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Imprimis, On Line -- April, 1993
Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
435,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
institution known for its defense of free market
principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
For more information on free print subscriptions or
back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-439-1524,
ext. 2319.
---------------------------------------------
"Can We Be Good Without God?"
by Chuck Colson
Founder, Prison Fellowship
Recipient, 1993 Templeton Prize
---------------------------------------------
Volume 22, Number 4
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
April 1993
---------------------------------------------
Preview: There have been many explanations offered for
social problems like crime and drug abuse in American
society. But, as Chuck Colson argues, most of these
explanations, even when they touch upon the breakdown
of values, avoid addressing the fundamental question,
"Can we be good without God?" His remarks were
delivered at the 73rd Shavano Institute for National
Leadership seminar, "Culture Wars," in Palm Beach,
Florida, for over 400 business and community leaders
from around the country.
---------------------------------------------
Last December, newspapers ran a striking photograph of
a group of people held at bay by armed guards. They
were not rioters or protesters; they were Christmas
carolers. The town of Vienna, Virginia, had outlawed
the singing of religious songs on public property. So
these men, women, and children were forced to sing
"Silent Night" behind barricades, just as if this were
Eastern Europe under communist rule instead of
Christmas in America in 1992.
We have spent the past 30 years determined to
secularize our society. Somemonths before the incident
in Virginia, the U.S.Supreme Court ruled in Lee vs.
Weisman that a rabbi who delivered a very politically
correct "To Whom It May Concern" prayer at a Rhode
Island junior high school commencement had violated the
constitutional rights of a fifteen-year-old student in
the audience. The Court said, in effect, that the girl
must be legally protected against listening to views
she disagreed with. There was a time when it was a mark
of civility to listen respectfully to different views;
now you have a constitutional right to demand that
those views are not expressed in your presence.
In another case that went all the way to the
Supreme Court, visual religious symbols have been
banned. Zion, Illinois, in the "heartland of America,"
was forced to eliminate the cross featured in its city
seal, because the Justices ruled it a breach of the
First Amendment.
In education, the same kind of court-enforced
secularism has been so successful that teachers may
hand out condoms in school, but they are forbidden to
display a copy of the Ten Commandments on a bulletin
board. Students, meanwhile, may indulge in almost any
kind of activity in school, but they are forbidden to
pray.
The Supreme Court is not the only institution out
to protect us from the "threat" faith poses. The media
assault upon religious believers has been fierce.
Cardinal O' Connor has been excoriated by the New York
Times for even suggesting that he might deny the
sacraments to a pro-choice legislator. (This was the
same New York Times that praised a Louisiana archbishop
who refused to administer communion to a segregationist
legislator in 1962.)
In February of 1993, the Washington Post featured
a front-page article that characterized evangelical
Christians as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to
command." If a journalist said that about any other
group in America, he would be fired on the spot, but
the Post didn't fire anyone. It merely expressed
surprise that many readers found the description
offensive. A few days later, one of the bemused editors
explained that they felt they were simply printing
something that is "universally accepted."
It is no wonder that Peter Berger, professor of
sociology at Boston University, says that if you look
around the world you will find that the most religious
country is India, and the most irreligious country is
Sweden--and America is an interesting combination of
Indians who are governed by Swedes.
A Post-Christian Society
These Swedes have done their job well. In 1962, polls
indicated that at least 65 percent of all Americans
believed the Bible to be true. In 1992, polls indicate
that only 32 percent do, while 50 percent say that they
actually fear fundamentalists. If the polls are right,
our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the
foundation of our values. We have become a post-
Christian society.
The process of "shedding" our religion began with
the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which exalted
existentialism and a kind of "live-for-the-moment-God-
is-dead-or-irrelevant" philosophy. Today, that Sixties
philosophy has become mainstream; it is in the White
House, it is in the poetry of Maya Angelou, it is in
every walk of life. This is not to say that people
aren't going to church. Forty-four percent of the
American people still attend religious services
regularly. But we live in a Donahue-ized culture in
which we sit and watch, hour by hour, the banality that
passes for knowledge on television, and we rarely think
about issues in terms of Judeo-Christian truth. We hear
carolers singing "Silent Night" or an invocation at a
public ceremony and we are filled with trepidation; we
are worried that we are infringing upon the rights of
nonbelievers. We see the symbol of the cross and we
feel compelled to paint it out because it might violate
the principle of separation between church and state.
We exalt tolerance, not truth, as the ultimate virtue.
The City of Man
Can we really sustain the city of man without the
influence of the City of God? St. Augustine argued that
it was impossible.
Any society, especially a free society, depends on
a moral consensus and on shared assumptions: What is
ultimate reali ty? What is meaningful in life? By what
standards should we be governed? These common values
are the glue that holds society together.
In America, the glue is wearing pretty thin. We
are in the middle of an identity crisis in which we are
attempting to redefine our basic values all over again.
We can no longer assume that right and wrong have clear
meanings or that there is universal truth. After all,
pollsters tell us that sixty-seven percent of the
American people say there is no such thing.
