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"I will utter My judgments against them concerning all their wickedness, because they have forsaken Me, burned incense to other gods, and worshipped the works of their own hands" (Jeremiah 1:16).
Among all the disconcerting news items swirling from the cesspool of sexual scandal involving Bill Clinton, the most disheartening were reports on the president's public approval ratings. With every sordid new disclosure, the president's numbers seemed to rise another point or two.
In the early stages of the scandal, one theory was that the public was taking a "wait-and-see" attitude and wanted to give the president the benefit of the doubt — holding him innocent until proven guilty. Now, however, virtually no one in the country believes him innocent, yet the poll numbers continue to climb. Another early theory, with perhaps some credibility, was that the numbers reveal more of a dislike for the news media than a growing love for the president. If someone criticizes a person we generally like, we tend not to like the critic and to show this dislike by positive disregard for his position. In the current case, it is clearly a case of killing the messenger who bears bad news, which is always an illogical thing to do.
We submit there is a deeper rationale for the soaring popularity of this flawed president. The poll numbers, as we said, are disconcerting, but not surprising, given the present American mind-set on morality (especially sexual immorality) and the nature of government.
Americans have for some time now made government their god, and like the idolater nations of 2 Kings 17:29 & 33, they have made unto themselves a god of their own liking. Furthermore, "For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God" (Romans 10:3).
The foundation for the present mind-set has many historic cornerstones. One of the most significant was laid by German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) who saw the state as the Divine Idea incarnate — god walking on earth.
Since man, in Hegelian thought, is his own determiner of truth, and the state is collective man, the state sets the standard of truth and moral right. In a democracy guided by this philosophy, truth is what the majority says it is, and prevailing public opinion (or power politics) is the yardstick for right and wrong.
Americans, like the socialists, communists and fascists of the past (all Hegelians), have for several decades been coming to view their government in god-like terms: it is the sovereign provider, giver of rights, and arbiter of all right and wrong. Add to this the fact that Americans, now so poorly educated in the details of the American system, have come to see the presidency as the embodiment of the government. Follow this syllogism: The government is god; the president is (or at least epitomizes) the government; therefore the president is god. (The ancient Romans had the same logic in re Caesar, and debauchery, tyranny and destruction were the results.)
Hegel drew his philosophies from the ancient Greeks; modern Americans have imitated the Greeks in creating gods in their own image. The gods of the Greek pantheon were all-powerful and the essential moving forces for every facet of life, yet they were petty, immoral, capricious, and thoroughly flawed — thus the image and reflection of Everyman . . . and the rationalization for every man's sins.
Bill Clinton has emerged as the divine ideal for Americans in the '90s. He is a god made in their own image, thus a comfortable god. There is great discomfort in confronting a God who sets limits on autonomy, who doesn't believe in the separation of religion and public affairs, and who judges sins. We find relief in having a god who exemplifies, and thus excuses, our own failures, fantasies, and foibles. An intelligent, congenial fellow who espouses noble ideals, feels our pain, attends church on Sunday mornings and yet can lie with utmost ease, call evil good, and indulge his lusts on Sunday nights is just the person to assuage our conscience while tickling our fancy. We are or wish we could be him. Sexual scandal has become a form of kinky entertainment, and escaping from the prudes is grounds for admiration.
Time and again, surveyed Americans have professed belief in the notion that there is no connection between personal life and ability to perform one's public duties. By this token, a Dennis Rodman can be as immoral and outrageous as he likes as longs as he plays basketball well, never mind that as a professional hoopster he is the role model for millions of ghetto kids for whom life is a basketball game. In the case of the president, Americans who think in this vein believe there is no connection between a man's private morality and his judgment as a statesman and political leader. It is a belief sprung from a desperate hope regarding ultimate judgment each of us faces.
But it is a desperate fallacy ... and utter nonsense. The wish to divorce private ethics from public duty is an impossible dream for anyone. And, if given a moment's serious reflection, it is not a policy which anyone should want his god or his president to adopt, especially in as volatile a world as the one in which we now live. What is the presidency, after all, if not an office requiring the utmost in sound moral judgment? Not just in the sense that the president — like a god — must set the tone and be an example for us all. Rather, trustworthy leadership in this dangerous world and perverse generation requires unprecedented wisdom, a keen sense of justice, and a profound internal commitment to what is civil and proper and right.
