No Neutral Ground

When Truth is Under Siege, It’s Time to Plant Your Flag

In the 16th century, Pope Clement VII refused to grant an annulment to the marriage between England’s King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. In response, Henry rejected the authority of the pope and had himself declared “Supreme Head of the Church of England.”

When Henry required all royal officials and church clergy to affirm his headship by signing the Oath of Supremacy, his chancellor, Sir Thomas More, resigned. The 1966 film A Man for All Seasons vividly depicts the ordeal More endured as a result. His conscience prevented him from endorsing King Henry’s takeover of the church, but, knowing that open opposition to the king would be fatal, More did not state a reason for his resignation. He never spoke either for or against Henry’s takeover, hoping silence would grant him sufficient legal protection.

Because More was well-known as a man of impeccable integrity, his silence rang loudly throughout the realm. Craving the one endorsement that would lend an air of legitimacy to his takeover, Henry refused to accept More’s silence as final. He ordered his ministers to harass More with endless interrogations, pressuring him either to sign the oath or stumble into self-incrimination. But More consistently declined to sign and adroitly sidestepped their verbal traps.

The Wisdom & Dangers of Silence

Ecclesiastes chapter three tells us there is “a time to keep silence and a time to speak.” Silence may sometimes be the way of wisdom; a given issue may not be sufficiently important to warrant conflict. Or, when an issue inflames irrational hysteria or rage, arguing can be like spitting into the wind. In such cases, silence may be a way of embracing Jesus’s warning not to cast pearls before swine; pressing unwelcome truth may incite volatile retaliation that merely escalates conflict without advancing acceptance of the truth.

Jesus illustrated this principle when his enemies tried to trap him with a loaded question about whether the Jews should pay taxes to Caesar. To answer yes would inflame the Jews, and to answer no would inflame their Roman overlords. With his brilliant reply, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” Jesus gave his critics an irrefutable answer which addressed a larger principle while also preserving silence on their gotcha question. His silence on the specific question of paying taxes to Caesar defused the volatile potential for unprofitable conflict on a controversy not central to his mission.

Sometimes, however, an issue may be of such magnitude that silence is not an option. Silence is not morally acceptable when an injustice or abuse needs to be challenged. Increasingly today, silence is not an option for another reason. Debate over hot-button issues has generated a toxic environment much like that which ensnared Sir Thomas More. If you don’t agree with today’s secularists on the racial, sexual, and social justice issues dear to them, they may come after you. Neutrality is not allowed. To many, silence is construed as opposition. Celebrities have been excoriated for failure to support ideologies such as Critical Race Theory, climate change, and transgenderism though they never voiced any opinion, positive or negative.

The Escalating War Against Truth

The targets of the enemies of truth have expanded beyond out-of-step celebrities. We ordinary citizens in everyday vocations can now find ourselves in the woke culture’s crosshairs. One example is Peter Vlaming. Vlaming was a popular French teacher in a Virginia high school when a female student announced that she identified as a boy. School policy required teachers to accommodate such declarations. Mr. Vlaming, a committed Christian, believes that one’s sex is an unalterable biological reality. He also believes in speaking truth and that referring to a female using masculine pronouns would signal complicity with a lie.

Mr. Vlaming managed to comply technically with school policy by adopting a strategy similar to that of Thomas More. He avoided pronouns altogether and referred to the student only by her name, even when pronouns would be more natural. But that was not enough for school officials. They ordered him to stop avoiding male pronouns when referring to the student. Vlaming refused, and the school fired him. He wasn’t fired for what he said but for not saying what in good conscience he could not say. He was fired for his silence.¹

The Unity of Truth

Was this controversy over pronouns a hill worth dying on? Peter Vlaming obviously thought so. He realized this issue was tethered to a larger one involving the nature of truth itself. All truth is unified, and to break with one part of it is to break with the whole.

As depicted in the film, Thomas More’s friends and family were blind to this principle. They urged him to save himself by acquiescing to what they saw as a relatively minor issue so he could live to fight another day over greater issues more hostile to truth. But both More and Vlaming knew that to yield even to a seemingly small lie would mean taking a step away from truth that would weaken their resistance to taking subsequent steps.

