Politics and Morality

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flight 93 that went down in Pennsylvania. Do you think the people on that flight were wondering what the moral, personal moral character of those who were trying to stop the terrorist was?

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Or did they just see themselves as part of a group that had a goal to stop the terrorists?

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When you're mugged on the street, you're robbed, and someone helps you. Do you care if that person is even, in that circumstance, even a

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Republican or a Democrat? And it's good to be back.

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And thank you for those who prayed while I was gone. We are going to talk about politics and morality today and how they intersect.

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And I think this is a difficult area for Christians. I put out this podcast yesterday, and I had people private messaging me even about it, wanting clarification.

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And so that's why I'm doing this. I think Christians have a tendency sometimes to spiritualize things.

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And sometimes that's appropriate. Sometimes it's not. And then also, I think so many political issues are fundamentally moral.

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And because of that, it makes it, I think, tempting to make every political issue about the cosmic battle, the universal battle between good and evil, and to judge everything on a simple moral scale.

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That's true for all peoples across time and place. And I don't think that's actually fundamentally what politics is about, even though I would certainly not dissuade you from the opinion that politics contains a moral component.

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We can't deny that. In fact, many of us, I think, came to a rude awakening leading up to 2020 when we found out our pastors oftentimes failed to teach about ethical issues that informed our political opinions.

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And so as a result of that, I think we're hyper aware now that, hey, pastors should talk about politics.

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That's important. And I would agree with that. But just because something has a moral component to it does not mean at an ontological level, meaning at a base level, a definitional level, that that thing is about the battle between good and evil, like the telos or the purpose of it is the end for which it exists is to make the good win and the bad lose.

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And let me give you a parallel example. It's not perfect in every way. But one of the examples I was thinking of in regards to this is sports.

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Sports is a very cut and dry, one side loses, one side wins. And sometimes there's rivalries in sports.

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Think of OSU in Michigan, right? There's a team spirit. There's a local spirit. You could say it's a good, right thing to want your team to want your community to prevail.

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You could say it's a good thing and as a byproduct of sports to learn how to be a good loser, learn how to be a good winner.

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Many parents put their kids in sports for that reason. You could say there's moral rules in sports, right?

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The referee will call you out when you break those moral rules. But one thing we wouldn't say about sports is that it is definitionally about the battle between good and evil, right?

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Because you can have a team that has, in theory, just as many good team members as the other team and just as many good fans and a good team spirit and good motivations as the other team.

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And yet one will prevail and one will lose. And it's not that one was better than the other in any universal moral sense.

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Now, there's exceptions to this. There's obviously teams that you don't like because they're bad. The players are bad. They're known for cheating.

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The coach is bad. But I'm telling you, though, at the base level, sports is really not about that.

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Sports is about one team prevailing over the other. It is about making sure that your team wins.

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And you may have people on your team who do not have the biblical ethics necessary for being a member, even at a church.

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But they are in the trenches with you when it comes to winning for your side. So that's a parallel example.

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It's not perfect in every way. But I think one area of life that we can recognize, there is definitely a moral component here.

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But it does not mean that at a base level, this is just about a simple moral calculation of good and evil.

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It's not always that simple. In fact, what side of the stadium you sit on might determine the right thing for you to do.

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If you are from the local area, it's generally considered, and I think this is appropriate, right, to root for your home team.

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Now, obviously, with people moving around everywhere and then becoming attracted to teams where you just like the player for whatever reason, this is not always the case.

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But a team spirit and a local spirit tend to go together. It's an Ordo Amoris thing.

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I love my own. And I want my own to do well. I want to be proud of the people in my community, right?

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And you throw a big party when your side wins, when your school prevails. So it's not a universal moral thing.

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It might change based on where you sit in the stadium, but that doesn't mean morality now is all of a sudden open to situatedness.

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It's not situational ethics. It's just the nature of the game.

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It's about winning and losing for your side. It's about ownership and making sure your people achieve the best.

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So that's sports. I think we understand that pretty well. And if we were to spiritualize sports too much, if we were to make it about a battle of good versus evil, then

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I think most of us would see, I don't even know what that would look like completely, but I think most of us would know that that's not appropriate.

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We would say that Christians can be on just about any team in a sports league and still be faithful Christians, right?