When a president displays such abject poverty of wisdom and propriety as Bill Clinton has proven to have in his long history of self-destructive affairs, he simply cannot be trusted to make just and righteous judgments in the affairs of state — whether in finding just solutions for peace in the Middle East, dealing with international tyrants like Saddam Hussein, safeguarding the welfare of the elderly, providing for the teaching of truth to our schoolchildren, understanding the crucial tensions between freedom and the sanctity of life, or knowing that "family values" cannot mean same-sex marriages and state-run daycare.
This president — for better or worse, the fiduciary of our collective life as a nation — must repent or be removed. Pray for one or the other.
The End of American Self-government
Bill Clinton has done his country at least one (dubious and tragic) service with his promiscuous life and corrupt administration. To use a Nixonesque phrase, he has made "one thing perfectly clear." It is this: Americans are no longer qualified to govern themselves. And if they persist in trying to do so without some fundamental changes, life in this country will grow increasingly hellish — with vice, crime, ambition, lying, and injustice becoming the hallmarks of our existence.
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, set forth the essential foundation for American society when he stated in 1778, "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future ... upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God."
Another patriot observed that the success of the American system depended wholly upon the existence of a moral people and that it was wholly inadequate for any other.
Some years later, the statesman-orator Daniel Webster put it plainly when he said, "Lastly, our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted to any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits."
In 1851, Webster cautioned: "Let the religious element in man's nature be neglected, let him be influenced by no higher motives than low self-interest, and subject to no stronger restraint than the limits of civil authority, and he becomes the creature of selfish passion or blind fanaticism.
"On the other hand, the cultivation of the religious sentiment represses licentiousness ... inspires respect for law and order, and gives strength to the whole social fabric, at the same time that it conducts the human soul upward to the Author of its being." Alas, these are values which are now of little consequence to the majority of the American people.
An earlier Webster, Noah, predicted our day when he wrote, "All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible." Far from believing, as Americans now do, that private immorality has no nexus to public duty, Noah Webster argued that the "moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis" of all our civil laws and life.
"America is great because America is good," the French observer Alexis DeTocqueville said in finding the America of the mid-19th century "aflame with righteousness." But he warned: "...if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
Near the turn of the last century, the U.S. Supreme Court declared: "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of The Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise...."
In the early part of our present century, we could still boast a president who recognized the absolute necessity of adherence to the Biblical system of morality and ethics if the American vision were to survive. Said President Calvin Coolidge, "The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country."
It is hard to say when exactly Americans lost this vision. It was probably sometime before Bill Clinton. But it has taken his scandalous affairs of self and state to reveal, through the new governing medium of the public opinion poll, that the vision has now been all but completely lost.
In America today, in politics, in social life and in the church, Biblical absolutes and objective truth no longer govern nor even serve as norms.
The Republican Party, for example, has abandoned the notion that parties are formed to advance principles. The party, born of principle, has now agreed to financially support candidates who openly flout the party's platform. It has forgotten the ideal noted a decade ago by conservative historian Robert J. Nagle, "The formation of any political philosophy is basically an attempt to transform personal moral and social values into a platform acceptable to a great mass of people." In the place of parties based on political or moral principle, we now have parties that are nothing more than power blocs. Whosoever will join, enrich, empower and cultivate the power bloc is welcome; principles be damned.
The future is bleak in other respects as well. An analysis by Bryan Hayes, marketing director for Mount Hermon Association Inc., finds that 60 percent of Christian teenagers "say there is no such thing as absolute truth." Worse, in the realm of ethics, fully 90 percent of Christian teens say that "right and wrong depend on the individual and the situation."
Can there be any doubt why Americans, especially the young, have no trouble then in accepting such convoluted Clinton assertions as that oral sex, as opposed to genital intercourse, does not constitute "improper sexual relations." The nation is now predisposed to this sort of dissembling. Yet this president must be warned that the example he is setting for coming generations qualifies him for the millstone necklace spoken of by Christ.
