If the “follow your heart” religion is indeed the dominant religion of our cultural moment, as Williams has argued, Christians, for the love of God and the love of our neighbors, will need to commit cultural heresy. We only find our “true selves” in right relationship with God. Reject the death spiral of self-worship. Embrace the abundant life Christ offers.  

“Follow your heart” is a slogan popularized by Disney movies, pop psychology, and social media. Ultimately, it is just another version of the oldest lie in the world: That you and I can be our own god.  
In his new book Don’t Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship, Professor Thaddeus Williams of Biola University has exposed “the cult of self” behind these mantras. The cult of self is, in a sense, the largest religion in the world and promises to elevate adherents to the place and prerogative of God. In the end, however, like all bad ideas about God and self, this lie dehumanizes us, leaving us empty, unsatisfied, and isolated.  
Don’t Follow Your Heart is a must-read today, wise in its analysis and practical in its application. Today is the last day to receive a copy as our thank-you for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month. Just visit colsoncenter.org/January. 
Williams shared more about the “the cult of self” in a recent conversation with Shane Morris on the Colson Center’s Upstream podcast. As he noted, everyone worships something.  
For Paul, it’s never a question of the theist versus the atheist. For Paul, everybody worships. Everybody’s a worshipper. Everybody’s on their knees to someone or something, either the Creator or the creation. 
The key is right worship. In today’s version of the world’s oldest idolatry, voices across our culture urge us always to put ourselves first, ultimately in the place of God and as the object of our devotion, allegiance, and obedience. At one point, Williams lamented: “Who isn’t telling us to follow our hearts?” This idea, however, has consequences:   
Now when you erase the creator-creature distinction, which has happened in the mainstream culture, that attribute of simplicity, or even we might say impassibility, a lot of the divine attributes, sovereignty, we now start attributing to ourselves.
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“The defense of our historic American system of liberty under law requires then that we wage war against pornography, because pornography is a major enemy to liberty. The opponents of pornography are therefore no threat to liberty. Rather, they are its friends and defenders. Under the cloak and name of liberty, the pornographers are out to destroy liberty. The real champions of liberty are in every age hostile to pornography.”

