“Drunk on Their Own Virtue”

Progressives have become prone to replacing the moral vacuum created by the departure of religion and civic allegiance with politics. They have become drunk on righteousness, high on their own ideological supply. They have assigned moral value to their political ideals, which can best be summarized as “my beliefs make me a good person and all behavior in pursuit of those beliefs is justified.”

This is nothing new, of course.  Noonan cites the wielders of the guillotine during the French Revolution:

The joyful exaltations of Too Online leftists, delighted by the violence and assured in the sanctity of their beliefs, invoke the Jacobins’ cheers that drowned the Place de la Révolution at each thump of the French guillotine. A mortified Englishman observed, “When the knife has done its work, they cry out, ‘Vive la République!’ as if some great victory had been won.”. . .

“Terror,” lectured Maximilien Robespierre after sending 1,300 people to the guillotine in a month, “is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”

They are all, Noonan says, “drunk on their own virtue.”

But progressives and left-wing revolutionaries are not the only ones guilty of this.  Conservatives sometimes slip into this mindset.  So do Christians.

This happens not just in the dramatic cases of killing people and approving of murder.  It is even more common in our everyday relationships, our virtue signaling, and our constant self-justifications.  Self-justification can indeed lead to our approval of or participation in horrendous crimes, but it more normally leads to petty rationalizations and stupid arguments with people we care about.

The antidote to self-justification is, of course, justification by grace through faith in Christ and His atonement.  That kind of justification begins by acknowledging ourselves as lost and desperate sinners.  Thus broken by the law, we can cling to the gospel, that Christ bore our sin and the sin of our adversaries, covering them with His blood.

In his book  Living by Faith , Oswald Bayer writes about our constant habit of self-justification.  From a post I wrote ten years ago on that book:

Bayer begins by showing that the concept of “justification” is not an arcane theological concept.  Rather, it’s something we are preoccupied with all the time.  We are always engaged in trying to justify ourselves.  We are always maintaining that we are right, particularly when other people say that we are wrong.  At work, in our casual conversations, in our relationships with others, we are always defending ourselves, making excuses, scoring points, and seeking approval. . . .

Underlying the need to be justified, Bayer says, is our yearning for approval, for affirmation, for thinking that our existence matters in some positive way, for our need to think that our life is worthwhile.

That we all are engaged in justifying ourselves is an understandable, normal facet of being human.  Of course, we are not always right and are often wrong–though we continue to justify ourselves–creating all kinds of inner turmoil.  The problem, though, is that we are trying to justify ourselves.

. . . .What if, instead of having to justify ourselves, we are justified by Christ?  What if Christ gives us approval, affirmation, assurance that our existence matters, that our life is worthwhile?

The grace of God–in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ–forgives our wrongdoing and makes us “right.”  Thus,  on the deepest level, we do not have to justify ourselves because Christ has justified us.  Believing in His Word of justification is faith.  And living in that realization is what it means to live by faith.

Illustration:  The Execution of Robespierre (1794) via Picryl, Public Domain