Hating on the Supreme Court is dangerous

Since the Dobbs decision, we have seen anger, threats, and violence from pro-abortion advocates spilling out everywhere. We see it on social media, on the streets, and in the media. We see it in the doxing of U.S. Supreme Court justices and illegal demonstrations outside their homes. We see it in vicious attacks on pregnancy care centers. We can see all that from here in Canada.

In the West, we are living through a slow-rolling revolution against the accumulated wisdom of many centuries. It has speeded up dramatically in the past half-century as we’ve lost almost all pretense of having once been a Christian civilization. And the decline of Christianity is met with an upsurge in barbarism.

Of course, we should all welcome the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States. We should rejoice that many states have quickly increased protections for the unborn. We should give thanks for many lives saved.

But the anger, hatred, and violence that has been unleashed are disturbing. It probably makes it hard for many Americans to see the overturning of Roe as the real moral progress in our society they had hoped to see.

In a situation like this, it is easy to lose nerve and surrender to the path of least resistance in which Christians only work for those social improvements that can be implemented by consensus. But if believers take that route, we will see little progress because those on the left have become addicted to rage. It will take the patience of Job to avoid either letting them get away with whatever they want or overreacting in exasperation.

We know God’s law is eternal and can be discerned in conscience, nature, and reason. We know that sexual promiscuity is wrong and can never be made right, no matter how many raunchy parades, permissive laws, and angry slogans are hurled against the rock of reality. We know that liberty can only be preserved by a people who restrain and discipline themselves. We need laws to restrain the heartless and educate the public on the moral and personal restraint necessary to maintain democracy and freedom.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his classic book After Virtue, argues that modern society has embraced emotivism, which means that for many people today, all moral laws or rules are nothing but expressions of feelings or emotions. In other words, there is no difference between being opposed to murder and being opposed to excrement. Both arouse feelings of disgust, and all our fancy ethical systems are merely window dressing.

But the problem is (as a million adults have said to a million star-struck teenagers), you can’t always trust your feelings.

What happens when a group of people becomes desensitized to immoral behavior? What happens when one person’s feelings of revulsion conflict with another person’s feelings of approval?

For about 20 centuries in the West, the answer was that some feelings of moral revulsion correspond to natural law or divine commands and thus are grounded in reality. The point of moral training was to get young people to associate feelings of disgust with objectively wrong behavior and to associate feelings of admiration with objectively right behavior.

Scripture tells us we are supposed to hate evil and love good (Amos 5:15). When our feelings align with what is objectively good, we are happy, healthy, and blessed. And when we begin to hate good and love evil, we slide down into the idolatry, self-destruction, and social disintegration described in Romans 1.

MacIntyre argues that no principled resolution of conflict can be expected in an emotivistic culture. One real function of government today is to broker compromises between opposing parties in society, thus averting a civil war. The best many in the West can hope for is to keep the lid from boiling over.

Yet, as we look at the United States today, we see members of one of the two major political parties denigrating the court and treating it as a super legislature, believing that if they lobby hard enough, the court will implement their policy preferences. We see the Senate majority leader threatening the justices. We see the president and his administration refusing to condemn the illegal protests outside the homes of the justices. We see an unprecedented leak of a historic decision. We hear talk of court-packing and attacks on the character of the justices. When we see and hear all this, we sense that something fundamental to the republic’s survival is breaking down.

As always, the Christian response is to speak the truth in love and model civility and respect for institutions that promote the common good.