"You can't legislate what's in a person's heart. Making it a law won't change minds and hearts."
This phrase is one of the most prominent arguments I hear from pro-choice Christians and conservative libertarians. And the argument is absolute garbage on an experiential and intellectual level. For instance, if we believed this, then we'd be consistent in our applications. Consider the following:
1) We would never demand behavior of children on any level. We wouldn't teach them manners. We wouldn't teach them to be polite. We wouldn't teach them the difference between right and wrong. We would just allow them to act on whatever their heart tells them. Why would we give them laws (ie rules) to follow when their heart is not in it?
Of course we would never dream of doing this. It's a recipe for societal disaster, because we all know implicitly the depravity of the human heart. Teaching morals and manners is good on a social level and not just an individual level.
2) We would never have demanded civil rights legislation. We would never have enacted legislation that wasn't in people's hearts. Overt racism still existed and we would not have been so foolish as to "impose" the legislation of people's hearts.
Keep in mind that this legislation was quintessentially moral and appealed to absolute moral values (ie racism and segregation are wrong on the face of it). Sometimes it's imperative, indeed an act of collective moral conscious, to legislate right and wrong despite what popular opinion is.
Those are just two examples that counteract even the most far-off person's flippant argument about legislating the heart.
As always, it is absolutely imperative that the US Federal Government make abortion illegal except in rare circumstances. Children are dying. Millions of them. And so I will continue my constant analysis of bad arguments on abortion that I hear in the effort to change those very hearts and minds to make this politically tenable.
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2 comments:
Dave,
I find it interesting that your closing appeal was to outlaw abortion due to its horrific result, the murder of millions of unborn children, rather than because of the need for changing abortive parents' hearts. (Perhaps you assume that the law will change their hearts and therefore result in fewer abortions, but can anyone assume the law will be written with this intent? No, it will simply be written to outlaw the practice. By far, the greatest contributor to a reduction in abortions in this scenario would be a lack of access to abortion clinics.)
I know I've been one to argue that legislation cannot change the heart, and I still stand by that. I think you're missing the point though, and so perhaps we're playing semantics. It is not the law that changes hearts. Rather, it is the working of the Holy Spirit. But for the law, we wouldn't recognize our sin; this is true. The law is a crucial part of the equation, but it is a passive part. It doesn't do the changing.
The Civil Rights Act was indeed based on absolute morality, but it does not necessarily follow that its purpose was to impose a particular morality upon a would be perpetrator. Much of it, in fact, was the Federal Government taking a stand that it would no longer employ systemic segregation and discrimination in its primary areas of influence. That's not changing human hearts-- that's changing the structure and operation of government bureaucracies and government-funded organizations under penalty of law.
Most of the appeals to civil rights legislation that I recall from studying history argue for the victims' innate humanity, dignity, and right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After all, even consider the act's name: the Civil Rights Act. The argument for the need for such laws focused primarily on upholding the rights of the victim. Perpetrators needed to be dealt with as a punishment for the particular act in question and a disincentive for other would be perpetrators. Certainly a few also argued that civil rights legislation would curb racism from the perpetrators' points of view, but I think these arguments were foolhardy and carried a grand misunderstanding of the human condition.
My point is not that laws are unnecessary, or even that parents should employ the extremely hippy ideal of "live and let live" with their children. My point is that the law, in and of itself, can only act as a constraint on behavior. (See our conversation about this whole matter here.) The law can no more change the heart of man than bare feet on a blacktop can make a schoolboy fly.
Much love,
Kev
Kev,
Thanks for the thoughts. I suppose I'll respond to a couple of items from your post and from my own:
1) The referent that you looked to in response to Calvin's 3rd use of the law is actually just plain wrong. Without the 3rd use, there's no point to the entire book of Deuteronomy. Paul alludes to it in Galatians to note that no one can indeed follow the law. But God did and still demands that the entire law be followed (Deut. 26-27). It's purpose is not just to prove our sinfulness.
The same is with the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus doesn't say "be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect" for the point of grace alone. Luther was wrong here. Calvin was right. The law is to provide a guide. And the sermon on the mount does so. It is the highest form of personal ethics ever recorded in history. It's purpose is not just to reveal human wickedness, but to provide a guide on the proper way to live.
Besides that, the person you quoted is just plain wrong. Why would Jesus give these commands to his disciples before giving them the Spirit? The person you quote relies on an over-reading of the Pauline argument, and misunderstands that Paul uses the word "law" in 3 different ways in Romans and Galatians: Mosaic law, Moral law, and covenantal/legalistic law. Understanding which term he uses when would settle much of that debate.
2) The appeal to the change of heart and mind at the end of my blog was an admission that a governmental solution to abortion doesn't seem politcally tenable at the moment. It is by no means a negation of my prior argument that such actions are still necessary.
3) My point is to argue on a social level. It wouldn't matter if everyone were Christians or if everyone weren't. Abortion is wrong prima facie, and the government has a right and responsibility to protect life. This position is logical and fits within the proper philosophical framework for the role of government.
This is why, in many ways, I try to avoid biblical arguments. Even though I believe them with all my heart, they do not carry much weight in the public sphere. Thus, I try to make my arguments philosophically tenable.
My point is to say that it doesn't matter if the law can't change hearts. It simply doesn't matter. If something is wrong, we should do something about it. And we can do something about it.
Perhaps my point is a non-sequiter, but I suppose I'm really just saying that the "law and hearts" argument is the real non-sequiter. Just because the law can't change a heart doesn't mean we cannot legislate against abortion.
It would and will decrease the amount of deaths in a year. It would protect unborn children. It would cause our nation to be made more holy in the eyes of God, because God wroughts judgment on the nations (see every prophetic book in the Bible).
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