Recently a pastor informed his congregation that
Christians can no longer seek to impose their moral
values on a society which does not accept Christianity.
The second part of the statement, at least, is
quite wrong . While Church membership and
attendance has sharply decreased, the Roy Morgan
Study of the Values of the Australian People
demonstrates that 80% believe in God.
Should
Christians seek to impose their moral values on law
and society? There are some who are forcibly and
aggressively arguing that Christian values must be
expelled from law, society and politics. Gareth
Evans (now Senator Evans) is reported in The Sydney
Morning Herald, May 7th, 1976, as stating at a
convention of the South Australian Council for Civil
Liberties that children wanted a right to sexual
freedom and education and "protection from the
influence of Christianity "
The same article
referred to Mr Richard Neville (of Oz fame) as stating
that "promiscuity is one beneficial way of
breaking up the family structure, which has led children to
become the property of their parents. "
If law is not based on morality, on what can it be based ?
The irony and hypocrisy of those who argue that
Christian morality must be exorcised from jaw and
society are that, at the same time, they are arguing
for new laws based upon their own particular moral
base.
The pastor who made the statement
referred to above has been deceived and is blissfully
unaware of "the new morality" which the opponents of
Christian morality are committed to secular
humanism, permissiveness, anti-Christianism,
material equality and distributive justice enforced through
law.
Christian morality, derived from
the Ten Commandments, underlies the common law.
Criminal law is based on the Ten Commandments, which
also underlie the law of contract and the law of
civil wrongs. The common law inherited by the
British Colonies on the Australian continent and by the
Commonwealth established in 1901, was developed over
many centuries by British judges, who reacted to
particular human situations on the basis of Christian
values.
In an essay entitled "morals and
the Criminal Law, " Lord Devlin wrote:
"Society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on
politics morals and ethics, no society can exist. Each
one of us has ideas about what is good and what is
evil; they cannot be kept private from the society in
which we live. If men and women try to create a
society in which there is no fundamental agreement
about good and evil they will fail; if, having based
it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society
will disintegrate.
"For society is not
something that is kept together physically; it is
held by the invisible bonds of common thought. If
the bonds were too far relaxed. the members would
drift apart. A common morality is part of the bondage.
The bondage is part of the price of society; and mankind,
which needs society, must pay its price " (The Philosophy
of a Law, ed. R.M. Dworkin, Oxford Press, 1977).
Such a consensus exists in the modern Western
community and in the Australian community. A major
problem of our times, however, is that elites in
politics, society, media, and even in religious
organisations, have turned their backs on the
traditional conceptions of right and wrong. The laws
passed by Parliament have undermined morality.
Some sections of the elites have undermined morality
deliberately. Others support ideas and causes which
have for them the unintended effect of undermining
values which they are committed to.
All this has led to confusion in the minds of many people
and is a contributing factor to the moral decadence of
this era.
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