Conscience and Tyranny

A little while ago, I was hiking up a mountain in Lake George, NY with my father, two brothers, and youngest sister.  Happily the mountain was a very small one, for my father and I probably could have handled little more.  As we huffed and puffed in growing fatigue, my sister, then about 5 minutes ahead of us, waited for us to catch up and then told us about some disfavor she had fallen into at her work.  In response, I told her about a tyrant who once showed a visitor to his garden.  Among the plants in the garden, one had grown above the rest.  The tyrant showed his visitor about the garden and as they approached the one plant that grew above the rest, the tyrant pulled out a machete and quickly cut it down to the level of the others.  The message was clear: no subject must be allowed to rise above the rest.  Tyranny can tolerate mediocrity but never excellence. 

The tyrant in question might have been any number of men over the years.  It might have been Napoleon  Stalin, or Henry VIII.  Robert Bolton captured well the attitude of Henry VIII toward the few men that dared raise their heads above the rest, toward the few plants that dared grow above their appointed bounds.  When Henry VIII broke with Rome and declared himself the head of the Church of England, he demanded that everyone follow him.  Nearly everyone did—but nearly was not enough.  When almost everyone else went along, Thomas More, did not.  He did not speak or write against Henry, he simply remained silent.  One silent man perhaps should not have seemed too much of a threat to Henry VIII, but Henry did not want More’s silence, but his approval.  When everyone else supported Henry, why should one silent man have bothered him so much?  Bolton’s Henry, speaking to More, gave the answer:

            Because you're honest... and what is more to the purpose, you're known to be honest. There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown; and those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with sharp teeth and I'm their tiger; there's a mass that follows me because it follows anything that moves. And then there's you...

The existence of even one good man is a spur in the conscience of the wicked.  The existence of one good man tells the rest of the world what it should be and that it should not be what it is.  Even schoolchildren know this; it is why they dislike excellence in their classmates.  Henry stood condemned not by any word of Thomas More’s, but by his existence.  He stood judged not by a letter of More’s, but by his very life.  Faced with this condemnation, Henry could have beaten his own breast in repentance, or he could have beaten More’s head off.  He did the latter. 

More was not the first to lose his head to the tyrant’s blade.  John the Baptist lost his head in like circumstances to the same sort of petty tyrant.  King Herod had married his brother’s wife while his brother was still living and John forbade him this.  John was only one weak prophet.  He had no armies and was no threat Herod, save that he threatened his conscience.  But that was enough.  John was a good man, known to be a good man and hence by his very existence condemned Herod.  And so Herod (and his wife) had to destroy John.  If there were only one good man (or woman) in a bad world, the world would have to destroy that one man.  How could it not, when on a gibbet before the nations, it unfurled goodness itself (1)? 

The same persecution is still the case even today.  Many supporters of same-sex “marriage” insist they simply want to be “married” and will leave everyone else alone.  But this is not true.  There are multiple examples of bakeries refusing to make a cake in celebration of a same-sex wedding, and being attacked because of it (2).  Why that should be when many other bakeries would happily make such a cake should now be obvious.  It would not matter if 99 bakeries in a city would happily make a cake for such a wedding.  As long as only one would not, that one would be too much.  If one man only refuses to support same same “marriage” and stands on silence, that one man will be too much and it will be for the same reason Henry VIII could not stand for Thomas More’s silence.  As Bolton’s Cromwell put it, “silence can, in fact, speak--” sometimes too much for a guilty conscience to bear.

(1). Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ

http://www.amazon.com/Life-of-Christ-ebook/dp/B001E2NXGG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378058425&sr=8-1&keywords=the+life+of+christ+sheen

(2). http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/31/economic-terrorism-bakery-that-refused-to-make-gay-couples-wedding-cake-gets-threats-could-close-down/

(3) See also the interesting article: http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/08/26/it-is-the-price-of-citizenship-an-elegy-for-religious-liberty-in-america/

Manhattan for Beads, Mankind for Condoms

Tradition generally holds that in 1626, Peter Minuit, leader of the Dutch colony in the New World,  purchased the Island of Manhattan for about 24 dollars worth of trinkets.  Today, this is often presented as a classic example of American Indian ill-use at the hands of European colonists.  I do not dwell here on potential errors in this view (1), but am here content to let it stand as an example for purposes of illustration.  Similarly, moderns regret how European colonists would sometimes attempt to cause Indians to become drunk and dependant on alcohol in order to cheat them in trade.  In essence, colonists knew that by causing Indians to become dependent on alcohol, they would abandon their freedom.  Drunk men are easily cheated. 

Modern man is just as drunk as the Indians of Colonial America.  Where the Indians were drunk on alcohol, man today is drunk on something else.  The modern world is drunk on sex.  A man can scarce think otherwise when condoms are widely handed out on college campuses and in high schools, or given the popularity of Playboy (magazine and digital content) and cheap romances.  One might likewise point to the widespread use of sex in advertising, on TV, and in movies, to sell all manner of nonsense to a drunk public.  For a drunk man is a man with little sales resistance. 

