Conscience is often used as a weapon to impose our will on others. Even Christians can be tempted to do this in the name of being Biblical. But this isn’t Christian.
The way this happens sounds something like this: “I believe something should be done a certain way, so you have to do it my way.”
Or perhaps, it may come from a professing Christian, and sound like this: “We’re supposed to love our neighbors. And I think to love your neighbors you have to do what I want, or you’re disobeying God.”
This is exactly what the Left did constantly during COVID in an attempt to deal damage to the church during COVID. How many times did we hear that it was loving our neighbors to get the shot? How many times did we hear that it was loving our neighbors to close our churches?
We ought to stop worshipping God because God would want us to. Right.
The sad thing is, this was a very effective tactic against most believers in America. It worked. Churches really did close. People really were pressured into getting vaccinated against their consciences.
I think the reason it was so effective is because most Christians sincerely want to love their neighbors. And when their neighbors tell pressure them into doing something for them because they say it’s the loving thing to do, the Christian wants to err on the side of love.
However, it turns out that we get manipulated if we allow this to happen without discernment.
Of course we have to love our neighbors. But loving our neighbors is absolutely not limited to the consciences of our enemies. Loving our neighbors needs to be done according to Scripture and OUR conscience. Not the conscience of others.
Conservatives Are Guilty Too
In a recent particularly dumb debate that I detailed in this podcast, Christians (almost exclusively conservative) on the internet were claiming that scarves are effeminate, and are therefore immoral for men to wear and are a sign of bad theology.
The twitter comments are as stupid as they sound. I don’t recommend looking it up, but if you enjoy getting depressed, you are entirely in your Christian liberty to do so.
Of course, men being effeminate is wrong. No Bible-believing Christian disagrees with that.
But to define exactly which articles of clothing are effeminate or not goes a bit far. God didn’t say “Thou shalt not wear long cloths around thine neck. It is an abomination.”
If God didn’t draw a line there, we shouldn’t either.
When we, entirely outside of the bounds of Scripture, attempt to bind peoples’ consciences to believe that obedience to God means doing exactly what we want, we’re guilty of exactly the same kind of behavior that forced churches to close and pressured people into getting vaccines they never wanted.
Obeying God does not mean obeying you. Obeying God doesn’t mean obeying clear Scripture and your own conscience. We know this because Scripture actually tells us to obey it, and also to obey our consciences. Scripture doesn’t say that we should obey a random group of hot heads who want to take morality into their own hands, if they’re liberal or conservative.
So everybody just chill out.
There’s a big difference between a man wearing a scarf (which is entirely Biblically permissible, and culturally valid) and a man wearing makeup, high heels, a flamboyant dress, and twerking in front of children in a public library.
The second man is the one we should spend energy attacking.
We ought to be very careful as conservatives to not do exactly what the Left did as an attempt to destroy us, or else we’ll just destroy ourselves and the Left won’t even have to lift a finger. At least make them work for it.
