The Cancer of Moral Relativism and the Presidential Election

                Moral relativism is the cancer that is killing our nation.  They talk about cancer touching every family, think about moral relativism.  As my wife and I went through it last night, more damage has been wrought on our respective families from moral relativism than cancer ever could.  It has invaded every major religion and both political parties.  The question is why and what does it mean for this year’s Presidential election?

                Let’s start with a brief history of moral relativism, going back to the beginning, to Adam & Eve.  Did Satan use the introduction of sin to bring down mankind or was he using guilt, which was the end result?  Eve committed the sin, Adam felt shame.  Shame is a symptom of guilt.

                I ask this question because for most of human history, human beings have done really, really awful things to each other.  War, murder, rape, genocide, these are not modern inventions.   Yet it seems like only the events of the past couple of hundred years have shaken mankind’s faith.  Germany was crippled by the Holocaust, they stopped going to church.  Ireland, rocked by the sex abuse scandal, quit going to church.  In America, we cannot seem to shake the scars of the racism that came with slavery, even 150 years later and after electing a black President.  The question is why?  Why do the events of the past few hundred years seem to have elicited a different reaction from mankind?

                Let’s go to the 1500s, to the Protestant reformation.  The initial response of the Lutheran and Anglican breakaways was to retain a high degree of Catholicism.  Even in the mid-1600s, the Anglican Church still believed in things like the real presence of Christ in Eucharist.  But the Protestants were off of their moorings and drifting.  Eventually most similarities to Catholicism fell by the wayside, including…confession. 

                So we evolved from the 1500s on into a world without confession.  Even now there are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, and many of them do not go to confession regularly.  This is a fatal shortcoming of Protestantism.  The Protestant faiths removed themselves from God, from an absolute truth, and in effect made man their god.  Whatever man decided was right or wrong was the law. 

I can offer no better proof of this than the Anglican Church.  Read the evolution of the “39 Articles” of the Anglican Church or the Wikipedia account of the Lambeth Conferences.  At the 1920 conference, contraception was not okay, but in 1930 it was.  1930!  What cultural event happened between 1920 and 1930 that caused this change? 

So why is this devolution to man as god in Protestantism significant?  Because the one thing that man cannot do sufficiently for another man, is offer forgiveness of their sins and absolution.  One man looks at another man as his equal, someone equal to you has no power to forgive you, only one above you does.  The Catholic sacrament of Reconciliation works because it is God working through the Priest.  This is not semantics as anyone who has been to confession can attest. 

So what happens in a world without forgiveness, repentance, and absolution – a world without confession?  Man is confronted with two logical choices.  Number one, they can pretend it does not matter they have sinned.  This is the Protestant doctrine that says faith alone is adequate for salvation.  The problem with pretending it does not matter you have sinned is that it is just that, pretending.  You still have the shame and the guilt (as St. Paul wrote, God’s laws are written on the heart of man).  You just have no way to remove the guilt because you do not have confession.  As G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Being a Christian without confession is like having a debt you can never repay”. 

Your other choice, the choice the modern world has made, is to say that you have not sinned because there are no sinful choices.  Rather than say that it is of no consequence that you have sinned, take it one step farther and say there is no such thing as sin.  All choices are equally valid.  Sound like moral relativism?  Bingo.  It is an answer devised by those who live without confession, although sadly it has been adopted by those who have trouble living with confession.  As Cardinal George wrote so eloquently recently, “there will always be those whose faith is not adequate to the faith of the church”.

So what does this have to do with the Presidential election?  The Democratic Party was lost long ago to moral relativism, I think we can all agree on that.  The Democratic brand of moral relativism says there is no such thing as sin because every choice is equally valid.  Birthing a baby or aborting a baby are both the mother’s choice, neither is right or wrong.

But what has been missed is that there is a Republican brand of moral relativism.  The Republican brand of moral relativism says I do not want to have to have moral judgments, so let’s keep these issues out of politics.  They seek to say sin is of no concern, the Protestant version.  Encapsulated in both parties are the two possible human responses to sin.  Say it does not matter (Republicans), say it does not exist (Democrats). 

So Republicans push “social conservatives” into a corner.  They want them to vote come the general election, but not have any real authority in the party.  This is incredibly ironic considering that Ronald Reagan was a social conservative.  He had great economic policies, but they were born of a moral conviction that big government was immoral.  Not amoral, immoral. 

But since Reagan, the GOP has nominated a steady stream of milquetoast conservatives:  George H.W. Bush; Bob Dole; George W. Bush; and John McCain.  They then pair them with social conservatives, but the social conservatives are always number 2 on the ticket:  Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Sarah Palin.  Even when the milquetoast conservatives are elected, taxes go up, government expands, because they lack the moral conviction.  Social conservatism matters when it comes to gauging commitment to fiscal conservatism.

This brings us to Mitt Romney versus Rick Santorum.  Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee, his victory in the Michigan primary virtually ends the race.  But, I can also tell you sitting here in March, that Mitt Romney will in fact lose in November.  It is because of moral relativism. 

Why?  Let’s take two key states that have held primaries thus far, Michigan and Florida.  In Florida, the counties that Mitt Romney carried were in south Florida.  It is a virtually identical footprint to the one that won Florida for Barack Obama in 2008.  The same thing is true in Michigan.  The Detroit suburbs that carried Mitt Romney to victory were the same ones that helped Obama capture 57% of the vote in Michigan in 2008, even as a Republican was being elected Governor.  The counties that are being used to hand Mitt Romney the nomination are counties that he will not win in November. 

What is the implication we can draw from this?  Republican moral relativists and Democratic moral relativists are neighbors.  They are two sides of the same street.  On one side, the neighbor who believes there is no sin (the Democrat), on the other side the neighbor who doesn’t want to get involved (the Republican). 

The battleground then becomes the rest of the state, the rest of the country, the rest of America.  It is outside the big metropolitan areas.  These are the values voters, these are the people who want to see meaningful change in this country, a reduction of the size of government, not just tax rates.  But when the GOP nominates someone like a Mitt Romney, they are not given a choice.  So what happens?

What happens is it becomes purely an economic game.  Nobody does a better job of promising money and handouts to the middle class, to the working class, than the Democrats.  Left without the chance to vote on a meaningful difference in values, these voters vote based on their wallets.  Why does the Obama Administration want to face Mitt Romney?  Because he leaves these voters up for grabs and they can pander to them.  Republicans lose, not win, when they fail to offer the voters a meaningful choice in values.

To take back this country, we need to fight the cancer of moral relativism.  In our families, in our churches, and in our political parties.  If the people who believe that real faith in God is a pre-condition for freedom cannot win in the Republican Party, then we cannot win in America.  What the results of Tuesday suggest is, we have a lot of work to do.