In God in the Dock, Lewis addresses in his typical trenchant way the dangers of national repentance. And, of course, one of the first things to note is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with national repentance, the real kind. But sinners have a consistent way of foisting the guilt of their moral failings off onto the backs of the nearest available abstraction — the age, the nation, the corporations, or the trends.
But the fundamental moral duties in Scripture are individual. Thou is not a peculiar kind of holy-speak found in sacred texts, but is simply the the seventeenth century singular. “Thou shalt not” means “You, yeah, you there in the third row, shalt not . . .” It is this kind of thing that used to make people squirm during sermons, but not so much anymore.
I am an active participant in my food chain, and I occupy a particular place in it. My moral duties are strongest right next to me, and they are weakest (to the extent that they exist at all) at the far side of the food chain.
This is not to say that moral responsibility cannot be transmitted along the food chain. Surely it can, as when my buddy shoplifts something from Safeway so we can share it for dinner. Eating stolen goods that I watched get stolen is morally problematic, and I cheerfully grant it. But I am here talking about my supposed complicity in the strange oaths that the foreman in the Texas pecan orchard swore at his underpaid migrant workers, in the season before those pecans from said ranch made their way through thirteen other morally problematic checkpoints on their way to my pie.
Now the reason it is wrong to invert everything like this is that obsessing about distant sin far, far away is almost always for the purpose of making room for sin near at hand (the personal kinds of sins that people commit against other people), or to atone for that same kind of personal guilt. It is either trying to get rid of guilt or make room for it, or both.
The bizarre moral duty to assume responsibilty for corporations on the other side of the world that might be doing something wrong is a moral duty that has been brought center stage and foisted upon us by a drunken, stoned, fornicating, sodomizing, porn-watching, unborn child murdering generation. And so what happens when blind men lead? The Lord spoke of the phenomenon once. And speaking of finnicky diets, these are the people who strain at gnats and eat the camel. To make it perfectly plain, swallowing unclean camels is a dietary issue.
If all this were happening in an era when obedience to the Ten Commandments had broken out all over, and we were all looking around with a culture-wide Westminster Larger Catechism gleam in our eye, looking to find the next level we could kick it up to, so that we could all become the Navy Seals of responsible biblical casuistry, I confess that such a circumstance would make it necessary to take it all more seriously (than I am currently doing). But we don’t live in that generation. We live in a time when all of the Ten Commandments are broken routinely, and half of them are mocked openly. And this is the generation that wants to lecture me about eating a chicken that Old MacDonald never sang e-i-e-i-o to. Wisdom is vindicated by her children. We piped but ye did not dance. We bought the Happy Meal but ye did not play with the toy.
On top of that, those quadrants of the church that are most likely to share in these various guilt-spasms — most likely to wallow in guilt over somebody else’s corporate malfeasance, most likely to urge us to flush only when we absolutely have to, most likely to learn the stewardship requirements of Genesis from The New York Times — are the same quadrants of the church ordaining homos and all the rest of it. Thought experiment. If I were to write a breathtakingly honest book review about the brutally honest transexual journey that one former fundamentalist had to take, as he made his way from condemnation to the liberation of self-acceptance, what kind of theological rag would publish it? What kind of publication wouldn’t? And which of the two would be most likely to publish some stewardship screed or other, arguing that responsible Christians have a moral obligation to protect the planet in just the ways that the lead singer of your favorite alternative rock band would approve of? Right. Thought so. So let’s stop pretending that we don’t know where the pressures are coming from.