Having given up on God the law will make us better. This fantasy changes the game, necessarily giving rise to an embedded political correctness. The dissenter is silenced. Its guardians insulate their self-righteous moral adventurism from popular complaint. They continually restate their claims while stigmatising the mental health of those who oppose them. 'Bigot' is their favourite accusation.
The French Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira would sit nicely in New Zealand. In reference to same-sex marriage she said, 'it's a reform of societyyou could even say it's the reform of civilisation'. Dissidents, on this claim, are enemies of civilisation.
Having denied the transcendent foundation of human dignity, civil rights law, torn from its roots, must proliferate to placate the equality demands of competing groups. The irony is obvious. Examine Magna Carta and the increasingly dechristianised drafts that eventually gave us The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The message of Easter speaks into this irony with a trumpet so loud only the unbending cannot hear it. The creator God has declared that we are his rebellious creatures. Some, in a vainglorious search for rights, might grasp the tragic and heroic rebel, Prometheus. Most of us are wimpier, like J. Alfred Prufrock.
God has declared that all we have to do is trust him. Most of us don't and fall victim to another master. The old idea of vision; the one without which the people perish, becomes impossible to imagine because the sublime affirms the transcendent.
In spite of their rebellion God loves his creatures. To prove it and to fulfil the just demands of the law, in the person of Christ, he becomes man and dies on a cross. The Creator of Life is killed by his creatures; the irony is deliberate. The debt incurred by the creature's rebellion is paid. Death, the consequence of our rebellion, cannot hold Jesus. He rises on the third day fully human and fully God. At last the rebel can be liberated from the power and consequences of his own folly.
This is the story of our culture. It declares our dignity by teaching that freedom is first of all about self-control that comes from trusting God. It is not about the counterfeit of undisciplined choice. The more godlike the sovereignty of choice becomes the less free our lives will be.
It is vacuous to claim that we are creating a new story to replace the old. The equality shibboleth of diversity and tolerance will have a limited life. Rubbing along together by excavating what we least disagree about is tiresome. It leads to increasing group self-interest and conflicting rights.
There are only two stories. Either the Easter story is true and Christ is our redeemer or it is a lie. The second story is a tragedy. The State, with or without paganised civil religion, is the default saviour.
When I was a boy most of us believed the first story; some of us put our trust in its Hero. We are sinners no longer. Guilt and shame and certainly sin, are psychological fictions; humility a weakness. Government, like Caesar, is the priest and king unable to forgive our trespasses. It tells us how to think, live and worship. Don't imagine you won't worship; you will. You are locked into it. There is a dubious consolation. Risk and suffering will be at arm's length and you can 'choose' death with illusory self-esteem secure.
Bruce Logan is a writer living half his time in France.
