One Can't Have Public Virtue Without Private Virtue

 Selwyn Duke has an article at the American Thinker entitled As a Matter of Fact I DO Care What People Do in Their Bedroom. The title is a shocking statement to the modern ear. One imagines Duke to be some sort of busy body, a Karen. But Duke then clarifies what he means:

As to my meaning, no, I’m not Enid Strict The Church Lady (I don’t look good in a dress and I tend more toward Paul Harvey than Dana Carvey). Nor would I, as emperor, put CCTV cameras in everybody’s home; I’ve no interest in uber-intrusiveness. But I do have a strong interest in preserving civilization — and in restoring it in the first place.

Now, I so boldly made my statement to that woman because, in part, I aimed to strike a tiny blow against the very modernistic social norm of assumed libertinism. But the real problem with the “I don’t care what people do in their bedroom” line is that, translated, it amounts to (whether the person intends this or not):

I don’t care about character.

Or perhaps, “Character doesn’t matter.”

Here we get to the real issue. Christ said that the greatest commandment was to love God with all our hearts and minds. But the second was like it: to love our neighbors as ourselves. But man has a decidedly limited ability to love. With all that I have on my plate now, can I afford to love someone I hardly know? Yet we are called to this, and there is good reason to care, and care deeply, about what others do in private.

The elders among us may remember that the above line was used to justify Bill Clinton’s gutter-rat morals during his 1992 White House run. But “you can’t be one kind of man and another kind of president,” responded his general-election opponent, then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush. Really, though, Bush was just echoing greater thinkers, such as our Founders. To wit:

“Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue], and public virtue is the only foundation of republics,” stated our second president, John Adams.

John Witherspoon, a minister and fellow Declaration of Independence signatory, issued an even sterner warning. “Let a man’s zeal, profession, or even principles as to political measures be what they will,” he said, “if he is without personal integrity and private virtue, as a man he is not to be trusted.”

Yet, we may often be reluctant to advocate for private virtue thinking that our own short comings will likely be thrown back in our face. It probably has or will happen to you, and it is quite humiliating. Yet, as I have quipped to my granddaughter, "don't make my mistakes. Be an original and make your own."

This said, Chastity is just one of the Virtues (out of style though it is); as I illustrated in “Where Have You Gone, George Washington?” there are numerous others. Moreover, there have been individuals who struggled with Chastity but still did great things and even were, in reality, virtuous in other dimensions. Paul of Tarsus might have been one (it has been theorized that the “thorn” in his flesh could’ve been sexual temptation). And Augustine of Hippo certainly was, with his famous supplication, “Lord, make me a saint — but not today!” Yet there’s a profound difference between such men and those unabashedly living, as we euphemistically put it now, “alternative lifestyles” (as if at issue is embracing an organic diet).

This difference is implied in ancient Chinese sage Confucius’s lament, “It is not that I do not know what to do; it is that I do not do what I know.” It’s one thing to value and promote virtue but, owing to weakness, fall into vice.

It’s quite another to value and promote vice.

In Romans 3:23 Paul says that everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Elsewhere Paul in Romans confesses that "For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me." So, despite even Paul's sins and iniquities, yet he provides a profound witness for Jesus as the living God coming to us as a man subject to all our temptations and weaknesses.  The Left has tried to paint Trump as a flawed human being but has failed in that mission because their candidates are also flawed and visibly so.  I think what voters have seen in Trump is his acknowledgement of this nature and yet he advocates for morally right positions both privately and publicly. Because it matters.

Duke closes with this:

We would do well to remember that apathy is not a virtue — and that the future belongs to those who care.

It is often too easy to decide that I just do not care. I have been at this for a long time, and sometimes I feel the weariness of it. Duke reminds me why I must keep on, because Truth matters, because virtue matters, just as He commanded.