“On the Wrong Side of History?”

“These forces tell us that our defeat in the causes of marriage and human life is inevitable. They warn us that we are on the wrong side of history. They insist that we will be judged by future generations the  way we today judge those who championed racial injustice in the Jim Crow south. But history does not have sides. It is an impersonal and contingent sequence of events, events that are determined in decisive ways by human deliberation, judgment, choice, and action. The future of marriage and of countless human lives can and will be determined by our judgments and choices, our willingness or unwillingness to bear faithful witness, our acts of courage or cowardice. Nor is history, or future generations, a judge invested with god-like powers to decide, much less dictate, who was right and who was wrong. The idea of a judgment of history is secularism’s vain, meaningless, hopeless, and pathetic attempt to devise a substitute for what the great Abrahamic traditions of faith know is the final judgment of Almighty God. History is not God. God is God. History is not our judge. God is our judge.  One day we will give an account of all we have done and failed to do. Let no one suppose that we will make this accounting to some impersonal sequence of events possessing no more power to judge than a golden calf or a carved and painted totem pole. It is before God, the God of truth, the Lord of history, that we will stand. And as we tremble in His presence it will be no use for any of us to claim that we did everything in our power to put ourselves on the right side of history.”

Robert P. George (M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School; J.D., Harvard Law School; D. Phil., University of Oxford), McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University, in a 2014 address to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C., entitled “Am I Ashamed of the Gospel?”

I found this quotation in an excellent online essay entitled “The Disingenuous Sophistries of the New Mormon Dissidents.”

Not only do I like the essay, but I’m happy at the fact that it was written by a man who served as a missionary in German-speaking Switzerland (quite a while after I did, but still . . . ), and that it features an extended discussion of his mission president, my one-time dean and long-time friend, the late Richard Cracroft (on whom I’ve blogged here and here).