Samuel Adams admonished religious, educational and political leaders in 1790 about their obligations to the young: "Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, by impressing the minds of men with the importance of ... inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy, and, in subordination to these great principles, the love of their country; of instructing them in the art of self-government, without which they never can act a wise part in the government of societies, great or small; in short, of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system..." (emphasis added).
By all of the historic measures quoted herein, and many others which could be cited, Americans have now lost their ability and right to political and governmental sovereignty.
What lies in store for us is too grim to contemplate. As commentator Thomas Sowell recently put it: "Corruption of the government is not a private matter or a transient scandal. It is dry rot that either has to be cleaned out or else allowed to undermine the whole structure in the course of time. But if we cannot see that, then our problems are much bigger than Bill and Hillary Clinton, and will be with us long after they are gone."
A Truth for All Seasons
Corruption is certain to be Clinton's legacy, whether or not he survives politically, but corruption is clearly not the legacy left by statesmen — men with the stature of, for example, the 16th-century British Chacellor Sir Thomas More.
Someone once observed that More "lived poorly but died well." ...Lived poorly in that, as a humanist and author of Utopia, he outlined the vision for the socialist state. ...Died well in that he submitted to martyrdom for conscience's sake when he refused to bow to Henry VIII's demand that he, as chancellor of England, sanction Henry's rebellion against the Pope and the king's related adulterous and (later) murderous personal morality. More was beheaded when he refused to take an oath of fealty to an act of Parliament declaring Henry the supreme head of the church and thereby paving the way for the king's divorce from Katherine of Aragon.
In a prison scene near the end of the 1966 Oscar-winning film about More's struggles against Henry VIII, A Man for All Seasons, the ex-chancellor's daughter Margaret urges him to simply take the oath while thinking otherwise in his heart. More (played by Paul Scofield) explains why he cannot do this and why oaths must be regarded as sacred: "What is an oath, then, but words we say to God."
In that statement, juxtaposed as it is in the film to the following scene of his beheading, More demonstrates the nexus between oaths and the truth and how truth is more sacred than life itself.
Alas, 464 years after More's death, it is a statement whose echo has died out — drowned in a wave of relativism and now buried under the debauchery of another adulterous head of state, Bill Clinton.
Frederick the Great, the 18th-century philosopher-king of Prussia, once observed, "A man who seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society."
By this token, Bill Clinton must be regarded as a scourge upon ours.
Clinton, like the apparent majority of his constituents, seems to have adopted the now prevailing relativistic view of truth eloquently set forth by romanticist Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73): "Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own." The president's "legally-accurate" lying and parsing of litigious words is the embodiment of Søken Kierkegaard's philosophical jibberish, "Every truth is true only to a point. Beyond that, by way of counter-point, it becomes untruth."
But relativism concerning the truth, as we saw with shocking clarity in the initial O.J. Simpson verdict, is a grievous virus which, among other things, will destroy all hope for justice, the justice which American presidents take an oath to uphold.
Isaiah 59:14 ("Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and right cannot enter.) makes the connections between truth and justice clear. Verses 9-10 of Isaiah 59 contain further warnings about our fate, our safety, and our social disintegration if we see truthfulness as a lesser virtue. "Therefore justice is far from us, nor does righteousness overtake us; we look for light, but there is darkness! for brightness, but we walk in blackness! We grope as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noonday as at twilight. We are as dead men in desolate places."
In the realm of civil justice, oath-taking has always been the gateway to determination of the truth. By placing hand upon Bible and declaring "So help me God," witnesses historically have sanctified their testimony by recognizing the divine origins and nature of truth. Such demonstrations and declarations lay the foundations for trustworthiness — a commodity essential to all human relations.
There is still some vestigial recognition of the necessity of trustworthiness in criminal law: our lives and safety clearly depend upon it. The debate swirling around the Clinton scandal has, however, diminished this necessity in civil law. Clinton and his defenders have so elevated their personal and political self-interests that they have been willing to put all civil justice at risk. It is now said that lying in a civil case, especially in a minor matter such as sexual harassment, is a trifle and does not rise to the level of a crime worth prosecuting — much less a "high crime or misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment.
