I have a lot of bad habits. Among the worst of my bad habits is my constant habit of making things more complicated than they have to be. The things I am about to discuss have been on my mind for a long time, and have developed with prayers, ideas, objects of study that have been rolling around in my head for an even longer time. I have thought about these things very in depth although I am merely scratching the surface of something that God is trying to teach me. I have been tempted to fall into my habit of making these thoughts more complicated than they have to be, and it will be my attempt to avoid that throughout the rest of this essay.
There has been a very dangerous and very important change in our culture. This change has its roots in very complicated philosophical changes, that I don’t fully understand. But this change is affecting all of our lives for the worse…. and could snowball into something so dangerous that the darkest minds of past years could never comprehend or predict it. This change, has been the cultural disconnect between morality and the basis of morality.
Ouch, that’s a mouthful…. let me try and explain it better.
Although I wish I could explain all the philosophical reasons I think this has happened… let me leave it at this: Atheism is a philosophy that has taken over our culture..even with people who claim to not be atheists. All ideas stem from a basic worldview, and in our day and age we have a bad habit of incorporating ideas that stem from a worldview contradictory to what we claim to be true. In this case…. atheism is a worldview that I believe ultimately leads to the conclusion that there is no such thing as right and wrong…… and this has seeped into the church in a very bizzare way… let me explain.
If you ask an Atheist if they believe slavery is wrong, they will probably say yes (unless they’re an extremely well thought out atheist, like a nihilist). If you ask a modern day Christian if they believe slavery is wrong, they will also say yes. If you ask an atheist why it’s wrong, you will get a lot of different answers. Their worldview gives no basis for morality, so they often steal buzzwords from other religions (namely Christianity). An Atheist might say that slavery is cruel (but then you could ask them, why is cruelty wrong?), or that it goes against the way of things, or it’s not nice, or any number of things. They have borrowed a moral idea, and have no idea why they believe it if you really talk them through their beliefs. What about a Christian? Well, sadly, many Christians will say the same sorts of things. They have been warped into not really caring why something is wrong, and simply have borrowed the cultural concept that it is wrong. We have borrowed the idea that right and wrong has no basis, and we can not seem to explain the basis for why something is wrong.
What’s the result? Well, if we fail to understand why something is wrong… we fail to understand the idea behind it. If we fail to understand the idea behind it, we can make the mistake of committing the same basic sin in a different way. We have become so good at being hypocrites. We condemn things on a social level because it’s become culturally considered wrong…but we commit the same basic sins all the time. This is because of the secularization of right and wrong. We rarely turn to thinking about God and his law for determining moral judgements.
So now that I have introduced the basis for my idea… here’s the specific application. I believe that we have become Thomas Jefferson-like in the way we treat and think about people. We have become hypocritical, like he was. We have become slave owners.
Thomas Jefferson talked very strongly about human rights, and the evils of oppression. He also said a lot of things about the evils of slavery. Yet, he kept many slaves himself and never once freed a single one as far as i know. Historians can only determine that he was a hypocrite. It is my belief, and my main point… that each and every one of us is guilty of the same basic sins of slavery. We have enslaved people around us, we do it constantly. As a whole, we have caused a lot of pain, a lot of hurt, and even death because of it (not just spiritual death, but physical death). Why have we done this? In part because we have borrowed the idea that slavery is wrong from Christians such as William Wilberforce who understood scripture and understood why it’s wrong. We have forgotten why it’s wrong, and have committed the same basic sins in other ways.
So…let’s do the right thing and examine from a Biblical standpoint why slavery is wrong, and see if we can see the same basic sin in another area of our lives (or from our generation’s attitude as a whole). This is where we return to the concept of worship which has pervaded a lot of my notes as of late.
Worship is not just something we do on Sundays or Wednesday nights, and not just something we do with a musical instrument. Worship is a complete submission of ourselves to God. We owe God our very lives, and we worship him through that. We tithe as a symbol of giving our lives entirely over to God. Just like I said in my note about worship and authority, the Jews were angry about having to pay taxes to Rome because taxation in Israel was considered a holy act of worship. It said who you belonged to. The Jews’ taxes went directly to the church as well as the state, so by giving taxes they were worshiping God and respecting his ordained authorities.
Tyranny is what happens when a certain person sets themselves up as a God over someone else. When someone tries to receive worship from the people that is meant for God. On a political level, it can mean a state having full control over peoples lives. That is why a key American ideal is the idea that people have the human right to be free. Because freedom means the ability to submit oneself to God entirely without another person or another institution trying to take God’s place and take what is yours to give him.
Slavery is the same thing on a smaller (though at the same time, much greater) scale. Slavery is what happens when one person says to another. Look! “Your work, the toils of your work belong to ME. Your life belongs to ME! Not God! I define who you are, and what you’re worth, not God!!!!” The sin behind this is quite simply…idolatry. The very first of the 10 commandments condemns idolatry. What’s the idol? Yourself. You are so obsessed with worshiping yourself that you long to force others to worship you too. You long for them to be under your thumb and to belong to you. You need them to elevate yourself up, so you can find yourself even more worthy of worship. You are no longer treating them as human beings, you are treating them as brutes. And as John Newton said of his involvement of the slave trade in the movie Amazing Grace, ‘we became the brutes…they were human.’
