OPINION:
Dear Dr. E: I watched this week’s Olympic ceremonies and was very disturbed by the mockery of the Last Supper. But nearly everyone is saying that the negative reaction from the Christian community is just another example of our intolerance. How do you respond to this claim? — FELLOW CHRISTIAN FROM OKLAHOMA CITY
Dear Fellow Christian: A handful of years ago, I was invited to fly to Hollywood to be part of a panel to critique the premiere of the film “Lord, Save Us from Your Followers.” Other panelists included Michael Levine, founder and president of Levine Communications, William Lobdell, former Los Angeles Times religion reporter and author of “Losing My Religion,” and the film’s producer, Emmy award winner Dan Merchant. I was the odd man out on the panel: a token conservative from Oklahoma to sit in juxtaposition to these other more enlightened folks of Tinseltown.
The nature of Mr. Merchant’s movie was simple. It was a “man-on-the-street” exposé portraying Christians as having an unsophisticated belief system that threatened pluralism, civil discourse, and tolerance. It implied that Christians should say nothing in the public square other than, “We’re sorry for being so judgmental.”
After the movie, all of the panelists took the stage. The moderator then turned to me to answer the first question: “Dr. Piper, what did you think of the movie?” he asked.
My response caught him a bit off guard. I admitted I was saddened by the thoughtless people featured in the movie, but I added that I was rather amused by the obvious indignation that served as the movie’s premise.
I then said that this negative critique of Christian behavior ironically had no meaning if there was no objective definition of righteousness to contextualize the offense. In other words, for the movie to mock Christians as being moralists, it had to rely on Christian morality to do so.
Think about it. Because Christianity is grounded in an immutable standard of right and wrong, it is Christianity itself that provides the standard that its critics use to criticize it. In other words, without Christian orthodoxy (right ideas), the heterodox cannot mock orthodox Christians for lacking orthopraxy (right behavior). Another way of saying it is that accusing someone of intolerance is rather silly unless you have some objective definition of what you find intolerable.
C. S. Lewis explained this in “The Poison of Subjectivism.” Here’s a brief excerpt of his remarks: “Until modern times, no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational… or that what they discovered was objective. It was taken for granted that in temptation, passion was opposed, not to some sentiment, but to reason.”
He went on: “The modern view is very different. It does not believe that value judgments are really judgments at all. They are sentiments… To say that a thing is good is merely to express our feelings about it… But if this is so, then we might have been conditioned to feel otherwise. ’Perhaps,’ thinks the reformer or the educational expert, ’it would be better if we were. Let us improve our morality.’”
“Out of this apparently innocent idea,” concludes Lewis, “comes the disease that will certainly end our species if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values and that a community can choose its ideology as men choose their clothes.”
The “tolerance” celebrated at the Olympics is indeed that “fatal superstition.” If this isn’t the poster child of “choosing our values as men choose their clothes,” I don’t know what is. But any schoolboy can see the hypocrisy in it all. None of this is really about tolerance, and it never has been. On the contrary, the self-styled advocates of “openness and peace” are clearly more interested in tyranny and power. At every turn, whether it be in Dan Merchant’s movie or on the present-day streets of Paris, we see them with their angry red faces as they shout, “You must agree with us! You must celebrate everything we do! You must watch, and you must applaud!” Tolerating anything they find intolerable is of no interest to them.
The end goal of the worldview that was on full display in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics isn’t tolerance or freedom but ideological fascism, pure and simple. That’s the intolerance being pushed by these champions of tolerance. That’s the conformity they have in mind when they criticize Christians for being conformists. It’s a “disease that will certainly end our species if it is not crushed.”
If you are seeking guidance in today’s changing world, Higher Ground is there for you. Everett Piper, a Ph.D. and a former university president and radio host, takes your questions in his weekly ’Ask Dr. E’ column. If you have moral or ethical questions for which you’d like an answer, please email askeverett@washingtontimes.com and he may include it in a future column.
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