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May 16, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show
21:46
Ep. 31 - Does Christianity Have Too Many "Rules"?

I have been told that Christianity's moral laws are too constricting and oppressive. I have been told that they deprive us of our freedom. But the opposite is true. It is through living moral lives, and walking the path that Christ laid down for us, that we can really enjoy true freedom and happiness. "Freedom" without morality always turns into slavery and death. Here's why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to the CarCast, everyone.
So we were talking yesterday about the reasons why young people have left the church, and I gave my theory.
My theory is that young people are leaving the church because the church has tried to be trendy and cool.
It's tried to appeal to the shallowest, most superficial aspects of young people, rather than appealing to their deeper characteristics, and that would be their hunger for change and identity, their hunger for a Cause to fight for a mission, their radicalism, their revolutionary nature, all that great stuff.
So it should be a match made in heaven, literally, between young people and Christianity, because Christianity is a radical revolutionary cause, right, to fight for.
But instead, we've watered everything down in an attempt to make it more palatable, but really what's happened is we've alienated everybody, including young people.
Now, I received a lot of feedback to that discussion, and I want some of it positive, some of it negative, as usual.
I wanted to address one objection, one email, because it represents, I think, a lot of the critiques that I read after we talked about this.
So I got an email from a guy, a fellow Christian, and he said that he agreed with much of what I said.
He agreed with the general argument for the most part.
But he also thinks that the real problem, or one of the biggest problems, is that young people are really repulsed By the rules, the so-called rules in Christianity, especially the rules that govern their sex lives.
And he said that if churches would de-emphasize those things, de-emphasize the teachings on abstinence, chastity, especially the idea that sex outside of marriage is wrong, if we de-emphasize that, then we might have a better shot of bringing people in.
And this idea I've heard echoed by many other people.
Now, I have several objections to that objection, and I want to go through them one at a time.
So first of all, let's start with this.
Churches have de-emphasized those things or outright rejected them.
And I find it fairly mind-boggling that there are still so many people who think that the church's main problem is that it's too conservative and too orthodox, and that it's too focused on rules, and that, you know, the biggest problem is all these Christians running around who are fundamentalists, and they're so focused on religious discipline.
Where is that a problem?
Where are you meeting all these Christians who that's their biggest issue?
I mean, really, what are you talking about?
I have not noticed that.
The vast, vast majority of Christians that you meet could care less about the rules, could care less about the commandments, they make no attempt to follow them whatsoever in their lives.
And the vast majority of churches that you go to They'll never talk about these.
They're not going to ever talk about sexual immorality, chastity.
I mean, you think, look, with all due respect, as I said, I find it mind-boggling, this idea that there's a problem with Christians being too focused on chastity.
When do you ever hear anyone talking about chastity anymore?
It's extremely rare, and it's extremely rare, I'm just telling you, it's extremely rare to find a church that talks about these things.
So the point is, we have de-emphasized them, we have liberalized, and that's been one of the great causes of the problem, which means it cannot be the solution.
Second, I don't like the term rules to describe the teachings and commandments of God, because they're rules in the same way that gravity is a rule.
Okay, these things are inherent.
The moral commandments that you find in the Bible, call them rules if you want to, but they are not random.
They're not arbitrary. And calling them rules makes it sound arbitrary.
And I think people use that term on purpose.
They want it to sound arbitrary.
They want to make it sound like this is just something Christians came up with or even something that just God came up with randomly, just wanting to cramp our styles, I guess.
But that's not the case.
The moral laws of Christianity are inherent.
They can be found within human nature.
They are part of the nature of things, just like gravity, on a physical level, is part of the nature of things.
So Christianity says that it's destructive and disordered to lust after women, to sleep around, to turn sex into a game, to be promiscuous, all that.
But Christianity isn't just giving its opinion.
It isn't just suggesting one possible way to live that's equal to all the other ways.
No. It's telling you something that's just true.