What is even worse, is that when someone is not spiritually very mature, and someone forces them to worship something besides God (like another person), they submit quite easily, even if it’s subconscious.
Furthermore, one must remember the concept that you will become what you worship. The men who worship themselves and force others to as well, start to become the corrupt things they are worshiping. They start to become less of what God created them to be…they become less human. The slaves then start to become less human, as they become the object of their worship. They either become numb and dead, or even submit to being just as cruel and oppressive. Look at John Newton. He was a slave himself for many years, and immediately became a brutal slave trader after he was ‘freed.’ Thankfully, Christ had been at work among our nation’s slaves before the civil war and many of them were very mature in Christ and came out of slavery without as much bitterness as would be expected.
Now…think about it. Worship, idolatry, brutality, becoming dead to your humanity…. it happens everyday in our social lives and social structures in a game we call popularity contests.
Everyday you can walk into a school and pick out the cliques. There are the cool people, there are the not so cool people, and the flat out rejects. This is a new game of slavery that is being played. Everyday, people around us proclaim that they are ‘god’ and force those around them to worship them. By putting others down, they are able to elevate themselves and feel as if they are worthy of worship. And I’m not just talking about with bullies or the obviously stuck-up… I’m talking at just about everyone. Anytime you have written someone else off as different, and ignored them, or talked behind their backs… you have claimed that you determine the value of people’s lives, personalities and abilities. Who does that sound like? God. You are trying to become God. You are taking their ability to be who God created them to be (worship) and taken it for yourself. You no longer want them to become like or worship God, you are wanting them to worship you. I’m guilty of it, and I think just about everyone of us is.
What happens as a result? We have kids who feel left out, oppressed, and feel like nothing. They have been treated as unpopular and unimportant and they start to play the part. Look at the raging problems with teen suicide and depression. And it isn’t just among the unpopular people, it happens among the popular people. They become just as dead as the people they oppress because they worship their corruption as they force others to join them. The game of popularity is a game of how many people can you put down so that you can get to the top. It is brutal, it is deadly, it is dangerous, and it’s wrong.
So now comes my manifesto. Be a movement of change. Look out for the oppressed and free them. Topple the idols, free the slaves. There is a full-flaming slave market going on all around us and we sit idly by and ignore it!!!! Every day, kids are in such devastating worlds of low self esteem, self hatred, and suicidal tendencies because of our sick desires to elevate ourselves and define what is popular and normal.
Perhaps this comes from my life as a quirky person myself…but I have never truly understood the way slightly off beat people have been treated and ignored. I actually have an affinity to slightly odd people (none of my friends should read too much into that!!!). But you know, it’s really not that hard to reach out to slightly odd people. But take it beyond that, abolish the word odd altogether. The word ‘odd’ is a slaveowners word. It’s not a godly word. God has created all people in His sight and who are we to have the gall to say we can change that?
We may not all feel as guilty as I am portraying us as… but we are. We commit these terrible sins all the time even if we don’t realize it. We have to realize the danger that we can cause so that we may correct it and help keep it from happening elsewhere.
Another symptom of this idolatrous culture is the need that is felt to conform to a certain look or personality. I look at people who come from school environments that especially breed these tendencies and see how alike they try to act and look. There is a desire to ignore the differences among people. They worshiping an cultural image, or a popular group of people when we conform that way. That is another similar form of slavery.
(side note: This is a reason I love homeschooling. I am so refreshed and impressed by spending time with my homeschool friends. They are not afraid to delve deeply into the people God has created them to be and are each not afraid to be a little different than someone else. They are so much more open about their interests and talents…it’s so exhilirating and I feel so at home with them!!!)
Remember that you have the power to free the oppressed everyday by treating all people with godly respect, and standing up for the person your world, your church, or your school loves to hate (even if it’s a very silent hate…marked by simply a desire to ignore them). You have the power to remove chains and hold back the whips by becoming a friend to someone and showing them love. You have such immense power for evil, but also such immense power for good.
And for those of us who have felt oppressed and looked down upon and laughed at…remember to live a life of Christlike humility and not to focus on the way other people treat us. The more we focus on the way we’re treated (this is a major part of my testimony), the more we become focused on ourselves and the more we will turn into the thing we hate. We can be agents of change too, with the love of Christ.
Remember that rejection of tyranny is obedience to God. Help others run away from worshiping themselves or from worshiping the people that worship themselves. Be an agent of change, and of freedom…and of abolition. Be creative, and take the things I have tried to communicate to you and find other ways of understanding and describing where ever this evil pops up. Don’t take this information lightly, or this manifesto without graveness. We are setting out to change an entire generation’s culture. We are setting out to change the world. It sounds impossible, but the older I grow the more I realize that God loves the impossible. He loves the lost causes. He loves those who try.
Besides. Just like William Pitt tells William Wilberforce, “We’re too young to know that some things are impossible. So we will do them always”
Go out and shake up the world. Turn it on it’s head. Look for the least among you, and elevate them to the respect that they deserve as children of God and think not of yourself. (taking another line from the movie Amazing Grace)…. As your friend I would advise extreme caution in how you go about change. But as a brother in Christ I say:
To hell with caution.
How to Think Too Much 