Forcing People To Be Good, Can It Happen? Series

Sophomore year in high school. We were assigned to study world history at that time, and we were using a Christian textbook, which rightly saw Jesus Christ as the center of all history. We even date years before and after the birth of Christ, even though the time line is about 3 years off what was probably Jesus’s real birthday, and modern historians have distorted the meaning and use the words “Common Era” and “BCE and CE” instead of “before Christ” and “Anno Domini–AD” meaning “year of Our Lord.”

But the critical time that featured the birth of Our Lord was that era of history called the Pax Romana or the “peace of Rome.” During that period, roughly three hundred years, the Roman Empire was ascendant in the East and the West of Europe and in Palestine and North Africa, and the Roman roads enabled the spread of the Gospel so that the Christian faith, despite persecution, was able to spread all over the Western world and Near East.

I imagine most Westerners have pretty much that same understanding of the early part of the first millennium. Rome’s army and navy, that had conquered so much of the surface of the earth, made everything great, and everyone at peace. Unfortunately, that’s a big oversimplification. The peace of Caesar Augustus came after a whole series of civil wars between factions in Rome, wars that cost Rome dearly in human power and resources. Moreover, Roman authority was established at a high human cost, mostly to the civilizations they conquered. The victors write the history, and Rome was victorious, so we don’t hear much positive about the Celts, Britons, Gallic tribes and others they subdued. But thousands died and the Romans plundered whatever wealth they encountered. And ultimately, internal corruption rotted out the Empire and led to its conquest by Germans, Huns, Mongols and Islamic millions. The Pax Romana was not a time of love and universal prosperity. Peace may have meant a relative absence of widespread bloodshed, but it was not a regime any of us would prefer to live under.

That being said, more and more young people are becoming idealists and spreading the general idea of Christian morality summed up in “Love your neighbor as yourself.” They hear the words of the Lord Jesus and St. Paul to live a simple life and take care of those less endowed with the goods of the earth and say, “let’s make that happen. Let’s create a society in which everyone has about the same wealth and income and everyone will have a guaranteed food supply, shelter, health care and security. That would be perfect, and everyone would be satisfied.” In other words, socialist redistribution of property and equal incomes.

That means we force everyone to live a semi-monastic life. Now I don’t want to get into the social, economic and cultural reasons why socialism does not work. Let’s look at this from a basic Christian perspective. Jesus taught us to love one another, yes, but He did not force us to love one another. When the rich young man came to him to ask how he could live the perfect life, recall that Jesus told him first to keep the commandments Moses gave. When he said he had done that all his short life, Christ then challenged him to sell what he owned, give to the poor, and then follow Him, his Master. When the young man went away, as sad as sad can be, Jesus did not force him to change his mind and do that. He accepted the boy’s decision.

You see, it’s alien to Christ’s life and law of love to force compliance. One cannot and may not try to force sanctity or even basic justice on another. Why not? Because we are created from the beginning in God’s image and likeness, minds and wills free from coercion, free to make good decisions, but also free to reject the good. God respects our free will and our sometimes weak and confused minds. Only rarely, as in the case of St. Paul going to Damascus, does God intervene to change minds and hearts, and even when He does, He still respects our free choices.

So even thought it is very clear that if we all lived simple lifestyles and collected less stuff, there would be more peace, less violence and a stronger family life and society, God will not act, or help us act, to force folks to live like that. The good end, no matter how wonderful, never justifies an evil means. We must do the hard work of repentance, conversion, study and evangelization if we are to help God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.