At the start of another year, remember that you were made for more than trivial pursuits. There’s nothing wrong with New Year’s resolutions, but remember: You will never find ultimate satisfaction in people, possessions, or pursuits. Solomon said that striving after the things of this world is like striving after the wind (Eccl. 2:11). There’s no profit in it. What we’re really hungering for can only be found in Christ. The longing we experience can only be satisfied if we strive after Jesus. 

Did you make it past Quitter’s Day this year?
By the second Friday of January, most people have thrown in the towel. That’s 14 days max. Many don’t even last that long, but within a fortnight it’s all over for the bulk of them. The majority has completely given up. They quit. Two weeks is the most they can endure. It’s all the holding power their New Year’s resolutions have over them.
But why? Why do our best efforts falter so quickly? Why do so many of us just give up? Why can’t we consistently keep the virtuous promises we make to ourselves? Because there’s a flaw that keeps us from pressing on to do what we know is good for us. That’s why.
History shows that despite all our best efforts and all humanity’s grand achievements, we still hunger for a significance that remains out of our reach. Even when you don’t quit, even when you keep all your resolutions, you will never be able to satisfy the hunger at the center of your own story by your own efforts. Simply put, you are not enough for you.
This is why every New Year we revisit our commitments to gym workouts, diets, Bible reading plans, etc. It’s a second chance at fulfilling the longings of our soul left unsatisfied from another year gone.
These promises and pursuits stem from an internal longing for something more. You and I long for a new beginning—a second birth, of sorts—because we know there’s so much more for us than life on this earth gives. To C.S. Lewis, this longing was a clue to the meaning of life. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” he said, “the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
The longing we experience points us beyond ourselves. There is a yearning in our hearts for something we can never reach on our own, though we try.
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Rather than aim for perfection, conservative energy would be better spent rebuilding the foundations of virtue. We need laws that, for instance, encourage marriage, discourage divorce, and promote community through friendship and civil associations. The benefits of rebuilding a healthy society are uncontroversial. Moral regulations must build upon this foundation rather than grate against it. In this way, conservatives can support incremental progress toward traditional morality while avoiding the twin dangers of judgmental moralism and amoral libertarianism.

Tim Keller recently critiqued evangelical Christians for not developing a political theology—that is, a theory of how to apply religious beliefs to public policy. He correctly points out that Christians do not want to penalize every sin. Specifically, most evangelicals want to penalize abortion but do not want to penalize idolatry (i.e. false religion). He writes: “Since we can’t simply say, ‘If the Bible says its sin it should be illegal’—how do we choose which morals to politically champion?” Keller aims to prevent Christians from dividing over politics by accepting that the political implications of Christianity are debatable. Keller’s piece provoked a response from several commentators, including Adam Carrington.
Keller’s challenge applies not only to Christianity but to ethical philosophies more generally. Should an action be illegal simply because it is wrong? If not, then which wrong actions should be illegal? Are there “harmless wrongs” that the state ought not to forbid?
In America, one often hears that the state shouldn’t “legislate morality,” or that people have a right to do anything so long as they aren’t “hurting anyone.” This position derives from John Stuart Mill’s famous “harm principle,” which holds that the state may only interfere with liberty to prevent non-consensual harm to other people. Live and let live!
This view, while popular, is wrong: the law may encourage virtuous actions and punish evil ones. As I have argued elsewhere, conservatism ought to abandon the liberal idea that the state exists solely to protect individual rights. Rather, individual rights derive from, and must remain rooted in, a framework of moral duties oriented toward natural human goods. Natural goods are not fleeting desires; rather, they are perceived by reason to be worthy of pursuit for their own sake because they enable humans to reach the best possible state according to their nature. If, then, rights are designed to facilitate the pursuit of natural goods, one cannot have a “right” to do wrong.
Nevertheless, drawing upon the natural law theories of Thomas Aquinas and Richard Hooker, I will argue that the state ought to refrain from punishing minor vices. Sometimes, people ought to have tacit “permission” to perform wrong actions, particularly those with minor social consequences. This view of the relationship between morality and law is attractive in that it encourages the promotion of virtue while preventing harsh intolerance. It acknowledges the reality of human sin without excusing or ignoring moral norms. It is idealistic without being unrealistic.
The Common Good Involves Virtue
Classic natural law thinkers hold that human law ultimately derives from natural law, which originates from God’s creative design and is known through reason. Thomas Aquinas argues that the natural law encompasses “everything to which a man is inclined according to his nature,” including virtue, since all people have a natural inclination to pursue virtue (Aquinas, Political Writings, 119). As the Anglican Richard Hooker–who followed Thomas rather closely–wrote in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, humans have a natural “desire” to become “more perfect,” i.e. to reach “an exquisite excellence of form” by “constantly and excellently doing whatever it is that their kind does” (62). They not only seek “continued existence,” both for themselves “individually” and for their species “through their offspring,” but above all aspire “to the greatest conformity with God by pursuing the knowledge of truth and growing in the exercise of virtue” (63).
Achieving basic goods, moreover, requires good political institutions. Hooker states that societies need laws “governing the order of their common life together,” which must be framed “for the sake of the common good” and for “the sake of public order” (82). Thus, as Aquinas likewise notes, “human laws should be adapted to the common good,” i.e. the collective flourishing of members in a political community, which is accomplished especially through natural goods such as life, peace, friendship, and the rearing and education of children (Aquinas, 138). Even supposedly private actions implicate the common good to the extent that they promote or hinder human flourishing.
In a chapter in Mere Christianity called “The Three Parts of Morality,” C.S. Lewis provides a good example of how virtue promotes the common good. He invokes the image of society as a naval convoy traveling through the ocean. There is a danger that the ships will either “drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage.” In order to avoid this, the individual ships must be in good shape; a ship with a faulty engine or steering mechanism will fall behind or veer wildly. The only way to keep the convoy safe is to ensure that each individual ship is seaworthy enough to stay in formation. Likewise, individual people who lack virtue are especially likely to harm others. So even “private” actions affect people’s ability to follow the rules and to lend society their aid.
If virtue serves the common good, then the promotion of virtue falls within the state’s legitimate powers. Hooker writes that “the course of politic[al] affairs cannot in any good sort go forward without fit instruments [i.e. citizens], and that which fitteth them be their virtues.” He argues for this reason that “pure and unstained religion ought to be the highest of all cares” for rulers inasmuch as religion is the best way to inculcate virtue among the citizenry. Whatever view of church-state relations we choose to adopt nowadays, Christian theorists traditionally perceived the inculcation of moral character to be a chief priority of good political communities. The same is true of non-virtuous or “vicious” acts, which may be proscribed. Hooker states that laws are not “properly devised” unless they “presume that man’s will is obstinate” and seek to “moderate his actions to prevent any hindrance to the common good” (82-83). This classic view follows Romans 13:1-7, which states that God instituted government to be a “terror” to people who do “evil” but to “praise” those who do “good.”
The Danger of Banning all Vices
Natural law theorists nevertheless believe that there should be practical limitations on laws that compel virtue or punish vice.
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In our sin, we need the desperation of the prodigal son who, after he squandered all his inheritance, recognizes his only hope is to return to his father (Luke 15:17–19). Or like the psalmist who calls to the Lord for mercy from the abyss of his sin (Psalm 130:1–2), we too must turn to God with hope-filled pleas for mercy. “For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption” (Psalm 130:7). We have been led by the insanity of sin to run from our Father, but he is ready and eager to run to us, brimming with forgiveness.

