I was recently listening to evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad discussing what he calls suicidal empathy, and I found myself agreeing with much of his diagnosis. Saad argues that Western civilization has developed a potentially fatal condition in which empathy, normally a virtue, becomes an instrument of self-destruction. A society can become so consumed with demonstrating compassion for others that it loses the moral confidence to protect itself, its institutions, its culture, and ultimately its children.
And as a faithful Christian, let me state unequivocally that God designed us with an instinct for self-preservation, and there is nothing inherently sinful about exercising it, even at the societal level. Look inward for a moment. Don’t you have a natural inclination to preserve your own life? Yet God also calls us to sacrificial love. These are not contradictory impulses, and we should resist the temptation to treat them as a binary choice. Rather, we must learn to love God with our minds (Matthew 22:37), reasoning carefully about how these God-given inclinations fit together within the responsibilities He has entrusted to us, including responsibilities in a society.
A father who risks his life protecting his children is not rejecting self-preservation as a good. He is recognizing a responsibility greater than his own immediate safety. But a father who needlessly sacrifices his family’s welfare to demonstrate compassion toward others has confused sacrifice with stewardship. Biblical love does not demand that we abandon our responsibilities in order to prove our compassion. It demands that we understand those responsibilities and faithfully discharge them, even when doing so requires sacrifice. And if that principle applies to a father entrusted with a household, why should we assume it becomes irrelevant when considering a government entrusted with the safety and welfare of an entire people?
The Interview
What particularly interested me was the interviewer’s struggle to find a solution to the societal suicidal empathy we’re engaged in right now. He clearly recognized the problem, but kept returning to classical liberalism and constitutional government as though somewhere within those familiar ideas there must be a line capable of stopping the destruction. Yet he seemed unable to identify where that line existed.
And that got me thinking about Hosea 4:6.
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.”
We have all heard this verse quoted, usually to encourage Christians to study their Bibles. But Hosea was addressing something far more serious than insufficient religious education.
Israel possessed the law of God. The problem was not that God had neglected to communicate His expectations. The people, particularly the priests responsible for teaching them, had rejected the knowledge entrusted to them. They had abandoned the moral and covenantal order that was supposed to govern their lives.
Their destruction was not simply the consequence of ignorance. It was the consequence of rejecting what they were responsible for knowing and obeying.
And notice something else. The consequences would extend to their children.
Now, America is not ancient Israel, nor is our Constitution equivalent to the Mosaic covenant. But Hosea exposes a principle that ought to concern every Christian entrusted with something valuable: Possessing knowledge does not necessarily mean possessing the knowledge required to fulfill our responsibilities.
Indeed, we can possess an enormous amount of the wrong knowledge.
And I believe that is precisely where American constitutional conservatives, including millions of evangelical Christians, find themselves today.
The Knowledge We Keep Returning To
For generations, conservatives have been taught to regard the Constitution as the ultimate source of our political identity and liberty. We study its Articles, celebrate its Framers, debate original intent, and quote the Federalist Papers as though they contain the answers to every political dilemma.
But what if we have been studying the wrong document?
Not because the Constitution is irrelevant. It is essential to understanding how our present government functions. But knowing how a government operates is not the same as knowing whether it should continue operating in its present form.
That distinction is enormous.
And the Constitution is simply not sufficient to resolve our present problems. It you really knew the Constitution, you would understand why. But since most conservatives and evangelical Christians don’t (I didn’t either at one time), let me help.
The Constitution organizes political authority. It establishes Congress, the presidency, the judiciary, and the processes by which competing political interests obtain and exercise power.
What it does not establish is an unalterable moral consensus among the people competing for that power.
Consider Article I, Sections 2, 3, and 4. These provisions establish the machinery for selecting representatives and senators and regulating congressional elections. Emphasize the word machinery, not principles upon which the machine functions. And indeed, although the Seventeenth Amendment changed how senators are selected, the fundamental mechanism remains: competing political factions seek control of the same national government. That was the design they came up with in 1787. It matters not the motivation of the Framers, not one iota. For our discussion, we just need to understand the mechanism.
But what happens when those competing factions no longer agree about the purposes for which government exists?
The Constitution provides the machinery for the competition. It does not ensure that whoever wins will possess the moral convictions necessary to preserve the civilization that produced it.
And this is where Saad’s diagnosis becomes especially important.