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I hope that makes sense. Now there are times in sports where you do have a universal good evil battle orbiting or paralleling the conflict that is emerging on the baseball field or football field, right?

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You can have a situation where there's a team that is known for being evil, that does evil things, and it has evil players and they're not kept in line.

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And people root for them maybe in part because of that component. And then the people who don't approve of that component are rooting against them.

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You can certainly see things like that happen in the world of sports. But fundamentally, we still wouldn't say that that's what sports is fundamentally about, this universal battle between good and evil.

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Politics is a little bit like that. And I'm going to bring up some very concrete examples that I think will help you make sense of this.

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Every political decision involves a moral component, but politics is not ontologically about ensuring the most moral outcome.

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It's about ensuring the survival of a particular way of life. That's what it is.

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This does not always involve a cut and dry moral issue, like abortion or sexual perversion.

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You could think of a lot of political issues that aren't those things, right, where it's obvious which side is morally correct.

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Obviously, in those circumstances, it becomes pretty obvious. And when we get to, I think, these baseline moral issues that are just so fundamental and the ethics of scripture speaks to them so clearly, it's obvious which side is right and which side is wrong.

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And we've realized, I think, in recent years that in most parts of the country, you can be a

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Christian and be involved in the Republican Party. Even if the Republican Party includes corruption, you still have a seat at the table.

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You can still make sure that your moral beliefs are represented and you're not going to be necessarily run out of the party because of that.

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In the Democrat Party, not so much. Maybe there's a few local areas you can still do that.

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I highly doubt it. On the national level, certainly not. It's opposed at a very fundamental level to the ethics of Christianity on sexual ethics and on murder.

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So you can't really be a consistent Christian and endorse the Democrat Party's platform.

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There's no way to do that. You can still be a Republican, though, and be a Christian and involve yourself with the platform for that particular party, even if it's not perfect.

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It's not at least contradicting blatantly your Christian morality. I think we all understand this.

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Politics involves more than just those kinds of battles, though.

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There are jurisdictional concerns. The art of the possible is what politics is.

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You can't always get the best outcome that you want. Sometimes the best possible thing is not what you even should shoot for.

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You don't want to let the good be the enemy of the perfect. I mean in a very narrow sense,

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I think we should always, in a universal sense, shoot for the right, going in the best direction.

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But I'm saying when we're practical, when we're not pragmatism, but when we're practical, looking at the possible choices of the limited array of choices that we're given, we sometimes don't see on the menu what we would prefer, but we have to go for the best possible option.

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Some of you might think voting for Donald Trump is that, and I would agree with you. I would prefer someone who didn't have some of the negative character qualities, right?

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But that person isn't here. So what do you do when it's a battle for survival and one person is going to allow your civilization to continue and one person isn't?

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This is where politics gets down to the real purpose. I think that's a window into what politics is actually about, which is preserving the way of life of your people.

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And of course, the true valuable good things in that way of life. But some of these things are valuable and it's not because they're always valuable in a universal moral sense.

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I'll give you some examples of that as we continue. We're going to have to form partnerships sometimes with even evil people who are interested in a particular goal.

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Think about on 9 -11. Think about the flight, was it flight 93 that went down in Pennsylvania?

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Do you think the people on that flight were wondering what the moral, personal moral character of those who were trying to stop the terrorist was, or did they just see themselves as part of a group that had a goal to stop the terrorists?

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When you're mugged on the street, hopefully none of you ever have that, but some of you listening might've had that, you're robbed and someone helps you.

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Do you care if that person is even in that circumstance, even a Republican or a Democrat? I mean, that person could be evil, but they're in that particular battle with the particular issue that you have and goal that you have of defeating this person who wants to end your life.

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They are an ally and you're going to band together with them. Politics is like that too. Issue by issue, you're going to find yourself in league sometimes with people that you disagree with on very fundamental moral things at times.

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That doesn't mean that you make those people in charge of your movement or give them prominent positions.

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They may not be trustworthy people. They may have bad characters, but it doesn't mean that you withhold or reject their help or a limited kind of cobelligerent partnership simply because they have these defects when you're looking at a greater threat and they're willing to help with that greater threat.

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This is kind of what I talked about yesterday with making sure that yes, you can band together against greater threats with people to whom you share very fundamental disagreements, but you have to make sure that you do so in an uncompromising way.

