Deliver Us from Evil

Justice Demands an Assessment of Injustice

by Anthony Esolen

Fiat justitia, ruat caelum: Let there be justice, and let the heavens fall.

"In the course of justice," Shakespeare reminds us, "none of us should see salvation." True enough. "As you from crimes would pardoned be," says Prospero in his final words, "Let your indulgence set me free." Good for persons. Good for persons, not necessarily for nations.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his famous letter from Birmingham Jail to his fellow Christian pastors, he appealed to their faith, their reason, and the angels of their better nature. He desired that the United States finally live up to the promise of her belief in the equality of all persons before the law, and their equality in dignity as conferred upon them by their Creator. He was appealing to a good nation that had permitted great evil.

At this point in the moral decline of our nation, are we any longer in King's position? Can we appeal to a good nation marred by evil deeds? While the nation includes many citizens seeking justice and doing good, in its legislation and court rulings, we discern what can only be called great evil deliberately committed by the state. Our nation's evil still may be masked at times by good deeds and by the residue of what the nation once was and is no longer.

This is a dreadful judgment to make. It is compelling, however, if we acknowledge, alas, that a Reverend King today could not appeal to faith, reason, or even our better nature. Faith subsists now under sufferance; reason is traduced as a tool fashioned by those in power to keep them so; nature is denied or despised or violated at every pass; and as for "better," the judgment it implies falls under the egalitarian ban.

In the matters of abortion, protecting the innocence of children, the very definition of marriage, and those laws and customs that promote and protect the natural family, Christians have on their side not only the word of God, but ordinary biology, anthropology readily observable by people of ordinary intelligence and no advanced education, logic, moral axioms common to every human civilization, and the thought of men of letters of the West for more than two thousand years.

This rich deposit of truth and wisdom all seems to count for nothing. You cannot use reason to defeat people who deny what reason is. You cannot remind people of the wisdom of the past when they neither know the past nor care to know. You cannot cite authority when your opponent's principle is that of the serpent: "You shall be as gods." You cannot appeal to nature to reach the soul of someone committed to perversion. You cannot show the beauty of male and female to people of ressentiment who desire that the family should sicken and die.

You cannot praise, with tears, the beauty of a vulnerable human child to people who place gain above goodness and so make their children pass through the fire to Moloch. It does not work. Church bells toll believers to prayer, but devils to the gnashing of teeth—and stratagems and spoils. Devils are loose in the land. I am not speaking about bad people, whereof we will always have plenty. My sins are enough to trouble me till my death. I am speaking about the real item, devils, and their malign possession of a nation's soul.

The Fruits of a Radical Ideology

Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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