In Peter Vlaming’s case, to comply with the gender lie would be to endorse a cultural shift away from reality, a shift that is plunging Western culture into sexual chaos. He faced a decision we all are at risk of facing each day as woke culture encroaches on our freedom to express our convictions. Is any truth too trivial, too low on the scale of values, to merit the risk of laying our neck on the cancel-culture chopping block? It’s easy to say yes. It’s easy to point out that there are larger issues looming over us than the use of gender pronouns. It’s easy to rationalize and ask what harm is there in sparing a confused teenager emotional distress by accommodating her gender preference? Why not yield to her pronoun demands? You can still hold in your mind a private conviction that gender is indelibly binary, that male and female are unchangeable realities. Where is the danger in making such a trivial compromise?

The danger is great. Failure to defend truth in a culture increasingly hostile to it can harm us in at least three ways. First, it can harm our personal integrity. We express who we are in our words and actions. To say or do anything inconsistent with our inner conviction causes our actions to conflict with our inner self; our lives are not integrated. To put it bluntly, we lack integrity. To maintain integrity is to seamlessly integrate one’s conviction with truth and to reflect that conviction in what we say and do. To act or speak in ways inconsistent with one’s belief is to lie, not only to others, but also to ourselves—and to God.

Second, taking that first step in the wrong direction makes it easier to take the second. The film depicts King Henry’s hatchet man, Thomas Cromwell, inducing the ambitious young Richard Rich to finally step over a moral line he’s been tiptoeing toward but has hesitated to cross. Cromwell offers him a lucrative position in exchange for revealing confidential information gleaned from private conversation. After Rich succumbs, Cromwell says, “There, that wasn’t too painful, was it?”

“No,” replies Rich.

“And you’ll find it easier next time,” Cromwell assures him. Sure enough, by taking this first little step away from truth, Rich embarks on a descent into duplicity that eventually leads him to deliver in court the lie that finally convicts the innocent Thomas More to death.

Third, one who glosses over “trivial” truths for the sake of living another day to fight larger battles deceives himself. Failure to defend the “small” truths atrophies the moral muscle needed to defend the larger ones when the need arises. In the 1964 film Man in the Middle, Robert Mitchum plays Lt. Colonel Barney Adams, a military lawyer whose superiors pressure him to conduct his defense of a psychotic man in a way that will ensure the defendant’s conviction for murder. At issue is the U.S. Army’s determination to sacrifice this man, whether guilty or not, for political reasons, in the belief that his execution will facilitate the greater good of shortening the war.

Adams comes to realize that he holds the key not only to an innocent man’s life, but also to a gate that will release a stampede of truth-trampling relativism in the name of beneficial pragmatism. If he chooses not to defend this “less-important” truth because it stands in the way of an objective his superiors view as more important, not only does an innocent man lose his life, Adams himself loses the integrity required to defend truth at all.

The Shrinking Neutral Ground

Like Sir Thomas More, Peter Vlaming, and Lt. Col. Adams, we face a corrosive relativism that can eat away not only our perception of truth but also our personal integrity. In a highly secularized society, where truth is under fire or even deemed nonexistent, no truth is too small to be defended. Truth is that which conforms to reality, and it cannot be divided into categories of small or large, expendable or critical. Reality is a unified whole encompassing everything that is true. It is that to which we must conform our lives, the unmoving rock on which we must plant our flag if we are to mount a defense against the age-old war on truth.

In his novel That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis warns that good and evil are becoming ever more sharply defined and neutral ground is shrinking to nonexistence. When silence can no longer be maintained with integrity, God calls us not to seek neutral ground, but to speak the truth and take the consequences. Near the end of A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More’s daughter urges him to take King Henry’s oath to save his life, saying that in any state where virtue reigned, he would be lauded as a hero. More replies,

If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we see that avarice, anger, pride, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice, and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little, even at the risk of being heroes.

We are called to stand fast now, while we have the freedom to do so. A time is coming when the option to choose a side will be closed forever. At that point every knee shall bow to the eternal, living embodiment of all truth.

Note
1. After five years of legal wrangling, the school board cleared Mr. Vlaming’s firing from his record and agreed to pay $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.