Posted on by musingthemysteries

What Laws Can and Cannot Do

People ask me why I waste my time writing about what’s going on in our country’s political sphere. “Governments and politics can’t change the real problem, which is in the human heart,” they say. “And only God can do that. Shouldn’t we focus our attention to sharing Christ with people and praying their hearts will be transformed? Transformed people transform communities.” I can’t argue with that. Better people do make better places.

But I can’t get out of my mind something Martin Luther King Jr said in a couple of different ways in his speeches and sermons about what the laws of the land can and cannot do.

“It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.” … “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.”

Pause a second or two and let those statements sink in.

Though MLK never saw a lynching in person, from a few feet away as a child his father watched a mob of white men curse, strip, beat, and lynch a black man with his own belt for the crime of being in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. But when MLK’s home was fire bombed, and his supporters went and got their weapons to retaliate, he stopped them and ordered them to desist and find love in their hearts for those who had come within feet of murdering his own family. That’s the kind of transformation we need, a kind that I believe is lacking in much of the Church and the religious community in America today.

But in the meantime, and as I often say, it is a particularly “mean time” right now, while we’re praying, evangelizing, and hoping for transformed hearts, we absolutely must confront unjust laws and policies that hurt, if not kill, humans that God loves. Better laws and lawmakers can’t change the heart, but they can help restrain the heartless. At least some of them can to some degree.

On that basis, I believe we have a moral obligation to oppose unjust laws in whatever biblically informed way we can. Augustine indicated that unjust laws are man-made codes that degrade the human personality and disagree with God’s moral law.

Let me ask you this: If you are the victim of an injustice perpetrated by an unjust law, wouldn’t you want your neighbors and fellow Americans to come to your aid and help you get the law changed?

This is why we can’t afford to hide our heads in the sand, why we can’t make prayer and evangelism our only tasks. Our most central tasks, yes, but not our only ones. “Newness happens in the world,” says theologian Walter Brueggemann, “when long silenced people get their voice enough to sing dangerous alternatives.”

So I pray, share Christ with others, AND I write, attend protests, and vote for candidates and initiatives that as near as possible parallel the values of Christ’s kingdom. If you want to know what those values are, a good place to begin would be his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. (I happen to know a pretty good book on that sermon if you’re interested.)

A South African Dutch clergyman told the great missionary evangelist E. Stanley Jones: “You preach a very troublesome gospel. We preach a Kingdom in heaven that upsets nothing on earth. You preach a Kingdom of God on earth that upsets everything!” Jones writes: “I would upset everything on one level––the level of this unjust and unworkable world order, to set up everything on the level of a higher order, the Kingdom of God. In watering a dusty road, you have to have to raise a lot of dust in settling it.”

Present day examples of people that have found their voice to sing dangerous alternatives are innumerable. Here are a small number of them that come to mind:

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