proportion to the discarding of a morality with roots in a Judeo-Christian heritage.
This trend requires those of us who are followers of Christ to do some serious thinking, especially if we are to understand and respond to our non-Christian colleagues and friends.
Let me make a few comments and offer some evaluation:
(1) A new type of morality
A mistake that many Christians make is to think that during the last few decades morality has disappeared altogether; we hear talk of moral breakdown or a collapse in morality. Of course from a Biblical standpoint this is partly true; Christian morality is sadly disappearing from view in western societies and we daily face the consequences. But for many people today, morality is alive and well; with our love, peace and tolerance creed we are actually more moral than previously. No longer do we condemn a person for their sexual preference; no longer do we censure a couple for having a child out of wedlock; no longer do we insist that a woman keep her baby when to do so would adversely affect her career; no longer do we try to convert someone to our religion. Today we live and let live and tolerate every lifestyle choice and decision as equally valid and right for the person who makes it. This is the thrust of the new morality and the world over, governments, transnational corporations, international institutions like the EU and UN plus most of media promote this creed with a missionary zeal. Dissenters must be exposed and vilified: they have no place in this new era of respect and tolerance. A worldview that had its origins in the thinking of an urban liberal elite has now gone global, seeking to convert everyone to its creed.
(2) Christians are the immoral ones
If once the church was considered to hold the high moral ground, the opposite is now held to be true. In particular Bible-believing churches have been assigned the low moral ground. Followers of the new morality openly despise people who defend Christianity morality. In their estimation, Christians stand in the way of justice and equality, especially for minority groups. Accordingly, strong measures to enforce the new morality are required; nobody must be allowed to stand in the way of the new rights for women, LGBTQ people etc.
(3) There is history here
It’s important to realise that this new approach to morality is not really new. Even if we cast our minds back into the early twentieth century, almost all of the seeds of the new morality were planted in the United Kingdom by the folk who made up what became known as The Bloomsbury Set, a group of intellectuals connected to Cambridge University who included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. In the early part of the century, the Bloomsbury folk advocated – and sought to live out – a wholescale sexual revolution. They mocked the idea of marriage, celebrated homosexuality, promoted the idea of free love and raised their children without discipline and boundaries. To them reality was not fixed by God, it was a fluid human social construction which could be remoulded to suit their preferences. No longer were there any absolutes; the world was relative. Does this sound familiar?
One way to understand current perspectives on sexuality is to realise that this group of artists, philosophers and intellectuals really won the day in Britain. By the 1960s, through ideas taught first in its universities and later in schools by a new breed of ‘progressive-minded’ teachers, the nation was put through a revolution. The BBC of course had a big part to play. By the time that Tony Blair’s government was elected in 1997, the cabinet was made up of the children of the sixties’ rebel generation, folks who had rejected a Judeo-Christian morality, in part no doubt because of some of the hypocrisy they saw in it. By 2017 the revolution is complete; we have now raised up a whole generation who have little sense that the world could be interpreted in any other way than through the liberal lens.
(4) The new morality means worshiping the creature not the Creator
So much for the history, but for Christians, as we seek to think Biblically about the world, how are we to understand and evaluate the new morality? Call them what you like, the changes in the western world represent nothing less a thoroughly human-centred approach to morality. We need to realise that what is in fact being defended and promoted is the right of every human being to define reality their way and live life on their terms. Or to put this another way, the new morality involves the individual assuming the role of God, believing that they have the right to live life in whichever way that seems right to them. It is this creed that has been absolutised. What the new morality insists upon is nothing less than an acceptance of humanism as the only worldview option permitted to shape society and the silencing of all others. There’s nothing tolerant about that.
Clearly, in seeking to understand today’s society we can in fact go far further back than the Bloomsbury Set. The new morality is really little more than a restatement of the old temptation that Satan offered to Eve in the Garden of Eden: “You shall be as God, deciding good and evil for yourself”. You have the right to decide how you shall live. The new morality represents a worldview that celebrates freedom from God and His law; even worse it is often the freedom to sin and call it good.
(5) Sin harms us
We must not lose sight of the reality that Biblical morality, increasingly seen as immoral, is actually good for society. This should not come as a surprise to us, as our Creator knows what’s best for us. If that’s true, tolerating options that contradict the wisdom of God is not wisdom, it is folly. So abandoning gender is not a good plan, it is foolish. Thinking that our parliaments have the authority and ability to redefine the pre-political institution of marriage is also rather silly; we cannot change what God has already established. Marriage is the best option for stability and the raising of children.
(6) God is still God
As we live through these strange but passing times, we Christians need to remember that to believe the temptation presented to Eve is as much folly now as it was all those years ago. We are not God and it is nothing less than idolatry of the deepest kind to think that we can assume His place and role and define life our way. The world is God’s: He created it, defines it and makes up the rules for what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. Life is not fundamentally about self-expression and intensification; it is about the honouring of God through life-transformation and finding our deepest joys in knowing Him.
Image: http://moziru.com/images/peace-clipart-tolerance-3.jpg
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2017-12-05. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.