Just like colonists wanted the American Indian drunk and dependant on alcohol, so too do modern “colonists” want man drunk on sex.  Advertisers want man drunk in order to sell him trash.  Sex sells cars, tools, soap, perfume, and alcohol (the better to get one doubly drunk).  The reason is simple enough.  As the American Indians gave something up for the alcohol on which they became dependant, so man gives something up by his drunkenness on sex.  He gives up some degree of his freedom and some degree of his humanity.

Advertisers are not the only ones who want man drunk on sex.  The federal government does as well.  The US government has commanded that all employers, even those with religious objections, must provide free contraceptive coverage to their employees.  Desperate for the free contraception, and drunk on the need to gratify his sex instinct, man, like American Indians dependant on alcohol, gives something up.  Among other things, he gives up his conscience.  By declaring that religious entities must provide contraception though it violates their religious beliefs and consciences, the government has claimed authority over man’s conscience.  It has claimed the power to tell man when he may follow his religious beliefs and when he may not.  In exchange, it offers free contraception, the ability to further gratify one’s sex instinct.  Alcohol for trinkets and land, contraception for one’s conscience, both for man’s freedom. 

Man often sells himself too cheaply; the flaw runs deep in human nature.  But when he sells his conscience away for free contraception, when he prizes the gratification of the instinct over his conscience, he gives up himself for too mean a price.  As Fulton Sheen said, "Our hopes and our liberties are sold too cheap when they are bartered away to him who feeds the body and leaves the soul naked." Judas sold God for 30 pieces of silver; when man gives himself to the government for free contraception, he is little better.  Judas thought he sold God, Who really gave himself for man.  When he sells his conscience for 30 shekals, though, man gives himself for nothing. 

(1). This would consist of about $1000 dollars today, that the event is only badly attested in one source, that the claim the Island was sold for beads and trinkets is not in that early source, and that the concept of sale for the Dutch was probably different from modern concepts of sale. 

Human Conscience, State Power

At the end of the First Century AD,  as the Emperor Trajan continued the persecution of Christianity, the Roman magistrate Pliny wrote to him for advice regarding that persecution.  Pliny wrote that it had been his practice to interrogate those who were denounced to him as Christians: 

             “I interrogated these as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed. For I had no doubt that, whatever the nature of their creed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished.” (1)

What is interesting about Pliny and Trajan’s exchange is not only that they wanted Christianity persecuted—they were hardly unusual in that—but one of the reasons that Pliny gave.  For Pliny, Christians ought be persecuted because “whatever the nature of their creed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy... deserve to be punished.”  

Pliny objected to Christianity not only for its beliefs, but for the mere fact that its adherents dared to hold those beliefs when commanded by the state to believe otherwise.  For him, the beliefs themselves hardly mattered—“whatever the nature of their creed”—but what did matter was the stubbornness with which the early Christians held them.  What mattered was that the early Christians rejected the State’s claim that it would tell them what they were free to believe.  What mattered was that they rejected the State’s claim to authority over the human conscience.  

As far as Pliny was concerned, Christianity almost might as well have declared the world round when Rome professed it square, or else preferred rose granite to Rome’s marble.  The point was not only the beliefs themselves, but that early Christians held those beliefs when Rome commanded them to think otherwise.  The agnostic Robert Bolt almost grasped this when he had his hero, Thomas More, on being asked why he held to his beliefs in defiance of Royal authority reply, “because what matters is that I believe it, or rather not that I believe it, but that I believe it.”  As almost 1500 years earlier, King Henry VIII would claim authority over More’s conscience and More would accede no more than would the Christians condemned by Pliny, Trajan, and Rome.  

Why could Rome not tolerate the beliefs of what were then a small minority?  Because Rome would suffer no rival, not even the few followers of a Nazarene carpenter.  When those followers proclaimed that man, executed by Rome, risen, Rome saw a threat to its power. When  they called Him the Son of God, which Caesar said he was, Rome saw a threat.  And when they called the risen carpenter Lord, which Caesar said that he alone was, Rome saw a threat to its power.   

If Christianity is true, then the state may last a thousand years, as Rome did, but man will live forever.  Man, therefore, will always take precedence over the state.  If Christianity is true, then there exists something higher and holier than the state to which a man owes his obedience, his devotion, and his conscience. That was why the Early Christians would not burn incense to Caesar as a god, they bowed to a higher one.  

 This was the threat the a powerful state could not bear, either two thousand years ago or today, whether that state is Rome, Tudor England, Soviet Russia, or Modern America, which has recently claimed authority over the human conscience (2). A powerful state can suffer no rival, but it can make its rivals suffer.  Yet, the reason for which the state would not tolerate the early Christians, and may soon not tolerate modern ones, is precisely the same one for which the Christians continued and will continue to defy the State’s claim to authority over their consciences.  They hold to a higher and holier God than Caesar, or as St. Peter put it when he defied the power of the ruling classes, “it is better to obey God than man.”

(1) http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/texts/pliny.html

(2) http://thesparkandtheflame.blogspot.com/2012/07/hhs-contraception-and-religious-liberty.html