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I'm not going to redo that podcast, go back and watch my podcast on friends and enemies. This is what politics is about.

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Sometimes you actually have to defeat good people in politics, good people who have actually even good goals for their people, but those goals aren't good for your people.

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I'll give you an example of that in a moment. All of this happens in pursuit of what we can rightly call a good goal.

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So why do you get into politics? Why do you operate in the political world? For those who are in office, why do you become a statesman representing your constituents in the highest offices in the land?

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Or maybe it's even just the lower offices. Maybe it's a local town. Why do you do that? Why do you go on the school board?

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Well, it's not always because of universal right and wrong in all times and places.

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I think fundamentally it's because you want to defend your current home, where you live, your children, the arrangement that you've enjoyed, the way of life that you have.

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You want it to be better. That's a noble thing. That's a good thing.

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That's a moral thing too. There's a moral component to that motivation. But that motivation is not something that you can reduce to a universal moral scale.

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What do you mean by that, John? Here's a bunch of examples I came up with. So let's talk about these. Here's my first example.

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A Christian land developer wants to turn a scenic area into condos.

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And this will change the traffic flow. It will become an eyesore. But it will be a benefit to the outsiders who move into your area.

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The reason I use this example is because it's actually one that is a very present real threat to the community

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I live in right now. This is something that many people have been talking about. It's a local debate.

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Are we going to let land developers come in? Now, I don't know if they're Christian. And they take places that used to be apple orchards, forested areas, beautiful scenic areas, and let them create ugly condos.

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Now, part of me is tempted to introduce a universal moral kind of scale here and say, well, we know that this is representative of progress.

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But progress, though, in a progressive sense, this is kind of a dystopian life where the people who come here are not going to really integrate into the community well.

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It's going to be at a scale that we can't manage. And I'm going to try to get to somewhere that this is wrong for the community.

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And I'm going to try to invoke a moral binary. But the thing is, I don't think

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I can do this in a universal way. Consider this. It may be that people from New York City need to have a place to escape from.

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Mom, Dom, he's going to come in office possibly. He's going to be this socialist guy. And they need a place to escape to. We can provide that.

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They could be refugees in our community. And I could see someone making a really good argument that this is the morally right thing to do, to provide, to share with others our resources.

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Now, where do my loyalties lie? Lies with the people that I'm around. Lies with my neighbors and obviously for the good of my own household, my family members.

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I don't obviously want a lot of traffic. That's an inconvenience. But if someone could make a counterargument and say, well, how that might be an inconvenience for you, but you know how important that would be for someone coming in.

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My point is, you can have a very strong opinion about an issue like this and you can be a

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Christian and you can be on both sides of this issue and you can be making very good arguments, but you couldn't really place this on a universal moral scale.

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It's situational. It's wisdom issues. I can say,

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I can with a clear conscience say, this is the wrong thing to do for our community. And here's my reasons why

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I think it's wrong from where I'm sitting. But I can't create something that's going to say it's wrong from where everyone is sitting.

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We have a responsibility for our family. It's wrong for our family to do this thing. Can't say it's wrong for every family.

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This is the nature of politics. Here's another example. A feminist wants to get legislation passed that will ensure boys cannot play in girls' sports for a different motivation than a

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Christian. The feminist thinks that this is against women's rights. This is a very negative thing to have men playing on women's sports because that represents the patriarchy.

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It's kind of funny to some of us to see every once in a while feminists making this argument because their normalization of women taking on male roles has led to this.

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But they see this as a contradiction, let's say. And they're going to fight to make sure that this evil doesn't happen.

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They could have a totally different motivation than you. You want to reflect the created order. You have a very baseline moral view on this that is universal.

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But you also have a motivation that says this is bad for my community. And for that reason,

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I don't want this coming in. It's bad. I don't want my girls competing with guys and getting hurt and that kind of thing, right?

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So do you partner with the person who's a feminist to get a good outcome? And I think the answer is, why not?

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They might have a different motivation. And on the next issue, you may be clashing. But on that issue, you're together.

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And to them, it's not this moral issue that it is to you. It is a political issue, though, that affects both of you.

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And the negative impact of this issue is going to be detrimental to your local community.

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And so people that might not be normally sitting in church with you are going to come out and vote with you against it.

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Because even if you have this baseline moral complaint, you share with other members of your community a more tangible kind of particular concern of what this will do for our sports team, what this will do for our community, what this will do for our school, that kind of thing.