There is no constitutional provision prohibiting suicidal empathy as a governing philosophy. People who embrace that philosophy can organize, campaign, win elections, appoint judges, and enact legislation, subject to whatever constitutional limitations remain enforceable.
Their opponents can do precisely the same thing.
We call this constitutional government. But it creates an extraordinary problem when the disagreement is no longer about marginal tax rates or spending priorities, but about the moral foundations and continued existence of the society itself.
At that point, constitutional knowledge may tell us how the contest is conducted, but it cannot tell us whether the contest itself should continue.
For that, we must go further back.
We Have an Origin Story (Hint: it is not the Constitution)
Eleven years before the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia, thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain.
And the document they produced did something fundamentally different.
It explained why governments exist, what they are supposed to accomplish, and what a people may do when their government becomes destructive of those purposes.
The Declaration begins by recognizing that a people may find it necessary to dissolve the political connections binding them to another political society.
It then establishes the principles upon which that decision rests.
Human beings are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Governments are instituted to secure those rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Notice the sequence.
Rights do not originate with government. Government originates to secure rights that already exist. Political authority is therefore not an end in itself. It is an instrument, instituted for a purpose and judged by its fidelity to that purpose. But somehow, we lost this. Our entire focus has been directed at restoring something that never was, i.e., a Christian supporting Constitution.
And this is why the Declaration of Independence is so central right now. This simple proposition absent from modern constitutional conservatism:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
Read those words carefully.
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends.
Not merely when you think a politician violated a constitutional provision, your opinion does not matter. Not when the Supreme Court finally acknowledges something has gone wrong. And certainly not only when one political party loses an election.
The standard is whether government has become destructive of the purposes for which it was instituted. Has ours?
You have to be intentionally blind not to answer with a resounding YES! Very destructive.
The Declaration then recognizes the people’s authority to establish new government in whatever form seems most likely to accomplish their safety and happiness.
Of course, the Founders appealed to prudence, warning against changing governments for light and transient causes. They supported their decision with an extensive account of abuses and usurpations.
But prudence does not erase the principle. And we have causes to separate, right?
The Declaration expressly recognizes both the right, and under circumstances of persistent despotism the duty, to replace a destructive government.
despotism (noun)
oppressive absolute power and authority exerted by government : rule by a despotic government.
And please don’t respond with your ability to vote means it is not despotic. Please!
The Declaration of Independence is our origin story – not the U.S. Constitution. And it contains political knowledge that constitutional conservatism, for all its devotion to the Framers, has largely forgotten.
The Constitution tells us how to compete for control of government. The Declaration tells us when government itself may no longer deserve our consent.
They are not the same documents, and the Constitution does not flow from the Declaration of Independence. The Articles of Confederation, America’s first Constitution, is a much better example of a structure flowing from the Declaration of Independence.
Empathy Without Responsibility
Now let’s return to Saad.
The problem with suicidal empathy is not empathy itself. Christians, of all people, ought to understand this. We are commanded to love our neighbors, care for the vulnerable, show hospitality, and exercise mercy.
But biblical love is not sentimental indulgence. Love operates within a moral order that includes justice, truth, prudence, and responsibility for those entrusted to our care.
A father who gives away his children’s food to demonstrate generosity has not necessarily acted virtuously. He may have neglected his first responsibility to satisfy an emotional impulse or establish his reputation as a compassionate man.
And the consequences fall upon his children.
At the civilizational level, I believe Saad is identifying precisely this confusion. We increasingly mistake the appearance of compassion for the exercise of genuine moral responsibility.
Compassion becomes detached from stewardship.
We are encouraged to consider everyone who might benefit from our generosity while treating questions about consequences, sustainability, and our obligations to our own families and communities as evidence of moral deficiency. Yet resources are finite. Institutions have purposes. Governments have responsibilities. And decisions have consequences.
For Christians, the issue is more serious still. We cannot substitute fashionable cultural conceptions of compassion for the moral obligations revealed in Scripture. The command to love our neighbor does not abolish our duty to provide for our households, protect the innocent, administer justice, or exercise wise stewardship over what God has entrusted to us. Indeed, love requires us to take those responsibilities seriously.
And this brings us back to Hosea.
The failure of one generation becomes the inheritance of the next.
The Knowledge We Have Forgotten
Who is responsible for transmitting the principles upon which a civilization depends?
