"Custom and Morality"

Excerpted from Law & Liberty, "Custom and Morality" by R.J. Rushdoony.

"Customs or social mores govern us often much more strongly than does morality. Most people are more afraid of offending their friends through bad taste than of offending God by sin...

"In every age there are many to whom appearance is more important than morality, but, when an age is dominated and controlled by such a disposition, the result is a rapid social decline. Morality requires faith and courage. It means making a stand and taking a course in terms of God’s reality rather than man’s reality. Morality in a sinful world places a man in tension with that world at the very least, and potentially in direct opposition to it. The moral man is governed by God and his conscience, and as a result, he is more inclined to be independent of the group and self-reliant in relationship to society. Morality is productive of godly individualism and independence of spirit.

"Where custom rules, however, a contrary spirit prevails. People become group-directed, and they feel it imperative to be members of the pack. Their standards vary as the customs and fads of the group vary. Instead of being individualistic, they are collectivistic, anxious at all times to be with a particular group whose customs are their social code. Society then is governed by mob psychology, by the law of the pack, and the social order lacks stability or character...

"Wherever a society places custom above morality, there a revolutionary situation exists. When custom is more important than morality, the first step toward revolution has been taken. The moral foundations of the social order have been denied, and a revolution in standards and behavior has taken place. As a result, an important thrust of all subversive activity is the undermining of morality. Where morality has been undermined, law and religion have also been undermined, so that the major task of revolution has been accomplished. A revolution cannot readily succeed where the existing order has moral vitality, but a revolution is virtually accomplished where moral order has been destroyed...

"The greatest asset to any revolutionary group is a large body of people who are governed by conventions or customs. With such people, since appearance is all that matters, the country can be gutted of its historical position, constitutionalism, and liberties, and there will be no objection as long as the form is retained. The same is true of their church relationships; they do not ask that their church be truly Christian, but only that it retain the form of being Christian. Their church can deny the faith every Sunday, teach their children the new morality, abandon its confession of faith, maintain through its missionary programs a revolutionary campaign and these people will never leave. They will maintain a façade of being Christian by complaining indignantly about some of the most flagrant activities of their church and clergy, but they will never leave. And rightly so, because they belong there: the dead among the dead. These people who cling to the appearance rather than the reality are the bread and butter of all revolutionary groups; they finance them, support them, and defend them, because they too are revolutionists. They are in revolt against moral order, and they substitute conventional order in its place. They are the first wave of every revolution, and, even though the second wave first uses them and then destroys them, the conventional people are still part of the revolution.

"This means we cannot treat people who sit complacently in apostate churches, and who ignore all subversion in the political order, simply as blind people. They are themselves the first great wave of social revolution, of moral anarchy and national and religious decadence. They are more deadly, these conventional people, than the organized revolutionists, because their position is more contagious and more destructive. There is, after all, a measure of honesty about an out and out revolutionist. He knows what he is, and he makes sure that you also are aware of it. He issues his manifestos and tells the world what he plans to do.

"But the conventional people have a deadlier revolution. They approach Christianity and they bury it under their mass of conventions and forms. They are for the Bible, but it doesn’t really mean what it says, and we mustn’t go overboard on these things. They believe in Christ, but only in terms of a sensibly modern perspective, of course, and so on. They retain the form of Christianity and the church, but totally deny the faith in actuality. They replace reality with their conventions...

"[T]he conventional people, having substituted appearance for reality, customs for moral order, cannot face reality in any direction. They cannot see God as God, nor Satan as Satan. They recognize neither good nor evil, only appearances. Nothing else is real for them. All people are exactly like themselves, or they are mentally sick. Conventional people are only blind in the sense that they are self-consciously, deliberately, and passionately averse to facing reality. They are like the people of whom Isaiah spoke, who, hearing will not hear, and seeing will not see, lest their minds understand, and their health be restored (Isa. 6:10-11). The destiny of such people is then to be blinded by God and led to destruction. Their nature and destiny is death. Our nature and destiny in Jesus Christ is righteousness and life."