In the anti-life, anti-family, anti-liberty agenda
of secular leftists, we find the same strategy Satan employed in the garden.
A popular
series of “Saturday Night Live” skits in the 1980s and 1990s featured Dana
Carvey as “the church lady,” a Christian television channel host who would
berate her guests for their immoral, un-Christian behavior. The funny climax of
the skit would be when the church lady would offer a dramatic pause before accusing
her guests of being in league with … Satan!
I’ve been
thinking about that playful allegation lately in reference to contemporary
politics. Whatever one thinks of the Bible — a true representation of God, a
literary masterpiece, or a book of myths — secular progressivists’ politics are
taken directly from the devil’s playbook. “The Power of Truth,”
a recent book by German cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, shows how.
Müller’s chapter “Faith’s Political Witness: The Demands of
Justice and Love,” is a reflection on the creation and fall narrative of
Genesis chapters 1-3 and its application to contemporary politics. Müller
interprets the opening of Genesis as illustrating the components most essential
for a flourishing human society. In the narrative of the fall of man, argues
Müller, we see an assault on “three core principles: the dignity of human life,
of marriage, and of freely chosen relationship with God (or what we would today
call ‘religious freedom’).”
Human Life Is ‘the First
of the Fundamental Rights’
The pinnacle of God’s creative act is man, whom God creates in his
own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26). The meaning of this “image of God”
language entails “our freedom, our intellect and will, our powers of moral
deliberation, judgement, and choice.” This unprecedented degree of dignity
among the created order is oriented toward relationship: relationship with the
eternal divine and relationship with one another in community. Müller explains:
We are not atoms in a zero-sum struggle to
survive, as Hobbesian individualism supposes. Nor are we mere means to social
ends, as collectivist ideologies holds. Images of a triune personal God, we are
personal and social beings, equal in dignity, who are fulfilled as persons in
relationship with other persons.
Because we are not reducible to the result of random genetic
mutations, but possess an irrepressible transcendent quality, men and women
have a right to be. This right to be, the right to life, is “the first of the
fundamental rights,” as Saint John Paul II taught.
Thus any assault upon this right — abortion, euthanasia, in-vitro
fertilization — reflects a violent undermining of what makes a human person
distinctly human. Müller explains: “A community must exist in its integrity
before its good can be fostered. The right to life defines and preserves the
community whose good we would promote.”
Marriage Is a Necessity
A second core principle of functioning societies is marriage and
the family. Müller notes, “Like each person, marriage bears the divine image.”
Genesis 1:27 reads, “In the image of God he created him; male and female he
created them.” Moreover, says Müller, “the first married couple is the seed of
all social order: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’”
(Genesis 1:28).
Genesis
teaches that there is a certain incompleteness in both sexes, one, at least on
a natural level, that is answered through “the embrace of conjugal love and the
children it brings forth,” which demands a “lifelong and exclusive commitment.”
The family is “The First Society.”
In our society, the “vision of marriage as a truly common good —
for family and the whole of life — has been eclipsed.” This takes many forms,
including postponing or simply dispensing with marriage, as well as the
societal acceptance of no-fault divorce. All have had predictably catastrophic
results.
Refusing to marry and have children, whether for the sake of
convenience or careerism, reinforces the atomization and loneliness of modern
American culture, while providing society smaller future generations to
generate wealth and support the elderly. Children exposed to divorce in turn
are more likely to suffer from serious social or psychological pathologies, to
drop out of high school, to become teen mothers, and to spend time in prison.
Family instability fosters more educational failure, teenage
delinquency, need for therapy, tendencies toward violence, and suicide attempts.
As Müller concludes, “Crucial for the political as well as spiritual common
good, marriage must be defended.”
Religious Liberty Began
in Genesis
The final principle found in Genesis is religious liberty.
Although God creates Adam and Eve for relationship with himself, he “leaves
them free to reject or spurn his friendship,” observes Müller. Indeed, Adam and
Eve do exactly this in reference to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
of which they eat, in clear violation of God’s edict. Citing “Dignitatis
Humanae,” Müller notes:
Within the bounds of public order, no one is to
be coerced into acting contrary to his beliefs in religious matters. And it
identified the basis of this right in the dignity of the person and in the
goods or ‘values’ of religion itself.
This right extends beyond autonomous individuals to the societies
they form. Müller explains:
So it is not just individuals that must be
immune from coercion, but also communities of faith; not just in private, but
in public; not just in secret assent, but in open witness; not just in sacred
assemblies and rites, but in ‘educational, cultural, charitable, and social
organizations’ and services.
We can
easily identify attempts to weaken, if not vitiate, this religious liberty.
Politicians and medical institutions attempt to force medical
practitioners to perform abortions in
violation of their religious beliefs, and to offer insurance covering contraception or
abortion-inducing drugs. Courts seek to force Catholic adoption and foster care
agencies to place children with
couples engaged in lifestyles and sexual behaviors at odds with the mission
statements of those agencies.
State
politicians aim to force Catholic priests to violate the
seal of the confessional. Catholics understandably have little confidence this
trend will soon subside.
Satan Still Attacks
These Three Core Principles Today
What is so pernicious about the serpent in Genesis is that he
attacks all three fundamental tenets of civil society. The serpent, Satan,
deceitfully tells the man and woman they will not perish when they eat the
forbidden fruit, precisely in order to bring about their demise.
He venomously works to place the man and woman in opposition to
one another, targeting the woman first to foster relational division and
enmity. And he falsely promises true freedom in disobedience to God, that Adam
and Eve will “be like gods,” though in truth, their free will weakens as they
become enslaved to their passions and Satan’s temptations.
Müller connects Satan more explicitly to the secular progressivist
paradigm:
It is hardly surprising that as these
foundations are undermined, the state looms larger; and conversely, that as the
state expands into the proper sphere of the individual, the family, and the
Church, they are weakened and their dignity is obscured.
The progressivist secular
state — whatever its claims — is no neutral, disinterested party, but a
proponent of a “latter-day form of paganism against which the Church has
contended from its infancy — a mythology with its own idols and superstitions.”
In the anti-life, anti-family, anti-liberty agenda of secular progressivists,
we find the same strategy “Old Scratch” employed in the garden.
Casey Chalk
is a graduate student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at
Christendom College.