And every person who's treated sex like a game, who has lived by lust and self-indulgence, whether Christian or not, has suffered the misery and degradation that comes with that lifestyle.
Just as every person who jumps from a building has had to deal with the fact that gravity is going to assert itself.
And in the same way, those moral laws assert themselves whether we choose to abide by them or not.
Third thing, you say that people don't want rules.
They don't want commandments.
They don't want to be told what to do.
I disagree. Now, on the surface, that might be true.
Again, surface level, it's true that people don't want to be told what to do.
On a deeper level, I think people are starving to be told what to do.
They're starving for direction, for instruction.
They're starving for lines to be drawn.
They are. I think when you go to someone and you say, do what you want, whatever you want, do anything that you want.
It's all equal. There's no bad.
There's no good. Everything's equally as bad, equally as good.
Anything you want to do, just go do it.
Now, they might be happy at first.
They might say, oh, awesome.
Great. But in the end, they're going to be lost and confused and paralyzed.
In fact, tell somebody that, come back the next day.
You know what they're going to be doing? They'll probably still just be standing right there.
They haven't gone anywhere.
When you've told them every direction is equal and nothing is better than anything else, it's like, okay, what's the point of going anywhere then?
It's kind of a crude analogy here, but it's sort of like if you go to one of these chain restaurants and Where it seems like the menus of these restaurants just grow by the minute.
And so now you open up a menu and there are 6,000 things on it.
Every variety.
There's Mexican food, Italian food, American food, you know, everything.
And what happens?
You have no idea.
It's too many options. You don't even know.
You have no idea what to...
And then what do you do?
You end up asking the waiter, well, what do you think I should get?
You need some direction.
You need someone to help you.
Like, just, this is too much.
Too many options. Give me some clarity here.
Give me some direction.
Give me some advice or something.
Don't just give me 6,000 options and say, eat whatever you want, right?
So it kind of works that way morally in our lives.
There are two types of freedom.
Okay, there's the freedom of a life devoid of all meaning, of all purpose, devoid of direction, devoid of morality.
There's that freedom where there's no rules.
And then there's the freedom that you find in truth and in God.
There's the freedom that you find when you willingly surrender to the moral commandments of That God has given us.
When you surrender to God.
So there's this freedom.
There's the freedom in pride where you say, I'm going to do whatever I want.
And then there's the freedom in surrender to God.
Saying, show me the way and I will walk it.
That's the freedom that we find when God has not only told us, but He's shown us.
Jesus Christ walked the path.
And He said, follow me.
He didn't say, just go do whatever you want.
Everything's equal. Nothing's bad.
Nothing's good. There's no sin. He said, follow me.
And so when you follow him, you find true freedom.
Even if in this life, you're also going to find suffering and sacrifice and all that.
So that's the only true freedom.
That's where you can really be happy.
But in order to enjoy that freedom, you have to follow the quote rules.
Just as you have to follow the rule of gravity, you have to obey its dictates, respect it, understand it, if you want to enjoy skydiving.
Okay, skydiving with a parachute is controlled.
It's restricted.
There are rules.
If you want to do it, and you've never done it before, you've got to go take a class, and they give you all the different instructions.
You fill out forms. You do everything, right?
There are a lot of rules.
I've never been skydiving. My understanding, though, is there are a lot of rules with skydiving.
And so there's, you know, you could do it that way.
Or you could do it the free way, and you could really be free, and you could skydive without a parachute.
One is fun and exciting.
The other is suicide.
So which way is actually free?
The one where you splatter on the pavement and die at the end?
Or the one where you learn the rules and you respect them and you follow them and you take the more controlled and restricted approach?
Another example, I think, we could look at marriage.
In modern times, you know, we've done away with all the roles, all the rules, all ideas of duty and responsibility.
We've done away with the man's authority and headship in the home.
And now we say everything's 50-50.
There are no roles. There are no rules.
