THE UNITED STATES:  ETHICALLY ADRIFT

Nations are often like people—they get depressed and “get the blues.”  Americans are often the most confident, optimistic people on earth.  But few would say so this Thanksgiving weekend.  Seemingly as a nation, we are in a funk.  Has the American experiment failed?  Will we soon join the dustbin of history?  I cannot answer these questions with any certainty.  But I do believe strongly that we can reach one conclusion about the state of America:  This nation is adrift ethically in a manner I have not seen in my lifetime.  Ostensibly, we have no ethical anchor.  As a nation, we have no compass to guide us.  Permit me to offer several examples of this proposition.

• First, consider the financial crisis we are in.  It is my contention that we are in the middle of something we truly do not understand.  No one seems to know exactly what to do and each day adds to this uncertainty and fear.  But there is one thing of which I am certain:  There is an ethical crisis in this nation and that crisis has contributed in no small way to the current financial crisis.  Listen to the wise words of columnist Daniel Henninger:  “It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligionizing America has been dangerous.  That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people.  Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.  The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is. . . . that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines.  We are erasing the chalk lines.”  Responsibility, restraint and remorse were absent during the years when the subprime crisis was birthed.  Personal responsibility, restraint and remorse are ethical concepts and have a great deal to do with virtue.  Each of these virtues must be learned, taught and passed on to each generation.  They have been conspicuously absent in this crisis.  Instead, we are turning to the state for our salvation.  Theologian R.C. Sproul has written:  “. . . the government now virtually engulfs all of life.  Where education once was under the direction of local authorities, it is now controlled and directed by federal legislation.  The economy that was once driven by the natural forces of the market has now come under strict control of the federal government, which not only regulates the economy, but considers itself responsible for controlling it.”  And, the church has been for all practical purposes banished from the public square.  Personal religion and belief in a God who is both Creator and Redeemer are the greatest check on ethically wrong behavior.  With that banished, where is the check?  The current financial meltdown in America is a product of a much deeper ethical meltdown.  See Henninger’s piece in the Wall Street Journal (20 November 2008) and Sproul’s article in Tabletalk (September 2008), pp. 5-7.

• Second, consider a bizarre court case in New Jersey.  The online dating service eHarmony was the subject of a complaint filed with the New Jersey attorney general’s office by a gay match seeker in 2005, who charged that his rights were violated.  He contended that eHarmony was guilty of violating the state’s discrimination law by not offering a same-sex dating service.  In 2007, the attorney general did indeed conclude that eHarmony had violated the state’s Law Against Discrimination.  Last week, eHarmony and the state of New Jersey reached a settlement in which eHarmony will launch a Web dating service for same-sex couples, called Compatible Partners, and will permit the first 10,000 users to register free.  In addition, eHarmony will pay $50,000 to the attorney general’s office and $5,000 to the man who brought the case.  [As a company, eHarmony was begun in 2000 by Neil Clark Warren, an evangelical Christian, who practiced for years as a clinical psychologist.]  The company faces a similar case in California, where it is located.  Why is this case so serious?  The case is further evidence of how ethically adrift we are as a nation.  That a state can use an anti-discrimination law against a private dating service illustrates how far our culture has accommodated itself to the homosexual agenda.  We have legitimized a lifestyle that is not pleasing to God, our Creator and our Redeemer.  Ken Myers has written:  “. . . [in the late 20th century] the pursuit of happiness took on a whole new meaning.  Happiness came to be understood as whatever any individual conceives it to be.  Since it could no longer be objectively defined in terms of a fixed purpose for human nature, the pursuit of happiness soon came to mean the pursuit of pleasure, the relentless quest for fun, for an emotional state of carefree bliss.  And this state need have no correlation to the ethical choices one has made, to the way one has ordered one’s life.  In fact, many Americans seem committed to pursuing this kind of happiness by means of making bad ethical choices:  committing adultery, dishonoring parents, killing their unborn children, abusing their own bodies. . . happiness [has become] merely a mood, the sustaining of which is the highest good. . .”  See the Wall Street Journal (20 November 2008) and Ken Myers in Tabletalk (September 2008), pp. 18-20.

