Games of Moral Relativism

Last night my husband and I watched a few minutes of the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games. As the commentators spoke of the beauty of the Chinese culture on display, the enthusiasm with which the Chinese people had been supporting the idea of hosting the games, and the change and progress that they had seen in China over the seven years since Beijing was selected to host in 2008, I was sort of getting on board, buying in to the excitement. China was represented by a very tall NBA star and a very small child who had survived the recent earthquake, and I was moved by the humanity of the scene.

At the end of the parade, the head of the Beijing communist party got up to speak, and I sort of woke up to what was really going on. Here in the Free World, we are tuning in to a speech made by the leader of a Communist dictatorship. The current government in China is the embodiment of the culture of death, and our grandfathers who fought against totalitarian regimes would be horrified to see that we are opening up to, and even celebrating, China. This propagandist speech was telling us that the 2008 games were environmentally conscious, and other things meant to improve public opinion of China both at home and abroad.

This is a country where people live without the basic rights that we believe, as a nation, the Creator has granted each of us. This is a country that lacks freedom of the press, freedom to practice religion. This is a country that puts conditions on families and where the government routinely comes into peoples homes and drags them to clinics for forced abortions. Dissident monks are jailed and tortured. These are only the things we know about.

I celebrate the goodwill of the Olympic spirit and I truly believe that learning more about other cultures is an important part of building the culture of love, but I worry that in this case we are adopting what has become the disturbing theme of modern moral relativism, a don’t ask, don’t tell policy that allows us to feel comfortable having relationships with people who are seriously in error with out naming those errors. Janet Smith made the analogy of a frog being boiled slowly. His body temperature adjusts to that of the water in the pot as it warms so that he never struggles, he does not notice that his environment is slowly changing until it is too late. As my favorite bumper sticker has it, if you are not completely appalled, you haven’t been paying attention.