Why Every Functional Society Needs Fear of God

Commentary From Selwyn Duke on American Thinker.com (Aug. 8):

To use a twist on an Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen line, millions of people hate what they think Christianity is.  Far fewer people hate what Christianity actually is.

Bringing this to mind, again, is a comment I recently came across from an avowedly "non-religious" mother who was upset that her seven-year-old's Mormon best friend wouldn't stop talking to him about Bible stories and Jesus.  "I don't want him to be religious, honestly," the woman wrote to an advice columnist in April.  "I want him to learn that you should be a good person and do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not because God will punish you if you don't."

This is a common atheist lament, one sometimes expressed even by Christianity's more intellectual critics, such as the late essayist Christopher Hitchens and biologist Richard Dawkins.  Yet it reflects a comic-book understanding of faith.

Here's reality: religious parents want their children to be good people, too (of course!), "and do the right thing because it's the right thing to do."  They know that motivation by love of God is the ideal.  But the wise among them understand something else as well: fear of God is also necessary.

In fact, something corresponding to the love of God/fear of God model is reflected where many would least expect it: in psychology's prescriptions.  Famed psychologist Erik Erikson, by way of his well known "Stages of Psychosocial Development," informed that when a child is in a certain early developmental stage, he understands that something is wrong only if he gets punished for it.

This reality may disturb the moderns who'd rather romanticize matters.  Yet it's akin to how very young children can't understand that an amount of liquid remains the same despite being poured from one size and shape container into one with different dimensions.  Certain things are still beyond their immature minds — moral understanding is one of them.

For this reason, the parent/child model must in a way reflect the God/child of God model in that a youngster should ideally love his parents but also fear that he'll endure their wrath should he misbehave.  For what else will keep him in line and prevent him from hurting himself and others until he's old enough to "do the right thing because it's the right thing to do"?  Moderns' failure to accept this reality is one reason today's parenting is often so poor and too many children are woefully uncivilized.

But here's the point: what do you do with people who, morally stunted and never rising out of those early developmental psychosocial stages, never learn to "do the right thing because it's the right thing to do" and only respond to fear of consequences?  Do you with resignation just accept that they'll do wrong? [read more]