At various points in my Christian life, I’ve felt my cheeks burn with shame as I’ve faced my sin. I’ve felt humiliated, disappointed, and sometimes disgusted with what I’ve done.
Perhaps you’ve felt a similar anguish. You can’t believe those ugly words just came out of your mouth. You look back with a sense of embarrassment over how you acted so foolishly toward your parents. You’ve all but despaired over some ongoing sin that you cannot seem to confess.
As Christians, we have all looked at ourselves and felt sorrow over sin. But have we ever deeply considered why we do it in the first place? Why do we sin?
Searching Our Past Sins
In Confessions book 2, Augustine (354–430) probes for an answer to why we sin by considering moments in his own life. But he does so cautiously, clarifying that he looks back on his past sin “not for love of them but that I may love You, O my God” (2.1.1). He does not peruse past sins like we muse over old photos on our phone, but rather, like a doctor dissecting tissue to locate a cancerous tumor, Augustine remembers sin in order to discover its root cause. With Augustine, we should gaze at the darkness of past sin only to better understand our own hearts and, most importantly, to see the brightness of Christ’s mercy more clearly.
Augustine takes us back to his teenage years when his “delight was to love and to be loved.” Yet he “could not distinguish the white light of love from the fog of lust” (2.2.2). As he recounts how his “youthful immaturity” swept him away into “the madness of lust,” we expect him to stop and analyze the sinful motives behind his lusts. But he doesn’t. He turns instead, almost abruptly, to a very different kind of teenage sin: stealing pears with his pals as a prank (2.4.9).
Augustine labors to understand this seemingly trivial sin to such an extent that some have worried he veers into scrupulosity. Yet he is not troubled with doubts about whether he sinned, as the overly scrupulous are. Rather, he struggles with understanding why he committed the sin at all. What motivated his teenage self to steal with such senseless disregard for God’s law against theft (Exodus 20:15)?
Why Steal Pears?
Augustine makes clear right away that the problem with his theft of the pears was that the pears themselves were not the problem. He had no desire for the pears. The pears were not lovely, and he had even better ones back at home. Nor did he steal because he was hungry: he and his buddies just threw them to the pigs after they had stolen them. So, why did he do it? Why steal something you don’t even want and won’t even use?
Before Augustine describes two motives for why he stole the pears, he considers what usually entices us to sin: disordered desire for otherwise good things. Our attraction to beauty, our delight in physical pleasures, and our satisfaction in success all become distorted when we love them apart from God. Like the prodigal son demanding his inheritance so he could run from his father (Luke 15:11–32), we sin when we spurn the Giver and selfishly love his gifts.
We can discern in disordered desires a certain logic to sin, even to a heinous sin like murder. Augustine points to Cataline, the archetypal Roman villain, to underscore that even in committing murder “he loved some other thing which was his reason for committing [his crimes]” (2.5.11). In our selfish pursuits, we may even commit murder to get what we want or protect what we’re afraid to lose.
But in Augustine’s case, he wasn’t motivated by a nefarious goal beyond the robbery or by distorted love for the sweetness of the pears. Rather, he says, he desired the sweetness of sin itself.
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