he utopian myth has taken hold in the home, where idealism is served up through magazines, parenting seminars, maternity classes and books on child development. In the most influential book ever written for parents, Dr. Benjamin Spock encouraged parents to reject the old puritan notion of children as savages, prone to evil and in need of civilizing. Instead, he urged them to understand children as evolving psyches in need of attention. For example, when a school-age child steals, Spock told author Dana Mack in The Assault on Parenthood that parents consider whether their child might "need more approval at home," and even a raise in his allowance!

Thus, even in the home, the heart and hearth of society, a sense of duty has been replaced by a sense of entitlement, a sense that we have a right to what we want, even if it means violating standards of proper behavior. Adults who once gave firm and unequivocal moral directionparents, teachers, even pastorshave been indoctrinated with the idea that the way to ensure healthy children is not to tell them whats right and wrong, but to let them discover their own values. As a result, most Americans have lost even the vocabulary of moral accountability. Sin and moral responsibility have become alien concepts.

Just how deeply this has affected us was evident in an MTV network special news report on "The Seven Deadly Sins," which aired in August 1993. The programs description looked promising enoughinterviews with celebrities and ordinary teens talking about the seven deadly sins: lust, pride, anger, envy, sloth, greed and gluttony, but the main message that came across was the participants shocking moral ignorance.

Rap star Ice-T glared into the camera and growled, "Lust isnt a sin These are all dumb."

One young man seemed to think sloth was a work break. "Sloth Sometimes its good to sit back and give yourself personal time."

Pride was the sin the MTV generation found the hardest to grasp. "Pride isnt a sinyoure supposed to feel good about yourself," one teen said. Actress Kirstie Alley agreed.

"I dont think pride is a sin, and I think some idiot made that up," she snapped.

Amazingly, the program offered not one word about guilt, repentance or moral responsibility. Instead, it was littered with psychotherapeutic jargon, as if sin were a sickness or addiction. Even the program narrator joined the chorus: "The seven deadly sins are not evil acts, but rather universal human compulsions."

Traditionally in the West, positive law (man-made law) was based on a transcendent standard of justice derived from Gods law. But in the late 19th century, legal thinkers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, influenced by Darwin and the rise of social science, began to shift these foundations, as we will see later, reducing the law to summaries of the social economic policies that could be determined scientifically to work best. The law was redefined as a tool for identifying and manipulating the right factors to create social harmony and progress.

The same scientific utopianism explains the rise of the welfare state. The idea that both law and government policy should be transformed into social engineering took root in the New Deal of the 1930s and blossomed in the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Many American politicians became enthusiastic converts, sincerely believing that all it would take to solve the problems of poverty and crime would be some well-designed, well-funded government programs. They were confident that they could win President Lyndon Johnsons "war on poverty."

Well, the war is over, and poverty won. The welfare state has backfired, creating both a near-permanent underclass of dependency and a host of attendant social pathologies, from broken families and teen pregnancy to drug abuse and crime.

When we deny the Christian worldview and reject its teachings on sin and moral responsibility in favor of a more "enlightened" and "scientific" view of human nature, we actually end up stripping people of their dignity and treating them as less than human.

elfare is not the only area of public policy that illustrates the pernicious effects of the utopian myth. When it comes to crime, Americas criminal justice policy swings back and forth between liberal and conservative approaches: from an emphasis on rehabilitation and social engineering to calls for tougher laws and harsher sentences. Yet both approaches exemplify, in different ways, the same utopian worldview.

Traditional liberalism fixes responsibility for crime on poverty and other social ills. Crime is not a matter of the soul, says the liberal; it is a technical problem that can be solved by engineering the right social conditions: devising the right public policies, distributing money to the right places, and arranging the right physical environment. This view was expressed at the dawn of the Great Society by then Attorney General Ramsey Clark. He first blamed crime on social conditions such as "the dehumanizing effect on the individual of slums, racism, ignorance and violence, of corruption and impotence to fulfill rights, of poverty and unemployment and idleness, of generations of malnutrition, of congenital brain damage and prenatal neglect, of sickness and disease, of pollution, of decrepit, dirty, ugly, unsafe, overcrowded housing, of alcoholism and narcotics addiction, of avarice, anxiety, fear, hatred, hopelessness and injustice."

Astonishingly, after reciting this horrendous litany, Clark concluded optimistically: "They can be controlled." Never mind how universal, how endemic, how intractable these problems are; they are all merely technical malfunctions that can be fixed by applying the right technical solution.

Since liberalism regards crime as the outcome of impersonal forces in society, it also locates responsibility for crime outside the criminal. Already at the turn of the century, Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who achieved notoriety defending Darwinism in the Scopes trial, was portraying criminals as helpless victims of their circumstances. He declared that "there is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible."