What we fail to realize, however, is that
rejecting transcendental truth is tantamount to
committing national suicide. A secular state cannot
cultivate virtue--an old-fashioned word you don't hear
much in public discourse these days. In his classic
novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the 19th century Russian
novelist Dostoyevsky asked, essentially, "Can man be
good without God?" In every age, the answer has been
no. Without a restraining influence on their nature,
men will destroy themselves. That restraining influence
might take many abstract forms, as it did for the
Greeks and Romans, or it might be the God of the Old
and the New Testaments. But it has always served the
same purpose.
Even before Dostoyevsky posed his timeless
question, an 18th century German professor of logic and
metaphysics, Immanuel Kant, had already dismissed it as
irrelevant. God exists, said Kant, but he is separate
from the rest of life. Over here are the things that we
can empirically know; over there are things we can
accept only on faith. What does that do to ethics?
Kant's answer was to separate them from faith; we can,
on our own, with only our rational capacities to depend
upon, develop what he called the "categorical
imperative." He explained: "Act as if the maxim from
which you act were to become through your will a
universal law."
This rational, subjective view is the basis of
ethics being taught in nearly every school in America
today, from Public Grammar School No. 1 to Harvard
Business School. Students are never exposed to
traditional moral teaching in school, only to
rationalism. Pragmaticism and utilitarianism are
substituted for Judeo-Christian ethics, and students
are taught that they have the inner capacity to do good
rationally, apart from God.
The Danger of Self-Righteousness
Nothing could be more dangerous. Let me give you a case
study: Chuck Colson. I grew up in the Depression years.
My dad, who was the son of a Swedish immigrant, used to
tell me two things on Sunday afternoon. Although no one
in my family had ever gone to college, he said, "If you
work hard, you can get to the top. That's the American
dream." And the second thing he used to say was,
"Always tell the truth. No matter what you do in life,
always tell the truth."*
I kept both of these pieces of advice in mind as I
grew up, earned a scholarship to college and then went
on to law school. I also remembered them when I joined
a very successful law firm and years later in 1969 when
President Nixon asked me to come to work at the White
House. I took everything I had earned and put it into a
blind trust. (If you want to make a small fortune, let
me tell you how: You take a large fortune and put it in
a blind trust.) I did everything to avoid even the
appearance of a conflict of interest. I passed
unsolicited gifts on to my employees. I refused to see
people whom I had practiced law with or made business
deals with--I mean, I really had studied Kant's
categorical imperative, and I knew that I would always
do right.
What happened? I went to prison.
Why? Because we are never more dangerous than when
we are feeling self-righteous. We have an infinite
capacity for this feeling and for the self-
justification that accompanies it. It was only when
Jesus Christ came into my life that I was able to see
myself for who I am. Indeed, it is only when we all
turn to God that we begin to see ourselves as we really
are--as fallen sinners desperately in need of His
restraint and His grace.
Kant's philosophy, like much Enlightenment
thought, was based on a flawed view of human nature
that held that men are basically good and, if left to
their own devices, will almost always do good things.
It was also dead wrong in assuming that the categorical
imperative could take the place of moral law. Just
because men can think the right thing, it does not mean
that they will heed it. Remember Pierre, one of the
central characters in Tolstoy's War and Peace? Torn by
spiritual agonies, he cried out to God, "Why is it that
I know what is right and I do what is wrong?" We can
know what is right, but we don't always have the will
to do what is right.
How Shall We Live?
In books like Mere Christianity and The Abolition of
Man, the 20th century British Christian apologist C.S.
Lewis attempted to refute Kant and make a powerful
intellectual case for the City of God that did not wall
it off from the city of man. In an essay entitled, "Men
Without Chests," he drew an analogy between the
spiritual life and the body that sums up his objections
to the supreme rationalism of the Enlightenment. The
head, Lewis said, is reason, and the stomach is passion
or appetite. The head alone cannot control the stomach.
It needs the chest, which is spirit, to restrain our
baser passions and appetites.
Yet after World War II schools began to teach
ethics based on subjective standards without
transcendent moral truths. Lewis challenged this,
writing, "We make men without chests and we expect of
them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and we
are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate
and bid the geldings be fruitful." That is what we are
doing in America today. We are taking away the
spiritual element and abandoning morality based on
religious truth, counting instead on our heads and our
subjective feelings to make us do what is right.
In our zeal to accommodate our so-called
enlightened and tolerant age, we have lost the ideal of
public virtue. I am reminded of Samuel Johnson, who,
upon learning that one of his dinner guests believed
morality was merely a sham, said to his butler, "Well,
if he really believes that there is no distinction
between virtue and vice, let us count the spoons before
he leaves." Today, there aren't any spoons left to
count. Look at Washington, Wall Street, academia,
sports, the ministry--all the spoons are gone because
we can no longer distinguish between virtue and vice.
