Christian Relativism?

During 1957, the novel Doctor Zhivago (the manuscript having earlier been smuggled out of the USSR) was published in the West. Though the author, Boris Pasternak, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, he was forced by the Soviet Union’s communist government to decline the award. Their outrage and humiliation, a consequence of the novel’s poignant portrayal of life within the Soviet dystopia, found them laboring feverishly to undermine the author’s work and credibility. Not long after, the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote:

Communism is not at home with nonpolitical categories, and it cannot deal with a phenomenon which is not in some way political. It is characteristic of the singular logic of Stalinist-Marxism that when it incorrectly diagnoses some phenomenon as “political,” it corrects the error by forcing the thing to become political. (Disputed Questions)

The overt politicization of virtually every issue of consequence was an intellectually dishonest, and coercive tactic which sought, intentionally, to divorce from the issues under discussion, the moral and spiritual dimensions which those same issues relied upon, uniquely and fundamentally, for value and meaning. In so doing, they crippled debate and reason. Truth and virtue were the first casualties of that ethos.

Indeed, it struck me, while visiting Moscow not long before the USSR’s collapse, that a full generation would probably pass before the Russian people might reacquire their moral and ethical bearings and equilibrium.

Principled political leadership would never seek to cultivate such an intellectually dishonest, coercive and morally bereft environment. Anywhere. For any reason.

Sadly, in the United States, this phenomenon is now becoming endemic to our own political milieu, welcoming (as it eventually must) a weird, disorienting and malleable sort of morality of convenience which eventuates in cultural decline … rendering our collective soul hollow and wanting. Chronic hypocrisy and double standards gut our moral authority, encouraging ethical anarchism attended by a damning myopia.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his famous Templeton Address, offered this penetrating insight:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval.

But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty-million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Over the last several decades, throughout the West, Christianity has often encountered hostility and ridicule when its values have conflicted with the aims and morality of certain political agendas. More than a few Christian thinkers have rightly noted with growing alarm our culture’s increasing reliance on the politicizing of essentially moral and ethical issues. At other times, though, we have witnessed a cunning appropriation of Christianity’s language (and, ostensibly, its aims), by the political class, while, nevertheless, ignoring its implications, obligations, values and spirit, all in an effort to enlist the support of earnest, well meaning Christians.

By falling prey to these cloying attempts to draft the Christian community’s support, more than a few well intentioned Christians have, at times, unwittingly not only engaged in the very sort of situational ethics and moral relativism they have long eschewed, but have empowered individuals and groups whose aims are antithetical to a Christian ethos, and good government.

This growing willingness to excuse or ignore flagrant hypocrisy and the glaring inconsistencies of those who appear to champion our cause, has led to the near ceaseless suspension of disbelief, in a desperate bid to cling to tribal myths. All the while sacrificing our witness and moral authority in the heedless pursuit and maintenance of political power.

By blindly embracing a tenuous apologia, have we supported and even fueled our growing irrelevancy, believing that engagement requires a relaxation of moral and spiritual imperatives, persuading ourselves that the lesser of two evils is somehow good, rather than something less than good; and, in fact, still evil?

Paul, in his letter to Timothy, warns us against those whose ambitions serve neither God, nor the good of others, but rather their own narrow ambitions.

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. (2 Tim 3:1-5)

I find of particular interest the words “having a form of godliness but denying its power”. Though eagerly claiming Christianity in word, these men and women routinely and habitually deny God’s authority and rule in their own lives in any meaningful fashion. The grave danger posed by that particular brand of hypocrisy and cunning is its unique capacity for insidiously breeding corruption and decay among those under its sway. It introduces to the body politic, and the people under its rule, more than a spiritual pathogen; it injects a deadly poison.

Has an embrace of the transactional politics now so common place in our civic life given birth to a grotesque revival of the Popes and Princes brand of Medieval Christianity? Such a Christianity is healthy for neither the Church or the State. A Christianity of convenience isn’t just an oxymoron, it’s an impossibility and a fraud. As jingoism is to authentic patriotism, this brand of “Christianity” bears no resemblance to true fidelity to Christ, to loving God and those He has called us to serve.

Political leadership which has a diminished understanding of virtue’s role in governing, in leading, is no champion of the Church’s cause. Individual leaders for whom virtue is an impediment to their aims and desires, doesn’t animate their motivations and actions, mock by their indifference to its demands the very virtue they pretend to defend. This is not leadership that Christians can either admire or embrace. Such a studied indifference to virtue is an intentional denial of God’s authority and rule. Pride, vanity, dishonesty and selfish impulsiveness are the unmistakable marks of such leaders.

Christians walk a fine line in our political engagement. While we must lead engaged lives, our allegiance and trust belong, alone, to God. We don’t seek alliances as much as we seek to live as the “salt of the earth,” cautiously remembering that compromise robs “salt … of … its saltiness”, rendering it “no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” Our trust remains firmly in God, and our personal ethos reflective of an allegiance to the values discovered in his word; an allegiance which might sometimes require a tactical retreat from choices which encourage compromise in order to participate.

The Psalmist captures well the happy state (and determined commitment) of those for whom God’s word is inextricably bound to the values and obligations it expresses …

Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing. Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. (Psalm 146:3-5)