Intellectuals that today we call “liberal” rely on the old myth that “man is the measure of all things” and cling to the notion that human brainpower alone can solve every problem and give us a better world. This rationalist creed commits its followers to failure because it disconnects them from the One who put us here. We are not puppets, true, but we are also not exclusively our own agents.

Severance from our Creator defeats the moral compass that keeps us from drifting in perpetual confusion, doubt, chaos, and cruelty. Morality based exclusively on human brainpower is the plaything of social and political dictators. A modern religious leader[i] has said that “the insistence of the articulate intelligentsia to divorce God from man abets ruinous fragmentation.” And, it must be added, opens the door to an “anything goes” philosophy, the predictable consequence of a disunity with the One who gave us our brainpower.

Missing for centuries from purely rational formulations for human welfare and progress is the simple truth that the power of the human mind is unequal to the power that created it. This central flaw in the rationalist take on reality, along with the willful and political misuse and abuse of reason and science, has resulted in a morally messed up world. Anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge knows how deadly rationalism can be. Bottom line: playing God doesn’t work.

Perhaps the worst example of rationalized morality is the one that swept France – and convulsed Europe – during and after the French Revolution. It came in the form of a lie imbedded in the slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The banner of that declaration is still flown in the West and revered by many, oblivious as were the French revolutionists to the paradox that in order for brothers to have liberty they must be allowed to pursue goals that result in inequality.

Equality before God – whether or not we call ourselves brothers and sisters – does not mean the surrender of the right to be unequal with respect to each other. Fairness and equality are not synonyms. Decent people in all times and places value every human life and help one another, using their unique (and unequal) talents in the common pursuit of wellbeing. This fully human instinct is at odds with egalitarianism, that homogenizing doctrine that stifles the initiative to rise to one’s best level of achievement, lifting everyone in the process. The stagnating “justice” of egalitarianism – cutting us all out of the same dough like cookies, reducing monarchs to ornaments and the gifted to apologists – has not only turned on our heritage but turned justice on its head and soured human relations across America.

What else to expect than a sick America when God is squeezed out of government, schools, occupations, and entertainment? Liberals who continue to undermine the moral health of America by rejecting or ignoring a morality higher than theirs don’t see that they are driving their case deeper into the ground, from which clever reasoning, fake science, and political warfare won’t save it. God grant that they wake up.

Photo credit: Elliott Brown, Flickr

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[i] Elie E. Pilchie in American Scholar, Spring 1966, p.390.