Recovering that ability depends on asking the
right questions. Our brightest and best leaders are
concerned with the question, "How shall we be
governed?" But in the Book of Ezekiel the Jews asked:
"How shall we live?" It doesn't matter who governs if
society has no spiritual element to guide it. Unless we
learn how to live--as men with chests--we are doomed.
The City of God
I have seen this truth most powerfully in the area in
which I've been called to spend my life. With the help
of my friend Jack Eckerd and others, I work with men
and women in prison in 54 countries around the world.
The crisis is grave. In Washington, D.C., for example,
46 percent of the inner city black population between
the ages of 18 and 31 is either in prison, on parole,
or on probation. America as a whole has the highest per
capita rate of incarceration in the world, and, for the
last 25 years, the crime rate has gone up every year.
We can't build prisons fast enough. In the last seven
years, we have seen a 120 percent increase in murders
committed by those between the ages of 18 and 20.
According to some sources, twenty percent of all
schoolchildren carry a weapon.
Criminologist James Q. Wilson, among others, has
tried to identify the root cause of this epidemic of
violence. When he began his inquiry, he was certain
that he would discover that in the great period of
industrial revolution in the latter half of the 19th
century there was a tremendous increase in crime. But,
to his astonishment, he discovered a decrease. And then
he looked at the years of the Great Depression. Again,
there was a significant decrease in crime. Frustrated
by these findings which upset all our preconceived
notions, Wilson decided to search for a single factor
to correlate. The factor he found was religious faith.
When crime should have been rising in the late
1800s because of rapid urbanization, industrialization,
and economic dislocation, Victorian morality was
sweeping across America. It was a time of intense
spirituality. It was not until the conscious rejection
of Victorian morality during the Roaring Twenties that
crime went up. This was the era when Sigmund Freud's
views were coming into vogue among "thinking"
Americans: people weren't evil, just misguided or
mistreated, or they required better environments. Sin
was regarded as a lot of religious claptrap.
The crime rate did not decline again until the
Great Depression, a time of people banding together in
the face of crisis. Wilson concluded, therefore, that
crime was in large part caused by a breakdown of
morality. Since 1965 the crime rate has steadily risen.
In the same period, religious faith has waned. We have
told people there are no absolutes and that they are
not responsible for their own behavior. They are simply
victims of a system that isn't working anymore and they
don't have to worry about it because the government is
going to fix it for them. We thought that in this brave
new world we could create the perfect secular utopia.
But the secular utopia is in reality the nightmare we
see as we walk through the dark, rotten holes we call
prisons all across America.
In this context, it always amazes me when I listen
to politicians say, "We are going to win the war on
drugs by building prisons, appointing more judges, and
putting more police on the beat. I remember when
President Bush announced the "War on Drugs." Having
spent seven months in prison, there wasn't one night
that I did not smell marijuana burning. If you can get
marijuana into a prison, with watchtowers, inspections,
and prison guards, you can get it into a country. You
can send the U.S. Marines to Colombia to burn all the
fields, seal all the borders, and build all the prisons
you want, but you won't stop drug use in this country
because it isn't a problem of supply; it is a problem
of demand. When there is no greater value in the lives
of so many people than simply fulfilling individual
desires and gratifications, then crime and drug abuse
become inevitable. The soaring crime rate is powerful
testimony to the failure of the city of man, deprived
of the moral influence of the City of God.
If we cannot be good without God, how do we
sustain public virtue in society? We cannot do it
through the instrument of politics. Alasdair MacIntyre,
moral philosopher at Notre Dame, says that "Politics
has become civil war carried on by other means."
Without moral authority to call upon, our elected
leaders are reduced to saying, "We can't say that this
is right and that's wrong. We simply prefer that you
wouldn't murder." And crime and drug abuse are not the
only results of this loss of moral authority. Forty-
four percent of the baby boomers say that there is no
cause that would lead them to fight and die for their
country.
In the city of man, there is no moral consensus,
and without a moral consensus there can be no law.
Chairman Mao expressed the alternative well: in his
view, morality begins at the muzzle of a gun.
There has never been a case in history in which a
society has been able to survive for long without a
strong moral code. And there has never been a time when
a moral code has not been informed by religious truth.
Recovering our moral code--our religious truth--is the
only way our society can survive. The heaping ash
remains at Auschwitz, the killing fields of Southeast
Asia, and the frozen wastes of the gulag remind us that
the city of man is not enough; we must also seek the
City of God.
---------------------------------------------
Charles Colson, former special counsel to President
Richard Nixon, is a highly acclaimed author, speaker,
and commentator. He is founder and chairman of Prison
Fellowship, a ministry devoted to helping prisoners,
ex-prisoners, victims, and their families. Born Again,
Colson's international best seller, detailed his
conversion to Christianity in 1973. His other widely
read books include Life Sentence, Loving God, Who
Speaks for God?, Kingdoms in Conflict, Against the
Night, The God of Stones and Spiders, The Body (with
Ellen Vaughan), and Why America Doesn't Work (with Jack
Eckerd). He also writes a regular column for
Christianity Today and appears regularly in the
national press and on radio and television. He is the
recipient of the 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in
Religion.
###
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