A Matter of Conscience

I don’t know if any of you are Agatha Christie fans; she was a prolific British mystery writer from the 1920s through the 1970s. Her novels and short stories almost always involved a murder that was eventually solved by the likes of Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, and others. Her psychology of murder was that it was almost always carefully calculated/premeditated and would not be committed unless the murderer was confident that there was a strong-enough reason for it (and that s/he could get away with it). Thus, the murder was never random but was targeted at a specific individual that the murderer knew.

In 1994, John MacArthur wrote The Vanishing Conscience. His thesis was that the conscience was something that needed to be trained from a young age. If it wasn’t, then kids would grow up with a poorly-functioning conscience that might essentially become non-functioning. One of the Bible verses he referred to was 1 Timothy 4:2, which refers to “hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.” Ephesians 4:18 is a related verse: “They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.” These verses describe how over time, a conscience can become “seared,” a very descriptive word, or how a person’s heart can become hardened. This brings to mind Pharaoh in the book of Exodus, whose heart was hardened against the Hebrews.

In his book, MacArthur gave examples of teens and young adults whose actions indicated seared consciences. Jumping ahead thirty years to the present, unprovoked assaults and murders of strangers have escalated, in sharp contrast to Agatha Christie’s depictions of murder. One of the more shocking murders was by two Las Vegas joy-riding teens who deliberately ran over and killed a bicyclist in August of last year. On the video, you can hear one of them say, “Ready?” while his partner in crime says, “Yeah, hit his ass.” The two can also be heard laughing. These same two teens also hit at least two others in the same fashion. Largely because of their stupidity in recording and posting the video, they were caught and now, thankfully, face multiple charges. These two are examples of teens who grew up without trained consciences. I’m not saying they are hopelessly lost, but they are literally on the highway to hell.

All of the preceding came to mind recently when my daughter told my wife and me that one of her elderly housemates had asked her to order cigarette filters for her on Amazon. The smoking (only outside, thankfully) housemate said that she hadn’t been able to find filters in our city. My daughter didn’t want to order them for her because it would violate her conscience; she didn’t think that people should smoke. Interestingly, another housemate said that he would have been “OK” with buying the filters for her; his reasoning was that the filters would lessen the effect of the carcinogens in the smoke. Unfortunately, however, he never shops online, either; furthermore, he doesn’t drive. My wife called a smoke shop in our city, and they do indeed sell cigarette filters, so the smoker now knows where to buy them.

This matter of conscience comes up more often than one might think. One area for churches is communion; some serve grape juice rather than wine because of the concern for any present or former alcoholics who may partake. There is a Bible passage related to this: 1 Corinthians 8. The Apostle Paul refers to eating food that had been sacrificed to idols, saying that the Corinthians had the freedom to do this; however, he says that for the sake of the weaker brother or sister, they should not eat such food because then the weaker one may be emboldened to eat such food. Verses 11-13 tell us, “So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.” Notice the reference to “conscience.” I am not saying that every church should serve grape juice, but simply that if it is known that someone in the congregation has had a problem with alcohol, then it is right for the church to use juice.

Matters of conscience sometimes come up unexpectedly. For example, a few months ago, several of the sisters at our church organized a birthday party for one of them. They had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant which was going to include belly-dancing later in the evening. Knowing that our daughter would be offended by this, my wife first talked to her about it ahead of time, explaining that if she didn’t think she could handle it, then she couldn’t go. She really wanted to go, so my wife told her just to not look at the belly-dancers. In the end, our daughter was able to tolerate it by not focusing on the dancing.

Another area where this matter of conscience comes up regularly is media, whether it’s movies, TV shows, video games, music, or books. When our kids were young, they watched a wonderful show called The Magic School Bus, which engaged kids with humor and animation as it taught them science. We knew a godly family whose mother would not let her kids watch that show because of the word “magic.” Similarly, she would not read, or let her kids read, C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe because of the witch and her magic. In contrast, over a period of a couple years, my wife read all seven of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia to our kids as bedtime stories; both our son and our daughter were captivated in the same way that my wife and I had been. While we felt sad that our friend’s kids would not grow up with The Magic School Bus and the Chronicles of Narnia, she was a godly mother, and you could see it in her kids.

A couple weeks ago, I heard a few minutes of James Dobson interviewing a woman writer and speaker; I didn’t recognize the name and don’t remember it, but one thing she mentioned in the context of sexuality is that sometimes wives enjoy watching “chick flicks” with their husbands. However, she cautioned that if such a movie shows nudity and sexuality, it may very well affect the husband in a way that it may not affect the wife. I can attest to this. If my wife and I are planning to watch a romantic comedy, I can easily look it up online and find out what is going to be portrayed. If it seems like it’s going to show more than I can handle, then I know to avoid it. On the other hand, when it comes to violence, I have a higher tolerance for it than my wife; again, if it’s something we’re planning to watch together, we can look it up online and make our decision. And sometimes I just watch something alone.

Twenty years ago, The Passion of the Christ was released. Our pastor at that time encouraged all adults and even teens to see it. One of my friends took his teen son to see it in a movie theater and regretted it; his son looked down for much of the movie and asked, “When is it going to be over?” Then later, when we found out that our son’s youth leader had shown a few minutes of it at church, we spoke with the youth leader about it, asking him to please not show anything so graphic again. We hadn’t seen it yet, but we knew enough about it that we didn’t want our teen son to watch it. Several years later, my wife and I decided to watch it; I have never seen such a brutal, graphic portrayal of violence, either before or since. I understand that there are some who have seen it and have benefited from it in terms of understanding what Jesus went through for us; however, for me, it was too much.

The Bible doesn’t always give us clear-cut answers to questions and issues. This is certainly true when it comes to things like wine, books, music, movies/shows/video games, and other entertainment (including belly-dancing!). Different Christians have different levels of what they can handle. The principle that my family has adopted is this: Do not violate your own conscience or coerce someone else to violate theirs. When Christians allow their own consciences to be violated or coerce others to do something which would violate theirs, we are on a dangerous path. Thanks be to God, however, if we do violate conscience, then when we repent, there is always our Lord’s forgiveness!