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Okay, how about this one? A politician wants to tax marijuana at such a high rate that it will make it impossible to afford it.

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So taxing a vice seems immoral on the face of it, right? Why don't we just have ban the vice?

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Why don't we just not give people the option, let's say? And I know there's, I'm gonna put this sort of to the side.

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I'm not getting into the medical marijuana debate. And I understand there's there's theonomists who would say or libertarians that, look, it's the person who abuses it.

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That's the problem. Outlaw the abuse, not the use. And I understand that and prohibition and all this.

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But just for the sake of argument, let's just say the moral, the universal moral position is you should not be drunk with wine, which is dissipation, right?

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And, and this is also a public, this is a public thing, though. Also, this has a public component.

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And the more people abuse it, the more problems you have with people not showing up for work, and the efficiency goes down and car accidents and medical bills because of neuroses and things like this.

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So there's this externality involved with using this particular, being involved with this particular vice, which is kind of like, honestly, it is like the prohibition arguments, right?

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There was a side that said, look, um, this is something that's personal. It's, it's, uh, it's something that we can manage in our house just because other people can't manage alcohol.

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Why should we be deprived of it? And then the comeback is, it's just going to be good for society overall.

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And overall, during prohibition prohibition, drinking did go down, right? I'm sure there were less of the ramifications and outcomes that often come when people misuse alcohol.

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But at the same time, uh, what does that do for personal freedom? Now I'm only bringing this all up to show you the complexity of what an issue like this represents.

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And we need wise Statesmen to talk about these things. If you're in a community and the marijuana use is so bad, it is causing such externalities that the society can barely function, right?

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Um, or you could insert alcohol there if you want. It may be prudent. If people aren't going to limit themselves, maybe you do have to limit them for a temporary timeframe until they can learn self -government.

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These are situational matters. These are wisdom matters. How do you apply what we know to be true?

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Right? This isn't a universal moral thing where it's wrong to ban marijuana or right to legalize marijuana.

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So what if you're in a German family and you own a brewery, all right, like prohibition, um, what is, let's bring it to alcohol, right?

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So tax, so we talked about marijuana taxing advice seems like, you know, it's immoral, but if the purpose of it is to make it so hard to get that it lowers the use and it's good for the community, you could support a law like that.

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You know, you could, I mean, another example of this would be like child pornography. We, you might want all pornography band, but if it's only child pornography and that's the option that's on the table and that will be good for your community.

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And we've already seen how porn companies have even pulled out of States because of those limitations. That may be the good thing to do, right?

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So, um, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is part of the political calculation and it's a wisdom thing.

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So let's bring it to alcohol. A Christian wants to prohibit the sale of alcohol altogether because of the negative externalities of it.

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But you come from this German family and you own a brewery. It's part of your culture, your heritage. What are you going to do politically?

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This is going to hurt my family. Those are my, my own people, the people that I'm responsible for. And I'm certainly not responsible for the negative externalities of alcohol.

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I'm just trying to make the best possible beer or whatever it is that I can make. Uh, and with the intention that people will not misuse it, that they'll enjoy it.

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And there's nothing wrong with that morally. And indeed there is nothing wrong with that morally. You could be a

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Christian and be on opposite sides of that particular battle. Is it a universal moral issue?

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Well, moral issues are coming into it, but again, this isn't a universal all times in all places, moral scale.

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It's not like abortion where in all times, in all places, this is evil, right? Let's go bring up another example, an enemy army.

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And then this is the end of politics when it gets, when the disagreements flare up too much, it's called war.

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An enemy army with a higher number of Christians and a morally superior civilization tries to take your land. Does it justify their cause?

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Does it mean that you should not fight for your cause? This is something that happens in a lot of wars where there's

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Christians on both sides. There are Christians on both sides of our civil war. There are Christians on both sides of our war for American independence.

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You know, theoretically you could have had situations where the British were coming in and the people under their charge were

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Anglican and were just trying to be submissive to the King and do their duty. And they were fighting with those who had less of a moral character.

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You know, I don't think the Boston Tea Party was a particularly good thing to do.

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It was taking tea from a private company and then dumping it overboard.

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And in a sense, this is stealing, right? So what do you do? Those are, those are people on your side now, right?

