The
New York Times was abuzz March 5. The board of trustees of South
Carolina’s Erskine College—a small, liberal arts college historically
associated with the Presbyterian church—had issued a statement
declaring that the school considered “all sexual activity outside the
covenant of marriage [as] sinful and therefore ultimately destructive
of the parties involved.” Not only did the trustees affirm what has
been standard Christian belief and practice since … well, the beginning
of Christianity, but they even stated:
“As
a Christian academic community, and in light of our institutional
mission, members of the Erskine community are expected to follow the
teachings of scripture concerning matters of human sexuality and
institutional decisions will be made in light of this position.”
How would the trustees’ statement, worried the Times, be perceived by
some homosexual and lesbian members of the volleyball and lacrosse
teams?
Enter
the State. A religiously neutral state is regarded—at least by
progressives—as a state that is axiologically agnostic: the state can
have no moral values of its own. The state exists simply to facilitate
the moral will of the individual.
What the Times did not worry about—indeed, did not even ask—was what
vision of society underlay the self-styled “progressive” view?
Progressives generally perceive themselves as “socially conscious,”
supposedly concerned with the “good of society” and the “commonweal.”
The truth is: progressives really do not believe in society. They
believe in the State.
Loud rhetoric about “social justice” and “concern for the community”
notwithstanding, the progressives’ position has, at root, an
impoverished view of society. That attenuated view of society, in turn,
derives from their vision of moral values in the community, which one
suspects is driven in large part by their commitments in the areas of
life and sex. [
CRISIS
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