There are no duties. There are no responsibilities that anyone in particular is supposed to be doing.
Everyone just does everything.
Nobody leads. Nobody follows.
Nobody's in charge. Nobody, nothing, right?
There's no head of the home.
Now, and so this is supposed to be a free marriage, right?
A free and equal marriage where everyone just can do whatever they want.
Now, I ask you, has this led to happy and fulfilled marriages across the country?
I can't even say it without laughing, even though it's not funny.
But it's just the absurdity of this idea that it's actually worked out, right?
Do you think it's worked out?
Because I look across the country and I see divorce.
I see unhappy and miserable people in their marriages.
I see an entire generation of people, my generation, who have almost given up on marriage completely.
They take such a dim view of it.
So has this equal 50-50 free and open approach to marriage?
Has it worked? No.
Instead, again, it's caused this paralysis.
People in relationships don't know what they're supposed to do.
They don't know who's supposed to do what.
Now, with gender roles, with those bad old ancient gender roles, people knew basically what they're supposed to do in a marriage.
And within those parameters, there's a lot of freedom.
And still, there's a lot of diversity in marriages, and marriages are all different because there are different people involved in them.
But when you have this basic idea of gender roles, well, now at least you can get going.
You can go in one direction because you know where you're supposed to go, and you have a general idea of what you're supposed to be doing.
But we don't have that anymore, so people don't know what they're supposed to do, how they're supposed to relate, and then what happens is competition arises, and they end up competing and working against each other because they've rejected the roles, the rules, that help them make their marriages work and help them work with each other so that they can enjoy a happy and complimentary and free marriage.
Fourth thing, and this point is related to all the rest that I've mentioned, but You say that young people aren't interested in chastity and abstinence and sexual morality.
Once again, that is only on the surface.
On the surface, yeah, they're not interested.
Let's look at a deeper level.
Deeper level, we can see that the alternative has not been a great success.
Modern sexuality, like modern marriage, unsurprisingly, the two are linked.
Modern sexuality is a disaster zone.
It's a catastrophe.
Disease, abortion, unwed pregnancy, porn addiction, the sexual revolution has been a catastrophic failure.
People are not happy.
Find me someone my age, 31, 32, who's been sleeping around and dating frivolously for the last 10 or 15 years or longer, and yet is happy and satisfied and content and not lonely at all.
Find me someone like that.
You can't. They're all miserable.
All the people that have tried it this way, they've followed the ideas of the sexual revolution.
They've wanted to be free, sexual freedom.
I mean, look at, you know, we had a baby boomers came along, my parents' generation, and they said, I want sexual freedom.
And what do we end up with?
Disease, abortion, death, divorce.
I mean, all these, that's what freedom has gotten us, is destruction and despair.
People are unfulfilled in their romantic lives, and worse than that, they feel violated.
What do you think all this affirmative consent stuff is about?
You have women who have sex consensually, and the next day they claim that they were assaulted because they volunteered to do it, but they volunteered and they had reservations, and it was an unspoken reservation.
And there was something in the back of their mind telling them, no, this isn't right, don't do this, but they did it anyway.
Now, what does that stem from?
They feel violated because they were violated, though they offer themselves up to be violated.
They feel degraded because they were degraded, though they were willing participants in their own degradation.
They wake up feeling used because they were used, though they allowed themselves to be used, which makes them feel even worse because now there's guilt.
And nobody can really be happy with that.
You see, what we've done is you find this over and over and over again, where somebody comes in and they get rid of the rules, they get rid of any sense of morality, they get rid of all that, and then catastrophe and disaster soon follows.
And so then they try to make new rules.
The whole idea was to get rid of rules, and now they're making new ones.
And the new ones are even more restricting and weird and bizarre and confusing than the old ones.
And so what's happened is we got rid of all of the moral laws and any sense of sexual morality.
We've tossed out the window.
The only thing that we've left Is consent.
That was the one last thing.
