Let’s respond to evil with tough love
By Chapman Cox, The Layman ,Volume 34, Number 6,Posted October 5, 2001, October 9, 2001
The pundits will long debate the lessons to be learned from the despicable mass murder of innocent people on Sept. 11, 2001.
I believe the most important lesson is that evil behavior leads to disaster – and that men and women of faith are called to respond with “tough love.”
Chapman CoxThe sadness currently gripping our nation is equaled by the sadness that mankind may not learn this lesson – any more than mankind has learned the lessons of the destruction of Jerusalem or the Holocaust.
Wickedness has pervaded our culture for decades. Tolerance of it in our moral code has led to the destruction of our families. Tolerance of it in our theology is tearing apart our beloved denomination. And tolerance of wickedness in our foreign policy has profoundly threatened our security.
Excusing terrorists in the past, rather than confronting their evil behaviors, has led to our current grief. There has been widespread acceptance of the argument by many foreign policy pundits that the murder of innocents by Palestinian terrorists is morally equivalent to the Israeli government’s extraterritorial efforts to seek out and destroy the perpetrators of crime. Hiding behind the shield of our tolerance, the terrorists have committed the most heinous crime in U.S. history.
Thankfully, we have godly leaders with the courage to refute the moral equivalence nonsense. They will lead our nation in an effort to avoid injuring innocent people while we justly use our God-given resources to find criminals beyond our borders and bring them to justice.
The challenge for Christians in resisting evil is to love the evildoer. Christ taught us to love sinners, but to resist sin. Those of us with loved ones addicted to drugs or alcohol understand the painful difficulties of this kind of “tough love.”
Only prayer and daily feasting on the Word can help us draw the line between rejecting evil behaviors and tolerating human weaknesses – between love and enabling permissiveness.
I am confident that our president, secretary of state and attorney general will do well in discerning that line because they each spend time daily on their knees and in the Word.
I believe that God will use the disaster of Sept. 11 to explode our acceptance of evil in the foreign policy arena. My prayer is that it will also jar us out of lethargy in the other areas of our culture where permissiveness is destroying the infrastructures of nuclear families and denominational communities. Our church, as well as our country, must heed the lesson that:
Christ’s call for us to love evildoers does not excuse us from his command that we resist evil deeds.
Chapman Cox, an assistant secretary of defense during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, is a Presbyterian elder and director of development for the Presbyterian Lay Committee.