"The Relationship Between God's Law and Man's" or "Morality and the Law II"

In "Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law," Bill Stuntz and David Skeel argue that Christian morality should lead to a breed of moral libertarianism rather than moral legalism.

"One might reasonably expect professing Christians to be especially attuned to the dangers of legal moralism. Judging from contemporary culture-wars debates, we aren’t. The heart of the problem is a tendency to confuse God’s law with man’s. Those of us who believe in a divine moral law are regularly tempted to try to write that law into our much less-than-divine code books....

Why do evangelical Christians find it so hard to resist the attractions of legal moralism?... Starting in the 1940s, evangelical leaders, many of them connected to Christianity Today, the principal voice of conservative evangelicalism, began calling for a renewed commitment on the part of believers to engage and influence the culture around them. 'From Carl Henry and Harold Ockenga in the 1940s,' as Christian Smith puts it, 'to Francis Schaeffer and Mark Hatfield in the 1960s and 1970s, to Charles Colson and Anthony Campolo in the 1980s and 1990s, evangelicals have been driven by a vision of redemptive world transformation." If the end is to transform a law-saturated culture like contemporary America’s, legal reform seems a natural means. Debates over legal limits on abortion, gambling, and Enron-style corporate immorality become tools for healing a spiritually diseased society....But the cure risks worsening the disease....

In short, legal moralism is nearly always counterproductive. In Christian terms, it is also deeply wrong. Jesus’s definitions of adultery and murder proved that immorality and illegality cannot and must not be coextensive. God’s law reigns over a broad empire that man’s law cannot hope to govern. Good moral principles are often vague and open-ended, and they reach into every nook and cranny of our lives and our thoughts. Legal principles that have these qualities only serve to invite arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. Arbitrariness and discrimination in turn invite contempt for the law....

Conflating God’s law and man’s law thus does violence to both. It makes far too much of man’s law, and far too little of God’s."