Discussions of censorship rarely occur without someone citing the old adage, “I might disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” While it is commendable to champion the rights of others, even those with opposing views, it shouldn’t be assumed that there should be absolutely no limitations on what individuals can express in the public arena.
Though some may initially consider this an infringement on the basic principle of freedom of speech, it is worth noting that even the most ardent Libertarian free-speech advocates reject the idea that people should be able to say absolutely anything they want to without consequence. Take, for instance, defamation laws that prevent libel, or copyright legislation that prohibit the publishing of stolen or plagiarised content.
Consequently, we shouldn’t imagine that all expression is protected as “free speech.” Speech can violate an individual’s right not to be robbed. Victims of libel, defamation, or slander suffer from a loss of reputation, potentially leading to financial damages, while victims of plagiarism are robbed of the credit or financial benefits of stolen labor. As such, justice should always demand restitution for the wronged from the hand of the wrong-doer.
This is not to say such laws are designed merely to infringe on liberty, but rather, they are to protect the liberty and rights of all potential victims.
Herein lies the distinction between liberty and anarchy: Liberty is restrained by law, while anarchy is inherently lawless. Liberty is the freedom to do what is good unhindered, anarchy is to live without the restraints of immediate social or legal penalties for doing bad.
Now, someone might say, isn’t this just the “cancel-everything-I hate” mindset infecting today’s culture? No, our point of contention lies not in whether bad things ought to be penalised, but how we determine what things ought to be considered “bad” and deserving of punishment. It’s not whether, but which. Not whether expression is restricted, but which expression will be restricted and on what basis?
Unless we’re going to embrace anarchy, we all draw the line somewhere. But why do we draw it where we do? Is it just reputation-theft, or should other expressions detrimental to society also be prohibited and censored? What about other immoral expressions, such as pornography?
This issue came up recently in Australia after a major store decided to remove a graphic children’s sex education book from its shelves following online criticism. While many applauded the move, some accused the book’s critics of violating freedom of expression by demanding its removal.
One Libertarian MP referred to those opposing the book’s contents as “book burners,” accusing them of “spitting in the face of parental rights.”
“Parents decide what is appropriate for their children, not the Government, not activists,” he argued.
But is this the approach we ought to take in our effort to secure freedom of expression? Do we, as some have argued, legally protect the bad to ensure overreaching governments don’t criminalise the good? Should our commitment to freedom of speech extend to pornographic content?
In his brilliant, short book, Law & Liberty, R.J. Rushdoony tackles this issue, answering the question of whether censoring pornographic material was a violation of rights. Though he speaks within an American context, the principles advocated are universal. The following excerpt is well-worth the read.
In Chapter 3, Rushdoony writes:
The issue of legislation governing pornography is becoming a major debate on the American scene. Shall legislation be further framed to abolish pornography, or does such legislation become censorship and a violation of civil rights?
Before analyzing the issue, let us examine the arguments for and against. In California, for example, the CLEAN Initiative, in 1966 Proposition 16 on the ballot, was one campaign among many to combat pornography. The advocates of CLEAN called attention to the fact that pornography in the United States has been a two billion dollar business annually. The publishers of pornography openly solicit manuscripts emphasizing perversions and hard-core pornography. Prosecution of avowedly pornographic works is difficult or impossible because existing laws are too weak. District attorneys do not initiate prosecutions, because the present law is inadequate to secure convictions. It is held that, to combat both pornography and its products, criminality and venereal disease, new laws are necessary.
Not so, the opponents argued. There is no necessary connection, it is claimed, between pornography and criminality, between pornography and immorality. Moreover, even if it were proven that such a connection exists, it would be wrong to pass laws against pornography, because such laws would introduce a greater evil, censorship and the loss of liberty. We are told that if pornography is the price we must pay for liberty, then we must be prepared to pay it. Liberty is too basic to the life of man to be sacrificed for any other factor. A lesser good cannot be sacrificed for the greater and basic good. We are against pornography, many argue, but we are even more emphatically against censorship and against any and every attack on liberty.
We can, as we assess these two conflicting positions, appreciate both a concern for moral standards and also a concern for liberty. The argument concerned with liberty is an important one, but it must be intelligently used. And what is liberty? Can it be limited, or is true liberty only unlimited liberty?
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, April 22, 2024
This points to their value in today’s debates. One of the striking lacunae on both the right and left wings of the Christian political spectrum is the general absence of any reference to the transcendence of God and the supernatural nature of the church. Immanent concerns rule the day. The pundits on both sides seem more concerned with making sure that no criticism goes unmocked, and no critic’s character goes unsmeared than with relativizing the affairs of this world in the light of eternity.

I recently revisited a book that I had not read for many years: Robert P. Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler. It is a study of how three intellectuals, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch—scholars of the Old Testament, Luther, and Kierkegaard, respectively—came to support Hitler in 1933 and ultimately be identified with an evil ideology that cost millions of lives, both in the death camps and in the war that German expansionism precipitated.
It is a troubling book because, while Hirsch was always a nasty anti-Semite and remained so after the Third Reich collapsed, Kittel and Althaus started as what we might call orthodox, patriotic conservatives. The story of their corruption by Nazi ideology is a sad and disturbing one. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, they succumbed step by step; each step they took made sense to them, given the exigencies of the time, but the end result was catastrophic. There was a logical line from voting for Hitler to, at a minimum, standing silently by as Nazi behavior became more outrageous and systematically murderous. While I was working on Luther for my PhD, I was particularly dismayed to discover the attitude of Althaus. He was one of my scholarly heroes. How could he have been so wrong?
It is an interesting thought experiment to wonder how Christians today might have voted in Germany in the early 1930s. Hindsight grants great privileges. It not only gives us all 20/20 vision, but also exempts us from the difficult moral trade-offs and compromises that all voting booths contain in a manner unavailable to those at the time. We should not be so certain that we would have necessarily acted as we might like to imagine. It was a world where it seemed that either the Nazis or the Communists must triumph and where the full evil of both was as yet not fully visible. But even as we can acknowledge these difficulties, it is important to note that there were still theologians who did see the problem in 1933 and who refused to strike a deal with the devils on either side of the political spectrum.
The most famous example is that of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, signed by, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. What is disappointing about that document in retrospect is its failure to address the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, something Barth later regretted. But there was an earlier and better document that is today all but forgotten: the Bethel Confession of 1933, which Bonhoeffer had composed along with another Lutheran, Hermann Sasse…The Bethel Confession has recently been reprinted and is well worth study and reflection.
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