• Third, consider how the South Dakota 2005 “Informed-Consent” Law is being processed in our culture.  In 1992, the US Supreme Court (in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case) established that states may require physicians to give pregnant women information that “a reasonable patient would consider material to the decision of whether or not to undergo the abortion”—informing them of the relevant medical risks, alternatives to abortion, etc.  The 2005 South Dakota law is a response to this allowance from the Supreme Court.  Planned Parenthood of South Dakota was successful in obtaining an injunction delaying the law’s implementation.  Last summer, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction, clearing the way for the law’s implementation.  Zita Lazzarini summarizes the South Dakota “informed consent” law:  “The law also requires that doctors give pregnant women a description of medical and ‘statistically significant’ risks of abortion, among which it includes depression and other psychological distress, suicide, danger to subsequent pregnancies, and death.  Physicians must tell women the approximate gestational age of the fetus and describe its state of development.  All disclosures must be in writing, and the women must sign each page of the document.  The physician must answer all the woman’s questions in writing and enter them into her medical record.  The physician must also certify in writing that the woman received the information and that she understood it, as far as the physician could ascertain.  Physicians who do not satisfy the statute are subject to license suspension or revocation and may be charged with a class 2 misdemeanor.”  How has this law been received?  The law states that “abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.  [And] that the pregnant woman has an existing relationship with that unborn human being and that the relationship enjoys protection under the United States Constitution and under the laws of South Dakota.”  According to Lazzarini, “in challenging the law, Planned Parenthood argued that it violates physicians’ First Amendment rights, first by compelling them to deliver the state’s ideological message—that ‘the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being. . . .’”  I highlighted the phrase “ideological message” in Lazzarini’s article.  So, we have come to this in our culture?  That the baby growing in the mother’s womb is a unique human being is an ideological message!!  That the baby in the mother’s womb is a human life is not ideology; it is a profoundly important ethical conviction.  The conviction that life beings at conception and that that life has infinite worth and value is not a matter of ideology but of truth and revelation.  We have come so far as a culture that we frame a question of the value of a human life in the womb as an issue of ideology, not ethics?  That is not how Scripture frames the issue.  In 1973 the Supreme Court was right:  There is no consensus in the culture about when life begins.  God’s revelation in the Bible, however, has spoken to this issue.  A thorough examination of His Word reveals that God views life in the womb as of infinite value and in need of protection.  The challenge is that most areas of the culture--law, politics, many theologians and religious leaders--refuse to heed God’s clear teaching on this issue of prenatal life.  A cluster of verses in the Bible clearly establish God’s view of prenatal life:

• Exodus 21:22-24--Whatever these difficult verses exactly mean, God views life in the womb as of great value.  Whether by accident or by intent, to cause a woman to have a miscarriage demands accountability on the part of the one who caused it.  The Law did not treat the fetus frivolously.

• Isaiah 49:1, 5--Referring to Messiah, God called Him for His mission from the womb.

3. Jeremiah 1:5 and Luke 1:15--As with Isaiah, God viewed Jeremiah and John the Baptist from the womb as of infinite value.  He even filled John with the Holy Spirit when he was in Elizabeth’s womb.

4. No other passage deals with the question of prenatal life so powerfully and conclusively than Psalm 139.  In this wonderful psalm, David reviews four phenomenal attributes of God--His omniscience, His omnipresence, His omnipotence and His holiness.  In reviewing God’s omnipotence, David reviews God’s power in creating life, which he compares to God “weaving” him in his mother’s womb.  God made his “frame,” his skeleton.  Then, in verse 16, he writes, “Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance. . . .”  Undoubtedly, David is referring to the embryo.  If correct, then the divine perspective on life is that it begins at conception.  So awesome is God’s omniscience and His omnipotence, that he knew all about David even when he was an embryo!  This is God’s view of life—and that is not a matter of ideology.  See Zita Lazzarini, “South Dakota’s Abortion Script—Threatening the Physician-Patient Relationship” in The New England Journal of Medicine (20 November 2008), pp. 2189-2191 and James P. Eckman, Biblical Ethics, pp. 29-30.

Print