10 Truths About Christians And Politics

Coral Ridge Ministries

Dr. D. James Kennedy, Founder

From the 10 Truths Series
TRUTH #6 - All Governments Legislate Morality

“You can’t legislate morality.” Everyone knows that. Even Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler and one-term Minnesota governor has body-slammed the idea that legislators can and should pass laws on moral matters. “[T]he old saw, ‘You can’t legislate morality,’ still rings true,” he writes. “It’s been tried. It doesn’t work.”

This widely used catch phrase is a popular idea with durable roots in recent American history. John F. Kennedy stood before an audience of Baptist ministers in 1960 to assure them—and the nation—that, if elected president, his personal religious faith would not interfere with how he performed his duties. Twenty-four years later, then governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, gave a speech at Notre Dame to explain why he, though personally pro-life, would not impose his morality on the voters of New York. Opposition to the use of law to enact one’s personal moral beliefs goes back even further. President James Buchanan was personally opposed to the institution of slavery, but he took no action to end it. Buchanan, who served as president from 1857 to 1861, was more concerned about roads and revenue than human bondage. He viewed abolitionists as divisive, and thought, according to biographer Philip S. Klein, that “questions of morality could not be settled by political action.”

But would anyone defend slavery or use that argument to do so today? Hardly. The nation finally settled the matter of slavery—first by war and then by the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which imposed an anti-slavery morality on the entire nation. Maybe Jesse and his friends are incorrect. Maybe we can, and should, legislate morality. Actually we do—every day. Laws against theft, murder, drug use, and prostitution, to list just a few, all impose morality on the public. All law, like it or not, arises from a view of morality and is rooted in religious values. This is both unavoidable and indispensable. “It is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand,” said John Adams, who signed the Declaration of Independence and later served as America’s second president.

Double Standard on Legislating Morals
Interestingly, those who seek to impose morality on the nation are sometimes celebrated, not22 censured. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. effectively imposed his moral values on Lester Maddox and George Wallace, segregationist governors of Georgia and Alabama. Now he is rightly praised for his moral leadership. And when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said in 1983 that the use of nuclear weapons could never be morally justified, Governor Cuomo praised them for their “courage and moral judgment.” As the late Henry Hyde pointed out, “The clergy were revered when they marched at Selma, joined antiwar sit-ins and helped boycott lettuce—they are reviled when they speak out against abortion.” He’s right. No one objects when groups like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice lobby and litigate on behalf of the right to puncture the skull and suction the brains out of a partially delivered baby. But as Hyde learned firsthand, Christians who seek to protect the unborn are accused of trying to impose their religion on the nation.

After Hyde, a U.S. Representative from 1975-2007, won passage in 1976 of an amendment to prohibit the use of federal funds for abortion, the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood went to court to stop its enforcement. They argued that Hyde’s law was religiously based and therefore “used the fist of government to smash the wall of separation between church and state. . . .” To prove their argument, they demanded and won the right to inspect his mail for evidence of religious sentiment and hired a private eye who tailed Hyde into St. Thomas More Cathedral in Arlington, Virginia, where he attended a mass to pray for the unborn.
Fortunately, the ACLU/Planned Parenthood lawsuit failed in 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a narrow 5-4 margin, upheld the Hyde amendment. Hyde, however, said, “The anger I felt when they tried to disenfranchise me because of my religion has stayed with me. These are dangerous people who make dangerous arguments.”

Law Can Lead to Changed Attitudes
One of those arguments—the claim, made by Gov. Ventura, that legislating morality doesn’t work—is just not true. The law won’t change someone’s heart, but it will restrain behavior, and it can lead to changed attitudes. “It may be true that you cannot legislate morality,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1965, “but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important also.”

And laws do impact public opinion. Attitudes about slavery have turned around dramatically since 1861, when the nation went to war to settle the question. “Legislating against slavery helped change attitudes because the majority of people have always believed that whatever is illegal must be immoral,” say Dr. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, authors of Legislating Morality.

The Real Question: Whose Morality?
The real question is not whether morality should be legislated, but whose morality will be enacted into law. Geisler and Turek charge that the morality of secular humanism has been progressively imposed on the nation by the courts since the 1960s. In 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court removed Bible reading from the nation’s schools. In the 1970s it legalized abortion. In the 1990s, Ten Commandments displays were removed from public venues and prayer was prohibited at graduations and high school football games. It should not have come as a surprise when the Court struck down the remaining sodomy laws in 2003. It was during this time, between 1960 and the early 1990s, that illegitimacy soared—up 450 percent; violent crime escalated—up 370 percent; teenage suicide increased dramatically—up 210 percent; and divorce increased by nearly 130 percent.

Humanism, which holds that man is the measure of all things, is a social philosophy that simply does not work. It empties the public square of any divine promise or retribution. The United States is clearly reaping the social chaos that follows from the failure to “legislate morality.” The mantra, “You can’t legislate morality!” is primarily a tool used to intimidate Christians and keep them from bringing salt and light to the realm of politics. Christians who work to make biblical morality the basis for our laws are not violating the Constitution—they are exercising the very liberty it guarantees. It is time we Christians take full advantage of that freedom. The next chapter shows, however, that when we do, we must make a choice as to how we will exercise our influence.