Human Respect and Political Correctness

In the Gospel of Luke, we read:

[Luke 6:22] Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.
[Luke 6:23] Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.

Our Lord gives special emphasis here to those who suffer for the sake of the Gospel. In this, their suffering is closely allied to that which Our Lord had to endure, especially from His contemporary co-religionists.

He condemns the opposite situation when He states:

[Luke 6:26] Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.

Here Our Lord is condemning what we might call the "idol of human respect", where persons who should be witnessing to the truth of the Gospel, are inhibited from doing so through attaching a greater importance to what men think of them than to what God thinks of them.

In our own time, one of the forms that human respect has taken is that insidious form which we have labeled "political correctness". There are many contemporary situations in which being politically correct is equivalent to betraying the truth of the Gospel.

In George Orwell's "1984", we encounter slogans in its fictional totalitarian society, such as: "war is peace" and "hate is love". In our contemporary secular culture we repeatedly encounter the equivalent of the slogan "vice is virtue". Vice is not virtue; vice is vice. The Latin equivalent is vitia, from which we have the English word "vitiate", which connotes dissipation and the misuse of a natural faculty.

In many parts of the Western world, to oppose vice masquerading as virtue is not only not politically correct, it has become a prosecutable crime. Moreover, movements are afoot to ban the Bible itself, because it contains putative "hate speech".

The time is rapidly approaching, and to a significant extent is upon us now, where we must be prepared to witness to the truth of Jesus Christ in a world that is far more hostile to that truth than was the world in which the apostles evangelized and suffered for the faith. To put it more plainly, we must be prepared to witness to that truth even though to do so will put us in peril, even grave peril.

Most of us have enjoyed the great God-given blessings of living in a free country. In recent years, our first-amendment freedoms of speech and of religion have been undergoing a steady erosion. The question each of us must ask now, is "Am I ready to stand up for my faith--to witness to its truth even though it involve great personal cost?"

When we contemplate the potential dangers that will be, and to an extent are now, involved in witnessing to the truth of the Gospel, we must always keep Our Lord's attitude in mind, whereby we hate the sin, but love the sinner. Our proper and courageous witnessing to truth can, and I believe almost certainly will, be the occasion of salvation for many who would otherwise be lost.