How about moral crusades that aim to put joint-keepers and pimps in prison?
Study for the Week
All great religious teachers have had a deep sense of the power of evil in human life. Jesus apparently was not interested [pg 158] in the philosophical question of the origin of evil, but accepted the fact of evil in a pragmatic way, and saw his own life as a conflict with sin and wrong.
Some facts, as we have seen, were clearly written in his consciousness: the frailty of our will; the consolidation of evil in men of bad character and the automatic output of lies and distortions coming from such; the power of social pressure by which the weak are made to trip and fall; and the pervasive satanic power of evil which purposely neutralizes the efforts leading toward the Reign of God.
The fact that Jesus realized evil in individuals and society, that he reckoned with it practically, and that he set himself against it with singleness of purpose, constitutes another of his social principles. Any view of life which blurs the fact of evil would have seemed to him an illusion. He would have foretold failure for any policy based on it. His great social problem was redemption from evil. Every step of approach toward the Kingdom of God must be won by conflict.
Modern science explains evil along totally different lines, but as to the main facts it agrees with the spiritual insight of Jesus. Psychology recognizes that the higher desires are usually sluggish and faint, while the animal appetites are strong and clamorous. Our will tires easily and readily yields to social pressure. In many individuals the raw material of character is terribly flawed by inheritance. So the young, with a maximum of desire and a minimum of self-restraint, slip into folly, and the aging backslide into shame. Human nature needs a strong reenforcement to rouse it from its inherited lethargy and put it on the toilsome upward track. It needs redemption, emancipation from slavery, a breaking of bonds.
I
Evangelism is the attack of redemptive energy in the sphere of personal life. It comes to a man shamed by the sense of guilt and baffled by moral failure, and rouses him to a consciousness of his high worth and eternal destiny. It [pg 159] transmits the faith of the Christian Church in a loving and gracious God who is willing to forgive and powerful to save. It teaches a man to pray, curing his soul by affirming over and over a triumphant faith, and throwing it open to mysterious spiritual powers which bring joy, peace, and strength beyond himself. It sets before him a code of moral duty to quicken and guide his conscience. It puts him inside of a group of like-minded people who exercise social restraint and urge him on.
When all this is wisely combined, it constitutes a spiritual reenforcement of incomparable energy. It acts like an emancipation. It gives a sense of freedom and newness. The untrained observer sees it mainly in those cases where the turn has come in some dramatic form and where the contrast between the old and new life is most demonstrable. But the saving force is at work even when it seeps in through home influences so quietly that the beneficiary of it does not realize what a great thing has been done for him.
The saving force has to attack the powers in possession. Only those who have helped in wresting men free from sin can tell what a stiff fight it often is. Here is an intellectual professional man who goes off for a secret spree about once in sixty days; a respectable woman who has come under the opium habit; a boy who is both a cigarette fiend and sexually weak; a man who domineers and cows his wife and family; a woman who has reduced her husband to slavery to supply her expensive tastes; a girl who shirks all work and throws the burden of her selfish life on a hard-worked mother; a college man whose parents are straining all their resources and using up their security for old age to keep him at college, and who gambles—complete the catalogue for yourself. To make these individuals over into true citizens of the Kingdom of God and loyal fellow-workers of their fellow-men means constructive conflict of a high order. It has been done.[4]