Letter #124: Impractical Magic
You Can't Give it Up If it Ain't Yours
Sproing.
I can’t match obscure musical references with you since I rarely listen to any song composed after Irving Berlin died. Those dad-blamed Beatles with their floppy hair and silly getups can just stow that racket and get off my lawn.
But I can connect your thought to another which has been on my mind a lot lately.
You’re surely right. Love involves sacrifice. The potential for sacrifice at the very least. To put God’s good above your own, and your neighbor’s good on a level with your own, is to risk running into situations where you have to do what you don’t want to do and get what you don’t want to get. Like crucified, for example. Which is really bad! And even if things don’t devolve that far, you may still have to sacrifice a job or a friend or your social media presence for love of something that is not yourself.
Which brings up an important point. Christianity is not a practical religion. Follow it closely enough and you may become a saint, which almost never ends well.
This may be why Jesus tells us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Because you can’t rightly demand sacrifice of others so you can’t rightly justify most political acts in Christian terms. Or to put it another way, when someone does justify political acts in Christian terms, he is almost always acting in bad faith.
You’ll hear someone promote welfare programs, for instance, by saying that Jesus asked you to give your money to the poor. But he never asked you to give someone else’s money to the poor. That’s just theft. Same problem when a politician tells us we need to lay down our lives for our “friends” in Ukraine or England or Israel, because greater love hath no man than this. You’re gonna need a much better argument than that before you lay down the lives of others.
This lack of practicality speaks into our subject: the challenges of faith in the trans-human world. Because if someone takes a pill that ends his depression while leaving him mired in the spiritual slough that caused his depression, or if someone has sex with a cute robo-girl because she feels good as real but doesn’t criticize his bad habits, who are we to tell him he should sacrifice the pleasure he desires in the name of love?
See, I think part of the situation we’re facing is this: the moment Christianity acquires any sort of political power, it becomes corrupt by definition. Because love involves sacrifice and sacrificial love must be chosen freely to be what it is. Which means the great gobs of money brought in by garbage pharmaceuticals and robo-sex toys will have nothing to oppose them but a still, small voice crying in the wilderness of the sinful human heart.
This is not a bug of our religion, it’s a feature. But accepting the ramifications — that too will be a sacrifice.
Love, Dad
Whew! This is really getting to the heart of the central question: what is—or should be—the connection between Divine (religious) law and civil law, or even just moral law (whose morality?) and civil law? And what should be our role in advancing or defending—or ceding—that connection?
Obviously America’s Founders thought it was a pretty close relationship, but they had the benefit of operating within a culture solidly grounded in Judeo-Christian tradition and its moral order. We are, increasingly, no longer so fortunate.
So to what extent should we as Christian individuals put our energy towards the collective action needed to resist the cultural decay? To restore the moral order that, say, preserves the legal definition (and thus rights) of a woman as an “adult human female”? Or the legal definition of marriage (and thus the foundational family unit) as between one man and one woman?
Politics is downstream of culture, or so they say, and so if we are losing the culture, what is our path? Are we to cede the effort to use the power of law—which is the whole project of politics—to preserve our Judeo-Christian values? How does following individual conscience, with its sacrifices, fit with maintaining the collective political will to hold space, in our (supposedly) democratic republic, to live by conscience rather than lies?
In a (semi)nutshell: What is the difference between Christian teachings informing our personal path and politics, and Christian teachings informing our collective political action? I would love to know. Because if serving the highest good of others is the fundamental ask of a Christian, am I actually doing that if I step out of the way of another bringing serious harm upon themselves, or, more the point, into society as a whole? What’s my actual role, politically speaking, in protecting the innocent, preserving space for innocence? As a Christian of good conscience, how gently must I go into the coming dark night?
"Which brings up an important point. Christianity is not a practical religion. Follow it closely enough and you may become a saint, which almost never ends well."
Well now that depends on what is meant by Ends Well. Yes Yes you die rather uncomfortably, but then You Get To Go Home.