If this is so, there remains no hope for justice in any civil dispute. Do Clinton's defenders really want to eliminate the necessity for truth-telling in property disputes, in divorce and custody cases, in personal injury and product liability litigation? By their argument, the tobacco company executives who lied under oath about the effects of nicotine and their corporate research findings cannot be faulted or held accountable.
More importantly, the denigration of oath-taking will result in the denigration of our very selves, our essential moral character as a people, our essence as free men. As the film incarnation of Sir Thomas More put it, "When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again."
These are all reasons why perjury, in any judicial context, must be considered a "high crime" — a most serious attack on our ability to govern ourselves and order our civil life.
Mankind — Christian and pagan — has, until our own time, had an instinct concerning the centrality of truth in human affairs. Demosthenes (384-322 B.C.) cut to the heart of the matter when he observed, "What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice." Shakespeare wrote, "No legacy is so rich as honesty," a thought which the legacy-desperate Bill Clinton would do well to remember. The naturalistic playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) saw that "The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom ... are the pillars of soceity." Germaine De Stael (1766-1817) also noted that "Truth and, by consequence, liberty will always be the chief powers of honest men." Confucius held that "Sincerity and truth are the basis for very virtue," and Thomas Jefferson found honesty to be "the first chapter of the book of wisdom" which statesmen and all free people must possess. And the Swiss critic Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881) argued that "Truth is the secret of eloquence and virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life."
The man-in-the-street interviews concerning the Lewinsky scandal have demonstrated beyond doubt how muddled the thinking of the American electorate has become with regard to truth. And because it is, we stand in real peril of losing our liberty, our grasp on other vital virtues, and certainly our moral authority as a nation in the world. To regain these, we must as a people again place our hands on the Bible, seek our help in God, and, like Sir Thomas More, swear allegiance to the truth at all costs. Doing this, we will be beneficiaries of Christ's conditional promise, "If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
Sinning with Impunity: Conducting America's New 'Affairs' of State
A few months ago, Rev. Steve Schlissel of Brooklyn, N.Y., wrote an astute critique of The Revolution of the Sixties. It was, he noted, the era during which America formally changed its religion, after more than a century-long process of eliminating the old religion's standard, the Bible.
With that standard of truth, right behavior and justice gone, it was now possible to realize the central goal of The Revolution: the right to sin with impunity.
"It was in the 60's that our civilization underwent its most dramatic change. That consisted in a glaring particular: the demand to sin without consequences," he wrote (Messiah's Mandate, 2nd Letter, 1998).
No assessment better explains what we are now observing in the sex-and-lies scandal sired by Bill Clinton and so warmly embraced by his spiritual siblings, the American people.
Though he initially denied sinning at all, on August 17 the president, with his parsed and steely-eyed admission of sin, publicly turned a moral corner which his contemporaries had turned more than 30 years earlier. As Rev. Schlissel put it, "Like a child stepping into the gutter after being told by the parent not to, the 60's generation brought sin ... into the faces of all authorities, and asked, 'What are ya gonna do about it?' The answer was a resounding whimper, 'Not much.'"
Mr. Clinton's entire posture and his formal defense to date can be boiled down to this: "I have sinned but no one has a right to do anything about it." And the American people, finding in their federal head a most perfect surrogate, have enthusiastically embraced this posture and upheld this defense. For in him they find their best hope to also sin with impunity.
The president's leading defenders — the rule-of-men "lawyers" who argue his case in court and on television, the president's political partisans, and certain say-anything-and-everything-outrageous pundits — have actually traveled further down the slippery slope. Going beyond an assertion of the right to sin with impunity, some have found a veritable duty to do so. Hence the various arguments that it is really only expected good form — good sexual etiquette — to lie about adultery.
Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt took the case still further during the House impeachment debate. He angrily denounced the puritanical maniacs who, in his estimation, have created a moral standard which is "impossible" for any man to meet. Gephardt apparently would have us believe it is now morally impossible for the world's most powerful political leader to keep his zipper up and young girls out from under his desk while he conducts the other affairs of state and it is further impossible to then refrain from lying under oath about it. To defenders of this bizarre new public morality it is a shameful, unattainable "litmus test" to attempt to view any public official as a moral fiduciary.