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Do you agree with them and everything they've done? I think there are situations where you're going to choose your people, the group that tangibly you live in, that God has given you charge over, and you're going to try to protect them, even if a force is coming in that may have moral superiority in some ways.

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Obviously you try to avert these kinds of crises, but they happen every now and then, you know?

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And I mean, we could bring up so many examples of this, right? I think ideology doesn't, ideologues want to make everything about a universal kind of black and white.

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And, and so, you know, like the civil war, for example, the North is coming in and if you've decided they're the morally superior ones because they have less slavery and the outcome of the war leads to the end of slavery, then you have to, and this is often the case, people will vilify the

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South and say, well, all of them must have just been evil for some reason because they didn't have that same cause.

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Well, what if their cause is defending their home and you're, and an army's coming? I mean, that was the, I forget who said it, that was the sort of a quote that got off and shared of this

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Union soldier asks a Confederate soldier, why are you fighting? He says, because you're down here.

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You know, Shelby Foote talks about this. Well, that's the only reason you need, right? That's the nature of political.

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You are being threatened. Your home is being threatened, your livelihood, your church, your community. You need to defend that.

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So I don't care if they have noble ideas in their mind of what they want to do to remake our society. They're destroying our society right now.

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So this is something that you can apply to many other conflicts as well. How about this one?

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A pervert wants to lower the age of consent to 15. Now you could say that, well, look in the

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Bible and throughout history, 15 has been a marriageable age.

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Yeah, well, not in our society, not in the current society we have. People generally aren't ready at that age.

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And if you start allowing that, you create an opening for predators to take advantage of those who are not ready to make those kinds of decisions.

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If you want to get the age down to 15 or 16, you would have to somehow figure out a way for society first to have the conditions it used to, where people are ready to take those responsibilities on at that age.

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But until society is at that point, are you going to let someone with an evil motivation create conditions that allow them to do more evil?

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You have to look at the conditions. You have to look at the ramifications. You could apply this to other things, too.

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Is the voting age somehow a universal moral thing? To vote in a democratic republic, you must be 18.

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No, this isn't across all times and places. It depends on the population you have. This is something that's based on tradition.

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Tradition mediates wisdom from the ages and applies it to a specific context. I hope those examples, and we could do more, but I think that's enough, give you an idea of how this works.

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Morality comes to play, comes to be applied into these situations. There's a moral component, but it doesn't mean that everything reduces down to a moral binary in a cosmic battle between good and evil.

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I think that's what I see a lot of people doing, making a very rigid kind of judgment and saying,

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I'm on the right side. You can do that on some things, certainly. I'm on the right side morally, and my enemies are beasts.

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They're barbarians. They're evil. They're demons. They're demonic. Vilify them in ways that almost categorize them as not humans.

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They're so bad. There are certainly moral issues that are baseline moral, where the universal battle between good and evil manifests itself in a political struggle.

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This certainly does happen. I'm not saying it doesn't, but I'm not saying the political is reduced to that.

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There are many issues. In fact, probably the majority of the issues on the local and state level, and even sometimes on the national level that we are concerned about, that it depends on where you're sitting and who you are responsible to, who are your people, your identity, that is going to determine kind of where you come down on this kind of thing.

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Who does it benefit? And that kind of thing. I hope this was helpful to you.

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I am certainly in favor, and I do want to sort of stave off the accusations that I'm a situational ethicist or something.

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I certainly want to say that I think the law of God, the moral law of God is universal. Anytime a universal moral law of God comes up, it's our responsibility to uphold that.

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I think God gives us responsibilities over our families or in our communities. And in the political, that's really what we are fighting for, our families, our communities, and the best kind of outcome for them.

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What would be morally right, but economically right, you know, in every category, we want the best arrangement for them.

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And we're going to stave off threats, threats to that arrangement, even if the threats are coming from people that are morally superior in some ways, or we will band together sometimes with people who are morally inferior to stave off threats to our community, because that's what politics is ultimately about.

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And that is a right thing, right? That goal is a right thing to be for your community, to be for your people, to be for your church.

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So hopefully that helps, that will answer some of the questions people have messaged me about. That's pretty much it for the podcast.

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I'm going to be doing another podcast Lord willing tomorrow and give you a news roundup update of a bunch of stuff that I haven't been able to get to because of traveling, but until then,