Devil in the White Miter
Judd Garrett – August 30, 2023
Jesus told Pilate, “The reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. (John 18:37-38)
Pilate asked the question that has plagued mankind since the dawn of time, the question we are still arguing over to this day. “What is truth?” Every time we watch cable news, or click on a news story on the internet, in the back of our minds, we are wondering, ‘what is the truth?’ The truth is under assault. Some even say, that we live in a post-truth world. The reason why we have arrived at a place without truth is because we have slowly embraced the concept of relativism.
Earlier this month, Pope Francis, an avowed communist, levied harsh criticism at the Catholic Church in America which still clings to the truth, and claimed that its leaders have “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” towards morality. He said, “I want to remind these people [American Catholics] that backwardness is useless, and they must understand that there’s a correct evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals.”
To be clear, that is something the devil would say. In fact, didn’t the devil use that same type of argument when he was tempting Eve in the garden? Didn’t he lead her to question the word of God, and get her to evolve her understanding of what is right and wrong in the eyes of God? And if Eve had refused to bite the apple, the devil may have called her “backward” and “reactionary”. And didn’t all of this lead to the fall of man?
Pope Francis went on to say, “Our understanding of the human person changes with time and our consciousness also deepens. The other sciences and their evolution also help the Church in this growth in understanding… It is clear that today the issue of homosexuality is very strong, and the sensitivity in this regard changes according to historical circumstances.” Is he actually arguing that truth, morality, right and wrong, and good and evil are all temporal, and not eternal? He believes that they can change based on the time in which we live, and circumstances that we face? We can argue what truth, morality, right and wrong, and good and evil actually are, but when he says that they are mere products of the times, he is rejecting that they even exist at all.
The Pope continued, “But what I don’t like at all, in general, is that we look at the so-called ‘sin of the flesh’ with a magnifying glass, just as we have done for so long for the sixth commandment. If you exploited workers, if you lied or cheated, it didn’t matter, and instead sins below the waist were relevant.” When did exploiting people, lying and cheating not matter? When were they not sins? In fact, previous generations were much less tolerant of lying and cheating than we are today.
And even if, lying and cheating didn’t matter in the past, shouldn’t the Pope – the moral conscience of the Catholic Church – argue that lying and cheating should matter more, and not argue that the sins of the flesh should matter less? So, the Pope has to lie and manipulate in order to create an argument for his position, just like the devil has to lie and manipulate to convince us to do what he wants. He finished by saying, “I am not afraid of sexualized society. No, I am afraid of how we relate to it.”
There is an old saying, “The devil wants to make sin look normal and make righteousness seem strange.” That is exactly what the Pope was doing with his statements. He wants to change how we relate to sin. For 2,000 years, since the time of Christ, what has been righteous, the Pope just called “reactionary” and “backward”. And what has been a sin, the Pope just called “correct”, “evolution”, “growth” and “science”.
The Pope uses scientific terms like “evolve” and “evolution”, and applies them to non-scientific concepts like morality as the justification to rewrite and amend Jesus. The Pope wants us to “evolve” the morality that Jesus taught to align with the times so as to not offend anyone, and thus relegating everyone who follows this to an eternity in hell.
Jesus said, “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.”(Matt 5:29) There was no gray area in Jesus’ statement about sin. Jesus did not say, ‘if your right eye causes you to sin, evolve your understanding of sin.’ He didn’t say, ‘to be righteous, you don’t have to change yourself, you merely have to update with the times what you consider a sin.’
When the woman was caught in adultery and about to be stoned to death, Jesus saved her by saying, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”(John 8:7) Everyone dropped their stones and left the woman, because everyone had a firm understanding of what sin was, even though they had not lived up to that morality, and had sinned. If that scene played itself out today, the woman would have been stoned to death because people like the Pope argue that we can change our understanding of sin to fit our circumstances. So, the woman’s adultery would still be a sin, but everyone else would evolve their understanding of their own sins to allow them to cast their stone at the woman.
After everyone left and no one condemned the woman, Jesus said to her, “neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” (John 8:11) After saving her life, he didn’t say to the woman, ‘I did that because I have a new understanding of adultery, so go and have sex with a man who is not your husband.’ He said, “go and sin no more.” We can have compassion, we can have understanding, we can have forgiveness for each other and our common struggles with temptation without accepting and affirming the sins we are tempted to commit.
You either live a principled life or you don’t. Either there are absolute truths, eternal truths, or everything is temporal. If everything is relative, if everything is temporal, if everything is a product of the times in which we live, then there is no right and wrong, there is no morality. And that is exactly what these people want – no morality. When you embrace the concept of moral relativism, all you’re doing is stating that there is no such thing as morality. Morality and relativism are incompatible and should never be used to modify each other, because they negate each other. Morality means, “principles that make the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” Relativism means, “the view that the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad are not absolute.” The left puts these words next to each other because doing so negates morality.
The Pope is trying to rewrite Jesus, just as judicial activists try to rewrite, James Madison, and the Constitution. The judicial activists claim that our Constitution is a “living document” that “evolves” over time, just as the Pope believes our morality evolves over time. A Constitution is the “fundamental principles” of a country – the legal morality of the country. The more we “evolve” our Constitution, the more likely our Constitution will become meaningless and powerless because the fundamental principles will be completely compromised. And when our Constitution becomes powerless, the politicians cannot be restrained and the people cannot be protected. Then, the politicians alone become the arbiters of human rights and freedom and morality.
And once they have that power, morality will no longer be relative because it will be their morality that is imposed on everyone else. The left is doing that right now. They have become the new Puritans. The Puritans were strict and judgmental. They had hard beliefs. There was no room for deviance. The Puritans judged, looked down upon, and even shunned people who engaged in perverse sexual behavior and pleasures of the flesh. The new Puritans of the left are the exact opposite. They judge, they look down upon, they even shun and cancel people who do not support their perverse sexual behavior and pleasures of the flesh.
We see this in public schools. If you are a parent and you stand up against drag performers coming into your child’s second-grade classroom or pornography in elementary school libraries, you are called “bigoted”, “homophobe”, “transphobic”, “hater”. You may even be arrested. The Pope will even call you “reactionary” and “backward”. And if you do not completely adopt and affirm the left’s immorality, they want you canceled from society; they want you fired from your job. They want the life that you know, taken from you.
Pilate was standing in the presence of the ultimate Truth, and made the argument for moral relativism. The Pope, the leader of the largest Christian denomination in the world, knows the truth that Jesus testified to, and he is making an argument for moral relativism. Left wing judges and politicians have read and studied the profound words of Madison in our Constitution and they make an argument for judicial activism. We now live in a country that is in the process of tearing down all of the principles and structures that give our country form and meaning. We have erased our borders, so we have erased what it means to be an American. We have compromised our Constitution to the extent that we have compromised our civil rights as United States citizens. We have upended our morality to the extent that truth and righteousness are vilified while lies and depravity are celebrated. And that is the world that the Marxist need to create in order to take over. They need a world without truth – a world without Jesus. And the Pope is leading the way.
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.
