A wave of social agenda is sweeping our nation state and it is beginning to feel like a tidal wave that is sucking our best values in the undertow and consuming untold scores of us in its wake. Although launched as a volley of single-issue tremors, the wave has the force of the culmination and its clean sweep is scouring our diversity into nonexistence.
The bitter irony is that this powerful unleashing of government is embraced as an antidote to big government.
When governments enact laws that penalize the offering of aid to the vulnerable, prohibit health insurance carriers from covering medical services, define who can (and cannot) be legally married, and even executes its own, it seems to me that government has become too big.
Yet the lament about big government is not in reference to these mammoth intrusions in our lives. Big government is code language for tax-supported services. The very same voting bloc that eschews “big government” in reference to economic policy ironically champions the government role in regulating our lives. Quite frankly I find the level of government ‘interest’ in my life to be frightening and the antithesis of the liberty to which I believed our nation aspired.
To be sure there are important moral questions. Whether and how to welcome the stranger is fundamentally a spiritual concern, hospitality. While our national immigration policies may grant or deny any number of rights and privileges, how we offer hospitality to the stranger before us speaks to the heart of our faith. Likewise there are important moral questions in when and how life begins and ends, what covenants we will share and with whom, and how we will care for those most vulnerable in our midst. The prophets are filled with concern for nations who allow their vulnerable to suffer.
What we are seeing is a wave of morality legislation, an attempt to codify moral conduct. Even were it a moral code that reflected my own, I would question both the inherent fairness and the potential efficacy of the imposition. Legislated morality is the slippery slope to a toxic cesspool.
Prohibition is a good case study. The groups that organized the effort and pushed forward the social agenda believed that by legislating this plank of the moral code, namely the drinking of distilled beverages, we could protect women from abusive husbands. True story. The temperance movement was prompted by women who were sick of drunken men beating them, their sisters, their mothers and their daughters. Together with their church families, a bold social agenda was codified.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. Following the 18th amendment we saw the rise of moonshine, Speak Easies, and rum running. Liquor still flowed in America, in some areas quite unabated; what changed was the addition of a criminal element to what had previously been a family problem. What we can learn from history, if we care to, is that morality cannot be legislated. Adherence to a moral compass must come from within not from external sources.
In Thomas gospel, Jesus is remembered as claiming that we will find within us all that we need, but that if we deny it, that same truth will be our undoing. As I watch the wave destroying our nation state, I cannot help but recognize the sharp edge of the truth.
And here is where faith becomes real. Do we believe that we are created, each of us, with such a compass? 
Each as unique as the creation itself, but every one has one. I do not need yours, I need to hear my own; likewise I respect that you do not need mine, and I will stand with you as you find your own. With such believing, we can stop the insane, ineffective, and hurtful legislative onslaught.
I believe. Do you?