"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me."
Nevertheless, when secularization separates personal and civic virtue from a sense of accountability to God, it cuts the plant from its roots. Reliance on culture and tradition alone will not be sufficient to sustain virtue in society. When one has no higher god than himself and seeks no greater good than satisfying his own appetites and preferences, the effects will be manifest in due course.
A society, for example, in which individual consent is the only constraint on sexual activity is a society in decay. Adultery, promiscuity, out-of-wedlock births,15 and elective abortions are but some of the bitter fruits that grow out of the ongoing sexual revolution. Follow-on consequences that work against sustainability of a healthy society include growing numbers of children raised in poverty and without the positive influence of fathers, sometimes through multiple generations; women bearing alone what should be shared responsibilities; and seriously deficient education as schools, like other institutions, are tasked to compensate for failure in the home.16 Added to these social pathologies are the incalculable instances of individual heartbreak and despair—mental and emotional destruction visited upon both the guilty and the innocent.
God’s way of teaching is to allow people to experience the consequences of their choices.
When you lecture, guilt-trip, and reason with those who don’t care, you become responsible for their motivation.
Frequently, rather than impose consequences, we yell, cry, guilt-trip or nag. Nagging is a form of control. It is a way of taking responsibility away from the other person. It puts the burden on the nagger to monitor and motivate the other person.
When we remove natural consequences from those we love, we take control of a process that God ordained. We are assuming our own design of the world is superior to His or that those we love are too fragile to learn in His way.
I told him—as we always did—that we would only help if we believed what we were doing would truly help. We were unwilling to rob him of the consequences of his choices. I explained we did not believe it was loving to keep someone from learning.
We often talk about agency as “the power to choose.” But it is far more than that. Agency is not just the freedom to follow our whims. It is the power to create. Specifically, it is the power to create consequences.
When God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, He said He was sending them into the world ‘to learn by their own experience.’ He designed a system where they could create and experience consequences. He seemed to think it was a pretty good system. He had confidence that when the consequences were painful, we would learn. When the consequences were joyful, we would also learn. Over time we would gain greater ability to create better consequences.
As the saying goes. Whether the stone hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the stone, it's going to be bad for the pitcher.