Promoting the politically correct means censoring the politically incorrect.
STATES MUST SERVE INDIVIDUALS. New laws in California and New Jersey now require the teaching of LGBT history. But they actually go counter to history. American history shows the gradual expansion of rights for all, as opposed to special rights for a tiny minority. In 1791, the first expansion occurred when the US Congress ratified the Bill of Rights.
A later expansion of rights occurred in the late 1800s. During that era, a tiny minority of individual robber barons were monopolizing business. Not only that, they were dominating politics, and abusing workers. Yet an opposite trend gained momentum at the same time. Specifically, the new doctrine of communism sought to subordinate all individuals to the state.
In 1891, 100 years after the Bill of Rights, Pope Leo XIII and other Catholic thinkers articulated a middle course between monopolistic capitalism and statist communism. They called it the principle of subsidiarity, which many evangelicals now also support. This principle subordinates the state to smaller groups. Also, it subordinates smaller groups to the individual. It contravened the medieval Catholic doctrine of making states, groups and individuals subordinate to the Church.
Choice vs. force
In subsidiarity, the state and other social groups serve to empower the individual to participate as best he can in the groups of his choice. This principle serves the gospel. It frees the individual to choose his Lord, his church and his role in the church. A participatory democracy guaranteeing individual rights is the best form of government for the spread of the gospel in a fallen world. And also for the growth of Christ’s church.
Likewise, in subsidiarity the state empowers churches and other social groups to participate as best they can in national life. The state governs best that governs least. “[A] central authority,” says Kenneth Grasso in Caesar’s Coin Revisited, “should have only a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level” by social groups.
De Tocqueville repeatedly stressed the importance of such groups in Democracy in America. He saw such social groups protecting the individual from the state’s tendency toward centralization and uniformity.
But in our time, the family, the church and other social groups are suffering breakdown. Statism is increasing again. It is forcing uniformity in LGBT indoctrination against the earnest protests of family and church advocates.
Therefore we must do all we can to bolster these institutions. Because the weaker the family and church, the more exposed the individual becomes to the manipulation of an antichrist state. And the less free we are to serve Christ and His church.
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