Now, consent was already embedded into Christian sexual morality.
Consent was part of it.
Christianity has always been against rape, very clearly.
So that was already part of it, but there was more to it, because Christianity recognizes that, yeah, you have to consent to a sexual act, But that's just the beginning.
That in itself is not enough.
You could consent to a sexual act and yet still be harmed by it physically and spiritually.
And so there's got to be more than just consent.
But what our culture has said is no consent's all that mattered.
But what have they found?
They found that Christianity was right.
There's got to be more.
That's consent is not enough because people are consenting to sex and yet they still feel awful and guilty and empty and ashamed the next day.
And so what our culture has tried to do is they've tried to take consent and use it as the raw material to build this whole new sexual ethic.
And they've turned consent into this like calculus, this impossible to understand calculus, whereas it should be pretty simple.
It's consent if you did you did you participate in the act willingly?
If you did, then you consented.
If you were forced into it, you weren't you didn't consent really simple.
But now we've tried to take consent and find a way to use it so as to in some way still protect the dignity of of women.
So that even if, so that there could be a situation where they volunteer to do it, yet they didn't consent because they're going to feel violated afterwards.
And so it just becomes very confusing.
It's not so confusing if you go back to the Christian sexual morality, which says that sex is a sacred thing.
It's a beautiful, wonderful, precious thing, and it has to be protected.
It's also very powerful.
It's powerful because sex can create a whole other person, which is pretty incredible.
It's also powerful on a spiritual, emotional level, where you, no matter what you try to say, you know, when you offer yourself up to somebody like this, and you are With someone in the most intimate way imaginable, your whole being gets wrapped up into it as well.
And so emotions get involved in all this stuff.
And there's kind of this bond that naturally and automatically forms.
Christianity recognizes that and so says, okay, this thing, it's not because we hate sex, no.
It's because we understand.
We understand how powerful and wonderful this thing is.
And so we have to respect it and reserve it for the protected parameters of a committed and loving and devoted marriage.
Christianity says that any other arrangement leads to despair, misery, and destruction, and the world has proved this correct.
The last 60 years of American history have been one long case study proving Christian sexual ethics correct.
You don't have to take my word for it.
Just look at the culture. Look at what's happened.
So no, it's not Christian.
Christianity doesn't hate sex.
Our culture hates sex.
It has turned it into this meaningless, empty thing, like just a recreational activity and nothing more.
Like a greeting between people.
Like it's just shaking hands with a person that's having sex.
That's what our culture has done.
They hate and are afraid of what sex actually is, whereas Christianity embraces it in its totality and says this is a good thing that comes from God.
It's so good, in fact, that you can't just give it away.
You can't just let it be used.
It's got to be protected.
Like anything else that's precious and valuable and personal and intimate, you protect it.
You don't just give it to anybody.
This is why Christians believe or should believe in saving it for marriage.
Now, Christian teachings, especially in the area of sex, are difficult to follow.
But as Chesterton, maybe it was C.S. Lewis, Chesterton or Lewis, one of those guys, said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting.
It's been found difficult and left untried.
So we have here an essential choice between the difficult but better thing or the easy but worse thing.
And I like that matchup personally.
That's a compelling argument.
I like that argument. That matchup between difficult, better, easy, worse, that's good.
I like our chances of winning that argument.
But if we're going to win that argument, we have to make it first.
And so you say, oh no, the church needs to back away from sexual morality, all morality, don't talk about it.
I say we should do the exact opposite.
We should be talking about it a lot more.
Because people need to hear this, and they want to also, even if they don't know it.
Because they're not happy with the other way.
No matter what they claim, they're not happy with it.
They want to find happiness and fulfillment.
Here it is. We got to tell them about it.
We can't be afraid to tell them.
We can't be ashamed or embarrassed.
We're not the ones who should be ashamed or embarrassed.
Of this belief system.
Because it's right and it's true.
Alright, thanks for watching everybody.
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