A moral quest

The producer of the Mad Max films was once asked the direction of film. His answer was an interesting one for the Christian church. He described this age as "the decade of the moral quest".

It was only some thirty years ago when I was sitting on the footpath outside a beach-side coffee house. The occasion was an evangelistic outreach to local kids. I'm sure it was after midnight and I was into a "deep and meaningful" with one of the local guru's. This particular year we had done very well tapping into the local counter culture. Usually you only get to touch the edges, but this year the heavies had dropped in on us. Interesting indeed!

The hot debate at the time was the imposition of Christian moral standards onto a reluctant populous. The question was straightforward enough. What right did we have of imposing our standards on everyone else? If it was a free country, wasn't morality a matter of individual choice rather than social imposition? They won the debate that evening, or more rightly we lost it. Actually this debate was lost throughout the Western world. It was the year the church retreated into the catacombs.

Of course, the moral liberation, the freedom of the 70's was illusionary. The vacuum, caused by the retreat of Biblical morality, was filled with the egalitarian ethic of socialism. All of a sudden the moral good became the drab sameness of the socialist dream - of heaven on earth. Ism euphoria became the order of the day. Sexism, racism became the ethic of the age. And of course, the ethic imposed itself on a free, gullible and unsuspecting populous. The very people who complained of the imposition of the Christian ethic, found themselves under a far less unforgiving ethic. Pity help you if you are a normal breadwinner with the wife and kids at home and find yourself unemployed and in need of food and shelter. Affirmative action doesn't work for you. The day is nearly upon us when the smoking of cigarettes and the use of bleached toilet paper will have us behind bars.

So, governments continue to legislate their drab egalitarian morality, even though it is dead and awaiting the last rites. Yet, the "decade of the moral quest" putters on behind the scenes and who knows, maybe we will see again that "the Lord is righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works", Psalm.145:17.