Last week, President Joe Biden declared that “too much of what’s happening … today is not normal.” His rhetoric was aimed at “MAGA Republicans.” While the January 6th insurrection was criminal and the former president’s erratic and dishonest behavior has certainly been highly inappropriate and unusual, can the sitting president really claim to stand for what is normal? After all, how do we define “normal?” The dictionary definition of normal reads as follows: conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. To what standard are we referring?
Let us explore whether normality, a standard of societal behavior, can be based on time or legality. Some believe in progress toward perfection, that as time passes, we learn from our mistakes, improve, and create better societies. For instance, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 -1804) argued that human psychology and the natural environment have driven the human race forward. Without a doubt humankind has progressed technologically and scientifically. But along with that advancement has come the slaughter of human beings on an unprecedented scale and weapons of mass destruction. Sixty million people were killed in World War II, atomic bombs were dropped on civilian populations, and countries invaded for their natural resources. As we discovered more efficient ways to communicate, as the internet came into use for consumers, we simultaneously witnessed a genocide in Rwanda while world powers refused to intervene. These are merely a few examples of numerous international conflicts that point to anything but progress when it comes to the behavior of states and sub-state entities.
On the other hand, there has been progress in the functioning of society: the outlawing of slavery and racial segregation are obvious examples of society moving toward a new and better standard. Slavery was once thought to be “normal” by a vast majority of the United States population; the practice was enshrined in law. It must be explicitly noted that something being legal does not by definition make it moral. Nevertheless, I think I have demonstrated in a few sentences that passage of time does not necessarily translate into progress. Time can bring human progress, but it can also result in the degradation of society. Democracies can crumble. Bloody wars waged by technologically advanced nations can occur, almost always under the guise of altruistic rationales. Preventable epidemics of violence such as recurring mass shootings can plague a society due to greed of special interests and beholden policymakers. Societies can become polluted environmentally, politically, and morally.
How about law as a standard to conduct human affairs? In the 19th Century, legal positivism sought to remove the ability to judge law with an external standard based on natural law. It aimed to completely separate the theological from legal structures, claiming that the source of justice was not God but human beings within a society. In other words, justice is whatever people decided it to be, within a particular society. At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi war criminals used this line of argumentation to defend their atrocities, claiming that within their legal code Jews were considered inferior and therefore dehumanized, and ultimately worthy of mass extermination. With legal positivism, external judgements on the morality or immorality of national laws were impossible; positivists claimed that law was culturally specific; therefore, no coherent proclamations on right or wrong, normal or abnormal were possible. This pitfall of legal positivism led to an expanded role of international and human rights law in the aftermath of World War II. Universal truths had to exist– base standards that all legal systems ought to follow.
If time or law cannot confer normality on a practice or a manifestation of beliefs, then what standard are we pointing to when we seek “normality?”
To be normal is to conform to a standard. But the question is what is the standard? Modern history is filled with laws that have later been thought to be evil, barbaric, or at the very least highly ignorant. Is normality then subjective? It was “normal,” within Germany’s Third Reich, for Nazis to kill Jews and for the antebellum South to enslave black people; now it’s anything but normal. Human beings changed their minds about those practices or had their minds changed for them through violent conflicts. Indeed, changes to previously normalized practices have occurred throughout human history, no less throughout modern legal history; how then can anyone point to a current practice protected or prohibited by national laws and say that it’s normal? What’s normal today may very well be abnormal tomorrow. National laws unto themselves do not provide a stable, let alone an objective standard on which to say anything is ‘normal.” Is it normal for kindergartners to be taught about “gender identity” and that individuals can choose to change their sex from male to female or vice versa based on their personal preference? Is it normal for two men or two women to marry each other despite it being biologically impossible for those couples to produce children together? Is it normal that the internet is flooded with pornography available at the click of a button? With up to 90% or more of 12-18 year olds having access to the internet, studies have shown that the average age when first exposed to pornography is now 11-12 and 93 % of boys and 62% of girls are exposed to internet pornography before the age of 18. Is it normal for the United States and Europe to wage a proxy war in Ukraine, sending billions of dollars in weapons, with little to no oversight, while people sleep on the streets of their own cities? Western countries continue to fuel a war that they in fact instigated through a coup in 2014 and an eight-year conflict that killed thousands of people in the Donbass. And is it normal that the vast majority of American and European citizens are unaware of the truth because their media fails to properly inform them while simultaneously accusing their adversaries and enemies of propaganda?
If one wants to discover a universal standard that is applicable to human beings, one must look to what transcends time and human beings. To truly discover a universal standard, it is necessary to seek guidance from a power that transcends humanity but at the same time enters into humanity to show us how to conduct our affairs. That standard of behavior has indeed been revealed to us. We have been instructed that our lives are of great value, each and every one of us, because we have been made in the image of God. We have great worth because we have been called to fellowship with God irrespective of our nationality, ethnicity, gender, social status, or any other category. The word of God has been revealed to us in the New Testament which is by far the most reliable ancient manuscript in our world with over 5,800 complete or fragmented copies in Greek (2.6 million pages of biblical text) as well as thousands of copies in other languages such as Latin, Syrian, Coptic, and Armenian. These manuscripts recorded how God entered our world and showed us the way to live through his son Jesus of Nazareth: a man who walked the earth doing good, performing miracles, and teaching. At the age of 33, he was brutally executed and, after three days, rose from the dead, an event witnessed by over 500 people at one time (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Today, there are over two billion Christians in the world. If even half of those Christians upheld the Gospel message given to the world by the son of God, societies would change for the better all over the world.
Does that mean one runs out to condemn and judge others or seek a theocracy? No, that is not the Gospel message. However, what it does call for is tolerance as well as loving, compassionate intolerance. In other words, to love the sinner but hate the sin. It calls for truth-telling while honoring the dignity inherent to all human beings. We have a standard, a path to what is expected of us as human beings. We know what is ‘normal” in the eyes of God, our creator, and our savior Christ Jesus. That standard does not include war making, economic exploitation, same-sex marriage, “gender identity” discussions with kindergartners, pornography, fornication (which is widely promoted on television and movies), abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, the destruction of the environment, and an egocentric mentality. Western countries in particular have allowed, under the guise of “freedom,” the act of sexual intercourse– designed for the purpose of procreation and loving intimacy between a man (a biological male) and his wife (a biological female), to be widely transformed into something dirty and obscene. Hip hop lyrics on mainstream radio stations routinely play music that would be a scandal in generations past, and movies and television programming routinely glorify animalistic promiscuity.
Therefore, President Biden was correct that “too much of what’s happening…today is not normal.” But it’s not simply because of “MAGA Republicans” but rather because societies, led by Western hubris, have strayed from God’s normal, the only real standard that exists.