Our pastors, teachers, professors, historians, journalists, and political leaders all participate in shaping what successive generations believe about themselves and their society. And what have we taught them?
- We have spent generations teaching Americans the mechanics of constitutional government while increasingly abandoning any common understanding of the moral purposes government exists to serve.
- We have elevated political process over political purpose. And the consequences have been devastating to the 65,000,000 murdered babies while we seemed to tell them: “Wait, we’re one election away from stopping these murders!” But the baby could not wait, right? Constitutional processes we became devoted to did this to our minds. We made a trade-off: process for life. How do you think God looks at our decision? I know, and I got on my knees and repented for my sin of neglect.
- And we have somehow persuaded millions of conservative Christians that the answer to an increasingly destructive political order is simply to study the Constitution more carefully, elect better representatives, appoint better judges, and try again at the next election.
But that assumes the problem can be solved by obtaining temporary control of the same machinery. What happens when that machinery has become the instrument through which fundamentally incompatible moral and political convictions compete for control of an entire country?
- The Constitution does not settle that conflict.
- It organizes it.
And because federal authority extends across the Union, the consequences of that competition reach far beyond the communities that embrace the winning political philosophy.
This raises a question I believe Christians should seriously consider:
Why must people who no longer share a common understanding of government’s purpose continue fighting for control of one government?
The Declaration offers a different starting point. It does not begin by asking which faction can assemble the winning coalition. It begins by identifying the purposes for which governments exist and the authority of a people to establish institutions suited to those purposes.
It even recognizes that political secession may become necessary. (Hint, it already is. We’re way past the time we should have seceded).
There is an extraordinary difference between a political movement determined to conquer its opponents through national elections and a people who conclude that their safety and happiness would be better secured by governing themselves separately.
The first perpetuates competition for control of the whole.
The second asks whether that competition is necessary at all.
And Our Children?
Jesus’ Parable of the Talents is instructive here. The servants were entrusted with resources and expected to act responsibly with what they had received. The servant who failed to act was not excused because he had preserved what was given to him. His master called him wicked and lazy.
I do not believe we can treat our inheritance of political freedom as though preserving an eighteenth-century governing document fulfills our responsibility to future generations.
- What have we done with that freedom?
- What has become of the society we inherited?
I am increasingly concerned that my generation, particularly the Christians within it, has failed to steward the extraordinary inheritance we received. We inherited considerable freedom, prosperity, social trust, and opportunities for self-government. Yet we have spent much of our adult lives watching those things deteriorate while continuing to look for salvation in the next election.
Meanwhile, our children and grandchildren inherit the consequences.
Hosea’s warning concerned God’s judgment upon Israel. It was not a prediction of America’s future. But the principle of intergenerational responsibility ought to trouble us. What if God has decided to carry evangelicals into Marxist captivity because of our decades of sin, idolatry and willingness to tolerate a holocaust in our midst?
We always could have tried to stop this holocaust created by the mechanistic U.S. Constitution using the principles in the Declaration of Independence. Why didn’t we do, you think?
The problem is not simply that Western civilization has developed a self-destructive conception of compassion. It is that we have lost the moral and political knowledge necessary to evaluate the institutions through which that conception becomes governing power.
We know the Articles. We know the amendments. We know the arguments of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay.
But do we know our own Declaration of Independence?
- Do we understand that governments are instituted to secure rights rather than manufacture them?
- That political legitimacy rests upon consent?
- That government exists for the safety and happiness of the people?
- That political secession is not an alien concept imported into American history, but the very act through which America came into existence?
And most importantly, do we understand that our responsibility is not merely to preserve the institutions we inherited, but to steward the freedoms for which those institutions were established?
The Constitution is useful knowledge when asking how our present government operates. But when asking whether that government continues to fulfill its fundamental purposes, constitutional mechanics are the wrong knowledge to treat as sufficient.
For that, we must return to the Declaration.
Hosea warned of a people destroyed because they rejected the knowledge they were responsible for possessing. I wonder whether future generations will look back upon us and ask a similar question.
- We possessed the knowledge. Our origin story was available for anyone to read.
- We even celebrated it every Fourth of July.
- But did we understand what it meant?
Or were we so busy defending the Constitution that we forgot why America declared her independence in the first place?
Article posted with permission from Bill Evans