Today, Darrows heirs fill court-rooms across the country, wringing pity from juries by presenting wrong-doers as victims of forces beyond their control. This loss of moral responsibility has spread across the entire spectrum of our culture, ushering in what writer John Leo terms "The Golden Age of Exoneration." When people are consistently told that they are victims of outside forces, they begin to believe it. When things go wrong, someone else must be to blame.

Of course, acknowledging respon-sibility means attributing real praise and blameand blame, in turn, implies the legitimacy of punishment. Thats what makes moral account-ability so bittersweet. Yet punishment actually expresses a high view of the human being. If a person who breaks the law is merely a dysfunctional victim of circumstances, then the remedy is not justice but therapy; and the lawbreaker is not a person with rights but a patient to be cured. The problem, said C.S. Lewis, is that "to be cured against ones will is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ought to have known better, is to be treated as a human person made in Gods image."

Denial of sin may appear to be a benign and comforting doctrine, but in the end, it is demeaning and destruc-tive, for it denies the significance of our choices and actions. It reduces us to pawns in the grip of larger forces: either unconscious forces in the human psyche or economic and social forces in the environment. Social planners and controllers then feel perfectly justified in trying to control those forces, to remake human nature and rebuild society according to their own blueprints and to apply any force required toward that end.

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive," wrote Lewis. "Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Utopianism depends on a kind of willful blindness to the reality of human sin and moral responsibility. But in denying the reality of sin, we lose the capacity to deal with it, and thus, in the end, we actually compound its effects. Therein lies

the greatest paradox of all attempts to deny the Fall: In denying sin and evil, we actually unleash its worst powers.

The fatal flaw in the myth of human goodness is that it simply fails to correspond with what we know about the world from our own ordinary experience.

In any society, only two forces hold the sinful nature in check: the restraint of conscience or the restraint of the sword. The less citizens have of the former, the more the state must employ the latter. A society that fails to keep order by an appeal to civic duty and moral responsibility must resort to coercioneither open coercion, as practiced by totalitarian states, or covert coercion, where citizens are wooed into voluntarily giving up their freedom. Its not much of a stretch to imagine Americans eventually being so frightened of their own children that they will welcome protection by ever-greater government control. Thats why utopianism always leads to the loss of liberty.

The only alternative to increased state control is to be honest about the human condition. The only solution for the pathologies that plague our society is to expose the modern myth of human goodness and to return to biblical realism. Sociologists are constantly searching for the root causes of crime and other dysfunctions in society. But the root cause has not changed since the temptation in the Garden. It is sin.

Christian worldview perspective clearly follows the basic contour of the categories of creation, fall and redemption. In the opening chapters of Genesis, we learn that human beings were made in the image of God, to reflect His character; therefore, we are called to reflect His creative activity through our own creativityby cultivating the world, drawing out its potential and giving it shape and form. All work has dignity as an expression of the divine image.

When God placed the first couple in the Garden of Eden, He assigned them the first job description: work the earth and take care of it (Genesis 2:15). Even in Paradise, then, in the ideal state of innocence, work was the natural activity of human beings. In the words of theologian T.M. Moore, "Labor and economic development, using mind and hands in a communal effort, are thus part of the original mandate from God," he writes in his memo "Economic Aspects of the Biblical Worldview."

Yet scripture is never romantic or nave about the human condition. The world God created was soon marred by the Fall, and work is now under a "curse," as theologians put it. Because of the Fall, making a living and raising a family are tasks fraught with pain and difficulty. Understanding this, we can be realistic about the agony of life in a broken world.

People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government. "Our U.S. Constitution was designed for a moral and religious people," said John Adams.

Sadly, in our relativistic age, many people, even Christians, have lost the ethical categories of right and wrong. A few years ago, a young acquaintance of mine, who is a member of a good church, attended a four-week ethics course at Harvard Business Schoola course that was started in response to the "Savings and Loans" scandals in the 1980s. On his return, he raved about the course.

"What kind of ethics are they teaching?" I asked.

"Well, the professor really summed it up the last day when he said, Dont do anything that will get you in the newspapers. Its bad for business."

"But thats pure pragmatism," I replied in astonishment. "Dont get caught. Dont get the company in trouble. Whats that got to do with ethics?"

"But thats the point, isnt it?" said the young man. "To stay out of trouble."

Even ordinary Americans make similar arguments when justifying their own choices. In some polls, close to 80 percent of the people say that they dont believe in moral absolutes; they believe right or wrong varies from situation to situation. This is sheer relativism.

