The Sin of Meddling

I have strong views about certain things and so do you. But so what? What is the correct relationship between our convictions and convicting someone of a crime?

Alan Turing (1912–1954) is most famous for being the father of theoretical computer science. At least, he used to be most famous for that. “The Imitation Game,” however—the 2014 Oscar-winning film starring Benedict Cumberbatch—brought to a wide public Turing’s role in breaking the infamous Enigma code of the Nazi armed forces in World War II.

The film also put a harsh spotlight on Britain’s long legal history of prosecuting homosexuals. Turing was caught with a man and sentenced to his choice of two years in prison or a regimen of “chemical castration.” After a year of the latter, he died of cyanide poisoning, in what some consider an accident but what was officially ruled a suicide.

Many of us nowadays—in Britain, North America, and around the world—shudder at the idea of criminalizing homosexual encounter. Nonetheless, dozens of nations, mostly in Africa and in the Islamic world, continue to penalize it, and some even execute people for it.

Meanwhile, here in Canada and even more so among our American cousins, powers on the political and social left and right eagerly seek to govern everyone else’s private lives. Diversity-equity-inclusivity (DEI) instruction and regulation was heavy-handedly imposed on many agencies and corporations by a left-leaning elite over the last decade. The winds changed, however, and DEI programs—plus affirmative action and a wide array of other policies intended to ameliorate, if not eliminate racism, sexism, and other pernicious prejudices—are being rooted out by the ascendant right.

Many conservatives fiercely seek absolute restrictions on abortion and medical assistance in dying. Liberals with equal ferocity insist on an orthodoxy that promotes transsexual transitions and forbids even counseling for those wrestling with non-traditional understandings of sex and gender.

A strange word in the First Epistle of Peter came to mind in this regard, specifically in I Peter 4:15. Peter warns his flock that it is obviously shameful for a Christian to suffer for engaging in murder, theft, and other evil-doing. But he adds one more term to this list, a word found nowhere else in the New Testament.

The Apostle warns also against “other-overseeing,” putting together the words for “another” and for “overseer” (literally, episkopos, the word later used for “bishop”). Several translators render this term as meddling.

We live in an era dominated by what I have dubbed “The New Moralism.” Finger-wagging is everywhere. “I’m right; you’re wrong; shape up or drop dead.”

Worse than discourtesy on social media, however, is the increasing freedom people are granting themselves to seek powerful ways of enforcing their own standards on others. They want to compel their fellow citizens to do what we ought to be free not to do, or to do without what we ought to be free to choose.

Christians, alas, are often in the forefront of such initiatives—again, on the left as well as on the right. But where is a healthy, Bible-grounded understanding of liberty and of regard for each person’s individual responsibility before God?

God’s law is good, yes, and we Christians rejoice along with the Hebrew psalmist in extolling its virtues, per Psalm 19. And all law is an expression of morality.

Not all morality, however, should become law. Lying, we all agree, is generally bad. But we have made it illegal only in certain zones, and not others: in legal contracts, in courtroom testimony, in advertising, and in a few others.

Freedom of speech means letting us tell certain kinds of lies without legal sanction, trusting social norms and social consequences to deal with other forms of lying. The idea of the state policing the truth of everyone’s speech is a nightmare.

Laying God’s perfect law on everyone else, moreover, lays an impossible burden on those who live without the power of the Holy Spirit. (Those of us who have the Spirit find it rather challenging ourselves.)

Furthermore, the imposition of such a standard would alienate many who might come voluntarily to embrace it as the Spirit eventually helps them see its beauty.

And, again, worldly authorities deal out, at best, only a rough justice. We cannot and should not legislate any more than we have to.

We must tread cautiously and courteously, therefore, in our quest for laws and other policies that will make people do things we have failed to convince them by persuasion they should do. Particularly as some Christians are loudly complaining of being persecuted for our values, we must beware, when we get a little power, of doing to others what we didn’t like them doing to us.

Just because something is wrong doesn’t mean it ought to be illegal. Just because something is good doesn’t mean it ought to be mandatory. The Bible itself says nothing of the sort.

We need much more learning, deliberation, wisdom, grace, courage, tolerance, and compassion in our legislation—literally in making the laws of our land, but also in other spheres, such as corporate cultures, workplace rules, educational mandates, and so on. We must not demand that everything and everyone go our way.

Pastors, teachers, and parents properly call those in their care to high standards. God expects nothing less. We must do so, however, with respect for each person’s accountability to God. We should give instruction and encouragement, and then explain and enforce the fewest and least onerous guardrails necessary for good order. Otherwise, we should stay out of other people’s business—even our congregants’ and our children’s, let alone the lives of our fellow citizens.

To decide on what to adopt as mandatory community values, we will need ears tuned to listen well to others, and especially to those who see things differently than we do—and to God, who often sees things differently than we do (Isa. 55:9), much as like to presume the easy alignment of the divine perspective with our preferences. We will need to find policies that work for everyone—or, at least, for all but the most doctrinaire or the most selfish.

There is much more to say, of course, about the ethics of Christian liberty as applied to our pluralistic cultures, and I’ve said more in three books. The big book is Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. The mid-level book is Why You’re Here: Ethics for the Real World. And the little book is Woke: An Evangelical Guide.

For now, let us cultivate what political scientist Glenn Tinder calls the “prophetic stance”: the habit of listening to God before presuming to speak for God. I call it holy hesitation—pausing to ask, “What does Jesus want here?” before I start telling other people what I want, and then trying to make them do it if they don’t comply.

Let us be sure not to legislate where there ought to be liberty.

In sum: let us be very, very careful to avoid demanding more of other people than God does.