A sizable majority of the American people apparently now find this all very reasonable, indeed wholly admirable. The president should not be sanctioned for his failure to avoid the inevitable, because, after all, it is his right and duty and a mark of sexual chivalry to sin without consequence. By extension, of course, it is the people's right as well. In America, it should be remembered, rulers do what they do by consent of the governed. The people's popular president has expressed his gratitude with reciprocal consent for his people likewise to sin freely.
The philosophy and politics of sinning without consequence have become pervasive in our society and culture. That fact came into vivid focus during the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. In this stunning example of how things work in a system where the rule of law is replaced by the rule of men, we heard Johnny Cochran and a sympathetic black jury assert the right to murder without consequence. In this particular case, the right to murder with impunity was grounded in a need to rectify the nation's record of racial wrongs. Justice now has nothing whatsoever to do with law or the facts of the case, but only with some subjective and ever-changing notion of social redress.
A "woman's right to choose" allows her to murder her own offspring with impunity. Sodomites, like people in racial categories, are now said to be born that way ... are locked by genetic into their queer orientation ... and must thus be free to commit their abominations without consequences (the HIV virus be damned, or, better yet, embraced ). To try to convert them, as the American Psychiatric Association has just declared, is the real sin against nature — this particular sin being one exception to the no-consequences rule, of course.
Related to this line of thinking is the whole "victimization" argument. If genetics and the immutable realities of birth cannot be invoked as authorization to sin, we can still find a rationale in the concept of victimization. Society has gotten away with sinning against me, so I have a right to commit crimes and other moral transgressions without retribution.
Gratefully, there are still a few statesmen and other leaders who recognize the grave danger to our national and personal lives in this legacy of The Revolution. Whatever their motives may have been, the Republicans who raised their voices during the impeachment debate on behalf of the rule of law were standing heroically in the breach. Michael Krauss, a professor of law at George Mason University near the capital, sees the current impeachment skirmish as "in many ways an important battle in the culture wars."
"I'm one of those who believe that there has been an erosion of values and legal standards in the country and that this is the time for the House of Representatives to stand up and say that the erosion will go no further," he told The Washington Times.
Dr. Hafeez Malik, professor of political science at Villanova University, is quoted in the same newspaper as adding, "In the culture, there is a moral relativism, and you are seeing its effect in these political deliberations among the Democrats."
Such voices are increasingly rare. Yet the deafening roar of their opposite numbers cannot change the reality of the Fixed Moral Universe into which God has placed us all.
In His Universe, the City of God, it is impossible to sin without consequence, all wishful thinking and moral relativism to the contrary. "Be sure your sin will find you out," Numbers 32:23 warns.
Our sin will find us out because sin is rebellion against an inalterably just and holy God.
"...[W]e must know that God is holy — infinitely, eternally and unchangeably holy," writes Calvin Knox Cummings in Confessing Christ. "He cannot, he will not, treat sin lightly. His justice demands full punishment for sin. His holiness requires that the demand of the law be met in full. He would not be a God we could respect if he required anything less. Should we expect less justice from God than from a human judge? The earthly judge who lets a criminal go free without punishment is despised as unjust."
That last statement was written in 1955, shortly before The Revolution began to turn such truths upside down. In less than a generation, we now live in a land where it is no longer considered unjust for judges, juries, congressmen, the electorate or the court of public opinion to let criminals like O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton go free.
St. Augustine outlined what will become of a nation where sinning has no consequence; that is to say, where there is no justice.
"Consequently, if the republic is the weal of the people, and there is no people if it be not associated with a common acknowledgment of right, and if there is no right where there is no justice, then most certainly it follows that there is no republic where there is no justice," he wrote in The City of God (book 19, chapter 21).
To put it another way, it is simply impossible to live freely and safely in a land where people can sin with impunity.
Perhaps God will stay His judgment yet awhile if our national prayer could become that which still stands over the door of the Boone County, Missouri, Courthouse: "Oh Justice, when expelled from other habitations, make this thy dwelling place."
