One reason why President Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike seemed so unreal to so many (including many of the controllers themselves who simply could not believe it) was that the President appealed to America‘s former respect for law instead of the situational ethics which has dominated the thinking of Americans for the past 15 years.
To explain what we mean by that, we go back to an editorial written some 12 years ago on the (then) virulent impact of situational ethics openly taught by the churches. We wrote:
“Most thoughtful people, both Christians and nonChristians, realize that America, as ‘a society ruled by law,’ is under massive attack.
“Our processes of justice have become mockeries, our courts have become havens for criminals, our laws have been written only to be broken.
“What most people do not realize is that the religious community has participated in the attack upon law through formal theological sanctions that have received the widest possible acceptance.
“The church has attacked law by teaching ‘situational ethics’ as a replacement for fixed rules of behavior. And it is no accident that the ‘new morality’ began to receive wide publicity just at the time that the laws of society as a whole came under attack.
“Commenting on the influence of situational ethics (the ‘flexible’ approach to rules and regulations taught in such texts as the current CLC book, In Response to God), Prof. John G. Milhaven of Woodstock (Md.) College described the year 2000 as he foresaw it:
“The traditional moral theology that solved cases of conscience through application of law will no longer be in demand. . . . Moral principles will still be recognized but not as solely decisive factors . . . . The principle of ‘responsibility’ will be more emphasized than that of an ‘obligation’ binding through law.’
“Prof. Milhaven was talking of the church, of course. But it is precisely because the church is (and has been) contributing a moral respectability to t he idea that laws exist only to be broken (if there’s a good reason, of course) that the entire concept of a society governed by law is beginning to crumble.
“After all, if the church says ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ is not necessarily the final word on the subject in every circumstance, it will not be long before a civil court says ‘Commit rape and you go to jail’ is not necessarily the final word on the subject in every circumstance.
“The judge who sits in church on Sunday and hears that fixed principles must yield to a decision concerning ‘the loving thing to do,’ may well go back to his court on Monday and decide that the rioter who killed a policeman while demonstrating should get a suspended sentence.
“And so in another area the church makes a major contribution to the disintegration of society.”
What President Reagan has done has been to restore an important value that–with the church‘s help–was beginning to disappear.
This editorial by the editor, Dr. Aiken Taylor, appeared in the August 26, 1981 issue of The Presbyterian Journal. published at Asheville, N.C., and is reprinted by permission.