The problem is that relativism provides no foundation for a safe and orderly society. If all people are free to choose for themselves what is right, how can a society agree on, and enforce, even minimal standards? And if there is no ultimate moral law, what motivation is there to be virtuous? The result is the loss of community; if you thought your neighbor had no clear definition of right and wrong, would you sleep well at night or let your children play in his yard?

hrough most of Western history, the moral consensus was largely informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. But with the Enlightenment, intellectuals began to argue that since God was no longer needed to explain the Creation, He was no longer needed to establish moral laws.

Reason alone would form the basis for morality. Since then, the great question that has faced Western society is the one posed by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky: "Can man be good without God? Can reason alone come up with a viable moral system?"

The Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion met from 1939 through the war years and after. By the 1948 meeting, reports Fred Beuttler of the University of Illinois, "the biggest fear of most academic intellectuals was dogmatism and indoctrination." The relativists had carried the day. "All absolutist thinking," they said, "has totalitarian potential." By the early 1960s the conference was disbanded. The original goal of defining "cultural universals" had proved impossible, wrote Beuttler in an article at the time.

Think of it: For two decades some of the worlds greatest minds engaged in stimulating debate and produced nothing. Why? Because they disagreed about the proper starting point of ethical knowledge.

In our public schools it has become nearly impossible to teach traditional precepts of right and wrong, and that has led to disastrous consequences. "For generations," writes theologian Michael Novak, "the primary task explicitly assigned public schools was character formation." That is no longer the case.

Dont educators understand where this kind of value-free teaching must lead? A nation without virtue cannot govern itself. "Our people are losing virtue," Novak says bluntly. "That is why we have been losing self-govern-ment." And if we cannot govern ourselves, then we invite others to govern us. The death of virtue threatens our very liberty as a people.

At root, this great struggle is between worldviews, and it poses the question: How now shall we live?

By the Judeo-Christian tradition or by the moral nihilism of todays relativistic, individualistic culture?

A virtuous society can be created only by virtuous people, wherein each individuals conscience guards the persons behavior and holds him or her accountable. Without conscience, a society can be held in check only through coercion. Yet even coercion ultimately fails, for there is no police force large enough to keep an eye on every individual.

"In an America in which virtue is exalted, there will be 270 million policemen," says Novak, referring to individual conscience, but "in an America which mocks virtue, you cant hire enough."

The emphasis on social justice at the expense of private virtue is not only mistaken but downright dangerous. People without personal morality inevitably fail in their efforts to create public morality.

"There is no social sin without personal sin," writes Georgetown professor James Schall. "Our youth today are almost invariably taught they must change the world, not their souls. So they change the world, and it becomes worse." Moral crusaders with zeal but no ethical understanding are likely to give us solutions that are worse than the problem.

Whats more, when we focus young peoples moral attention solely on public issues and causes, they fail to treat the personal realm as morally serious. Some years ago, Christina Hoff Sommers, philosophy professor at Clark University, wrote an article entitled "Ethics without virtue," in which she attacked higher education for teaching ethics as social justice rather than as individual decency and honesty. One of Sommers colleagues chastised her, complaining that she was promoting bourgeois morality and ignoring the real issues such as the oppression of women, the evils of multinational corporations and the exploitation of the environment. But at the end of the semester, the same teacher came to Sommers office, horrified that more than half her students had plagiarized their take-home exam. They had cheated in an ethics course!

"What are you going to do?" Sommers asked. Sheepishly, the woman asked for a copy of Sommers Chicago Tribune article on the importance of individual virtue.

hristianity gives an absolute moral law that allows us to judge between right and wrong. Try asking your secular friends how they decide what they ought to do, what ethical principles to follow. On what authority do they rely? Without moral absolutes, there is no real basis for ethics.

An absolute moral law doesnt confine people in a straitjacket of Victorian prudery. People will always debate the boundaries of moral law and its varied applications. But the very idea of right and wrong makes sense only if there is a final standard, a measuring rod, by which we can make moral judgments.

But Christians can cut through this fog and argue for the right of a healthy society to express moral disapproval of socially harmful behavior.

Only the Christian worldview offers redemption from sin, giving power to overcome the single most powerful obstacle to becoming virtuous: the rebellious human will. Morality is not just about an intellectual acknowledgment of ultimate standards, of what ought to be; morality is also about developing virtuethat is, the full range of habits and dispositions that constitute good character. We must not merely assent mentally to certain principles; we must become people who are just, courageous, patient, kind, loyal, loving, persistent and devoted to duty. And only the Christian worldview tells us how to develop virtuous character, to become moral persons.

Excerpted from a new LifeWay Christian Resource Bible study, How Now Shall We Live?, based on the book of the same title by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey. Copyright 2000 LifeWay Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission. To order call 800-448-8032 or fax 615-251-5983.