‘You Will Be Like Gods’: The Need for Moral Clarity in a Luciferian World

Politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from religion. Evidence of this maxim abounds, but a pertinent illustration may be found in a well-known Republican’s policy shift on same-sex marriage. At a Thursday night townhall event in Epping, New Hampshire, presidential primary contender and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie cited the Vatican’s controversial document “Fiducia Supplicans” in endorsing same-sex marriage. While the Vatican document allowing same-sex couples to request certain informal blessings affirmed that it is not “changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage,” Christie pointed to the document as evidence that “even the Church is changing.”

Christie isn’t the only one to liberally interpret the Pope Francis-approved document as license to promote homosexual relationships. Despite the Vatican’s repeated insistence that same-sex relationships cannot be condoned due to their inherently sinful nature, LGBT apologists within the ranks of the Catholic Church — from high-ranking German bishops to media-savvy priests like Jesuit James Martin — have erroneously touted “Fiducia Supplicans” as ratifying their rainbow axiom. The chief issue with the Vatican declaration isn’t so much what it says, but rather what it doesn’t say. The absolute and abject absence of clarity has resulted in liberal and left-wing activists and ideologues incorrectly citing the authority of the Catholic Church in support of their vacuous woke agenda — in short, it has resulted in moral confusion and chaos.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to the Catholic Church. For example, at the Seventh Lambeth Conference in 1930, the Anglican Communion broke from the majority of Christian denominations and approved the use of artificial contraceptives. Until that point, nearly all Christians of varying stripes had agreed that the chief purpose of sex is procreation, an end which contraceptives intentionally thwart. A report published shortly thereafter by the English Church Union noted that Anglican leaders were starkly divided on the subject, with many arguing the decision “is so contrary to Holy Scripture and to Christian principle and instinct and tradition that there are no circumstances in which it can be justified.” The outcome was a majority of especially “mainline” Protestant denominations adopting similar stances and, eventually, even allowing unrestricted use of artificial contraceptives.

In 2020, the United Methodist Church announced a proposal to split the denomination over “fundamental differences,” predominantly relating to same-sex marriages. So far, nearly 8,000 individual churches have filed to leave the United Methodist Church over its progressive policies. The Presbyterian Church USA allowed the ordination of openly-gay men and women in 2011 and, in 2014, approved same-sex marriages. The Episcopal Church allowed blessings for same-sex unions in 2012 and quickly followed by permitting same-sex marriages in 2015. Of course, these moves are more than merely ambiguous and outright contradict the biblical definition of marriage.

Since Western civilization rests on the back of Christianity, a lack of moral clarity from Christian leaders inevitably leads to a lack of moral clarity in Western civilization. Without that moral clarity, Western nations become uprooted from objective morality, as defined by God, and increasingly turn inward upon themselves, giving rise to the dangerous phenomenon of consent-based and consensus-based morality.

The fruits of this absence of moral clarity are already alarmingly clear in today’s world. The cult of transgenderism prizes an individual’s feelings of discomfort or confusion over the biological reality of God’s creation. The “priests” of this cult often prey upon those feelings, pointing to insecurities and psychological or emotional wounds as a reason for the afflicted soul to offer himself up on the altar of the operating table. God’s design, lovingly crafted and miraculously breathed into life, is discarded in a hubristic effort to declare confused and disordered feelings to be certain and rightly-oriented.

Abortion has become a sort of sadistic sacrament for the Left, a return to the child-sacrificing days of Baals and Molochs. No longer solemnized with golden idols and fiery furnaces, today’s child-sacrifice rituals are accompanied by the waiting room, the scalpel, and the little box of pills. No longer do the “priests” of this religion promise rain or crops in exchange for the lives of innocent children, but prosperous careers, financial security, and freedom from the responsibilities that come along with sex. In its demonic parody of a Christian sacrament, abortion takes for its twisted motto the very words of Christ Himself, “This is my body,” spoken the night before He offered Himself up on the cross as sacrifice for the sins of all mankind.

Since the beginning of time, man’s heart has been oriented to worship. Writing of the centuries before Christ’s birth, the ancient Greek historian Plutarch observed, “You may find cities without walls, without literature, and without the arts and sciences of civilized life, but you will never find a city without priests and altars, or which does not have sacrifices offered to the gods.” In the ages before God became Man, the pagans of old sought to satisfy that yearning for worship, rightly recognizing that what is worshipped must be greater than they themselves and thus inventing gods of thunder, of the sea, of the sun, of fertility, of death.

Prior to the Nativity — that holy and cosmic cataclysm we just celebrated — God had not become flesh, had not walked among his beloved creatures, sat at table with them, wept with them, laughed with them, suffered and bled for them. Christ’s birth changed everything. No god either before or since has taken on man’s form and sacrificed his life; Christ alone has done so. Because He became a man, our Brother, He elevated us to become sons and daughters of God, thus St. Paul wrote:

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption. As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God” (Galatians 4-7).

But in the centuries since Christianity became ascendant and, eventually, dominant, in the West, men began to listen again to the whisper of the serpent in Eden: “You will be like gods …” (Genesis 3:5). The soul’s yearning for worship must be assuaged, and some have sought (and many more seek today) not to worship God — and certainly not to worship Zeus or Jupiter or Thor or Odin, for such mythological creations seem, for all the rich beauty of their tales, mere campfire stories against the immovable truth of Christ — but to worship the self, to believe the serpent’s lie, to turn inward and declare oneself god.

This self-worship, this Luciferian attempt to revolt against Heaven and usurp the throne of God, has become widespread in today’s liberal, “tolerant” West. The great Christian author C.S. Lewis once observed, “Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead — even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served — deny it food and it will gobble poison.” Just so, as God has been denied the honor He is due in the public square — as prayer and worship have been forced out of the classroom, suppressed in parliament buildings and legislative chambers, and muffled in film, literature, and art — men have decided to bestow that honor upon themselves.

Morality is not determined by the individual, nor by convenience, nor by democratic consensus, but by God. Those entrusted with preaching and teaching His word have a grave responsibility to speak the Truth, to uphold moral clarity in a world gone mad. As long as Christian leaders remain silent, as long as they produce nothing more than ambiguities and reluctant compromises, more and more souls will turn away from God and listen to the serpent’s hollow pledge.