Take away religion and you can't hire enough police

Last week I was reading Andre Shea King's column entitled "Words of wisdom from a Marxist." It included a short video clip of a professor from the Harvard Business School in Boston named Clayton Christensen.

The video, no more than 90 seconds long, blew me away. Here is the transcript:

"Some time ago I had a conversation with a Marxist economist from China. He was coming to the end of a Fulbright Fellowship here in Boston. I asked him if he had learned anything that was surprising or unexpected. Without any hesitation he said, 'Yeah. I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy.'

"'The reason why democracy works,' he said, 'is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does; but rather, democracy works because most people, most of the time, voluntarily choose to obey the law. In your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week, and they were taught there by people who they respected.'

"My friend went on to say that Americans follow these rules because they had come to believe that they weren't just accountable to society – they were accountable to God.

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"My Chinese friend heightened a vague but nagging concern I've harbored inside, that as religion loses its influence over the lives of Americans, what will happen to our democracy? Where are the institutions that are going to teach the next generation of Americans that they, too, must choose to voluntarily obey the laws?

"Because if you take away religion, you can't hire enough police."

Chew on that last statement, folks.

Do you really think it's an accident that our society is become more and more lawless as the importance of faith in our daily lives recedes?

A huge element of a religious people is the self-control they are taught from toddlerhood. When you think about it, a Judeo-Christian heritage is all about self-control. There are rules and regulations laid down by God. He gave standards of expected behavior. While we all sin and fall short, that doesn't mean we are excused from trying. Religious parents reinforce this on a daily basis, and church attendance reinforces this weekly.

Right now in modern America, we are witnessing what happens when people flout the godly rules our Founding Fathers used in the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which all educated people must agree has a religious foundation. Like bratty children flouting the rules of their parents, we think rules are unnecessary and stifling. People mock, sneer and taunt the Almighty, yet Americans still feel entitled to receive His blessings.

What IS self-control, anyway? And why is it important?

Clayton Christensen

Quite simply, self-control is the ability to regulate our personal impulses and reactions. It's the realization that behavior (not moods or emotions, but behavior) is often a choice. Self-control is often referred to as self-regulation.

Why is it important? The answer is eerily simple: If you can't control yourself, someone else must control you. This is precisely what the Chinese Marxist economist observed.

He should know. China is one of the most intensely government-regulated societies on the planet. Do we really want that in America? Hmmm. Maybe some of us do.

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It's clear that our nation as a whole has suffered because of a lack of individual self-control. When we can't (or won't) control our own behavior, government will often step in and control that behavior for us.

There are those who applaud this loss of self-control, preferring instead to revel in their "freedom of expression" and taunting those who control their own behavior as "repressed" or "puritanical." They welcome the idea of government becoming God. These are the people who like the fact that government has become the controller, and welcome public funding of their inability to self-regulate. They welcome government mandates for how much power we can use, what kinds of cars we can drive, what foods we can eat, what medical care options we have, how we can educate our children … in short, there's virtually nothing the government wouldn't happily take over to force us to control ourselves in compliance with their agenda.

Atheists will immediately protest that they know right from wrong and don't need a "bronze age deity" telling them what to do in order to be law-abiding citizens. OK, fine, whatever. But "who" is stopping you from filching that pack of gum from the grocery store? Is it your conscience? What is at the basis of your conscience? Gee, could it be … God? Nah, can't be.

As God is taken out or denied in our society, we're no longer trying to fight our sinful nature. Instead we welcome it. We embrace it. We wallow it in. We celebrate it. Has America become freer and more independent as a result? Or are we becoming more watched, more surveyed, more followed, more – controlled?

I think it was Rush Limbaugh who said something to the effect that you know you're successful when half the country hates your guts. To take this analogy a leap forward, God must know when His Son is successful when half the world hates Him. In the gospel of John, Jesus says: "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. … Whoever hates me hates my Father as well. … [T]hey have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: 'They hated me without reason.'"

Does it really take a Chinese Marxist to point out the obvious? "I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy," he said. In the push toward an atheist, hedonistic culture, we may lose the very thing that distinguished America from the rest of the world, notably China.

We may fight religion. We may fight God. But we cannot fight the fact that America is becoming more obsessively government-controlled. And as we're already seeing, governmental fiat is a very poor replacement for godly self-control.

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