By Rollin Grams, Bible and Mission. (Image: Pixabay)
If Western society continues to dig its heels into a post-religious culture, its laws will increasingly be suspect. Society will be less one under law and more one that manipulates law towards political ends…. Most especially, laws will be passed that are actually against nature, such as the hideous law equating heterosexual marriage with same-sex marriage. Indeed, a post-religious culture is an antinatural culture.
We have reached a crisis of law in Western society, one predictable enough in light of the rejection of religion in one way or another. The crisis stems from not having an understanding of what stands over law. Lawmakers and judges often say, ‘We are a nation under the law?’, but what happens when the law itself is under nothing?
This brief essay raises the question, ‘Can Western society actually be a society of good laws once it gives up respectfulness or even reverence for religion and nature/creation?’ The question is not only asked regarding Christianity, although as a question for Western society in the 21st century, it is largely about the recently emerged, post-Christian context. The essay will explore the arguments of Marcus Tullius Cicero, a renowned Roman legislature in the first century BC. He argues that a society’s laws must fit into a wider cultural context that honours the gods and is willing to live according to nature, not against it.
In On the Laws, Cicero argues that wardens of the state (lawmakers and judges) must believe in the gods because laws must be derived from nature, which they created. He says,
But if rights were established by peoples’ orders, if by leading men’s decrees, if by judges’ verdicts, there would be a right to rob, a right to commit adultery, a right to substitute false wills if those things were approved by the votes or resolutions of a multitude. But if there is such power in the opinions and orders of the foolish that the nature of things is changed by their votes, why don’t they establish that bad and ruinous things should be held to be good and salutary things? Or if law can make right out of wrong, can’t the same law make good out of bad? But we can divide good law from bad by no other standard than that of nature (On the Laws I.43-44).[1]
Cicero’s view that civil laws must be based on natural law established by the gods follows the earlier argument by Plato along the same lines (Laws 10.885-897): the argument was well-established over the centuries. In On the Laws, Cicero defines good law as prudence found in the order of nature: