Social Matter

Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion. People’s thoughts are as thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls. The thoughts of their hearts are too wretched to be sinful. It is perhaps possible to regard it as sin for a worm to nourish such thoughts, but not for a human being, who is created in the image of God… That is why my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There one still feels that those who speak are human beings; there they hate, there they love, there they murder the enemy, curse his descendants through all generations—there they sin.

Growing up Southern Baptist, I can remember going to any number of Worth Waiting For events. At least I think that’s what they were called. Worth Waiting For was just one of many campaigns tailored for church youth groups to raise awareness about the evils of premarital sex. Now this is a perfectly needful message, especially in present-day Weimerica where our entertainments constantly encourage us rut like animals in any permutation of gender pairing or partner numbers that happen to titillate our interests at the time, where internet pornography normalizes loveless and degrading sex, where second graders are schooled in the subtleties of anal intercourse. In this atmosphere, young people desperately need sane doctrine on self control, on love, on marriage.

But these Worth Waiting For events were often pretty ridiculous in practice. They’d bring what amounted to motivational speakers who wouldn’t discuss the issues at hand except in the most tortuous circumlocutions. We’d watch sappy videos. Young girls would get “purity rings,” which were like engagement rings that your parents bought you, only instead of indicating that you were getting married they indicated your promise not to knock boots until you did so. And everyone filled out “pledge cards,” which were like non-legally-binding contracts with your future spouse that you were “saving yourself for marriage.” It was kind of a circus.

And, of course, the most conspicuous participants on the youth side where the kids least likely to find themselves in any sort of potential “temptation” situation anyway. (Church youth groups are not, in my experience, reservoirs of sexual magnetism.) They were homely girls and socially awkward boys (unlike your humble correspondent, who has always had his finger on the pulse of cool). And, again, there’s nothing wrong with being homely or socially awkward. But it did give the proceedings an air of unreality, a sense of disjointedness. The set of kids who were heavily involved in youth group had very little overlap with the set of kids drinking and partying and hooking up on the weekends. Most of the church kids were going to have a normal dating-to-marriage life anyway. They weren’t leaving a trail of broken hearts and illegitimate pregnancies behind them as they blazed their way to the next drug-fueled bacchanalia.

I often wondered, then, whether or not our pledges and our purity rings and our “chastity” really counted for much in the grand scheme of things. Or whether it was really just gilding an incapacity with the appearance of a virtue. I began to suspect that you wouldn’t get many crowns in heaven for avoiding a sin that you were never capable of achieving in the first place.

But nevertheless that sort psychology crops up all over the place. It’s along the lines of what old Nietzsche called “ressentiment,” where you re-translate your personal weaknesses as some sort of triumph in the ethical realm. The fey, noodle-armed, hoplophobic activist stomping around with his “Violence is Not the Answer” placard, for example—do his impeccable pacifistic credentials really mean much? He’s never used physical violence to solve an interpersonal dispute. Fantastic. But it’s not like he’d be able to solve much via fisticuffs anyway. So he’s treating something he can’t do as an outrage that other people shouldn’t do.

Kierkegaard, in the quote above, posited a sort of baseline humanity necessary for the ability to sin, to really sin. And I think he was on to something. There are people who are in thrall to such petty, squalid habits that, while yes what they’re doing must be in an absolute and theological sense a sin, it seems hardly fair to apply that word to their actions. Rising up against your brother in a field and slaying him, that’s a sin. Sending a husband off to die so that you can marry his wife, that’s a sin. Betraying our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for a bag of silver, that’s a sin. But eking out some marginal existence on Playstation titles and XXX videos, the edges and disappointments of life smoothed over by marijuana… is that really in the same experiential realm?

My take is not only that Kierkegaard is right about a baseline humanity required for real vice but that there is a similar baseline humanity required for virtue as well. And I think a lot of what gets passed off as Christian virtue, especially in the political realm, fails to meet that standard. It’s simply a surrender to ambient cultural norms dressed up as a victory over them. Christ once asked his listeners, “what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?” He was assuming a certain level of psychological normalcy in his audience, a certain degree of well-adjusted adulthood. He was assuming a baseline humanity. And yet how often are bizarre crusades like mass immigration or wealth redistribution advocated by Christians who treat these initiatives as somehow essentially Christlike? They claim the his imprimatur while they are in the very act of handing their future generations, their sons and daughters, the stone of a failed state, the serpents of ethnic strife. Personally, I can’t see how this sort of conduct even meets the bare minimum secular standards for stewardship, much less the standards of love that God demands for those his providence has placed within our care.

I can see how such conduct is an opportunity for moral grandstanding, however, especially in a culture that already venerates the idea of the “other” and fetishizes all manner of aid poured out to them. And so I tend to think that these conspicuous Christians aren’t too different from some of us youth-group kids in our callower days, treating our inability to rock the boat (no pun intended) as a principled and praiseworthy refusal to do so. And while I sincerely hope that someday soon we will see a revival of the faith of our fathers in America, in the interim I would settle for a return of the basic sanity the tenets of that faith seem to me to assume.