We must be judgemental

Dr Charlton has written perceptively on this subject before:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/christians-must-exercise-discernment.html

Christians must be judgemental. We must make judgements about the goodness and honesty of people, places, and situations.

Steve Skojec recently wrote a long article about the dangerous state of the Church, and how it got that way: http://blog.steveskojec.com/2014/03/28/something-wicked/

The chief lesson I take away from it is that Christians must be judgemental. We’ve been taught so much nonsense about how wicked it is to judge others; and though we may know that a lot of it is nonsense, we’ve still internalized the instinct to feel bad when we judge people—and to avoid doing it. Perhaps most of all, we try to avoid judging people in positions of authority in the Church. Pushed by our scruples to ‘be charitable’ or ‘give the benefit of the doubt’, we give second chances, we postpone judgement, we wait as long as possible before we say ‘this man is not to be trusted’ or ‘this man has bad intentions’—long past the time when we’ve had every reason to make this conclusion.  

This is a bad habit. We have the tools to form judgements about other people’s character—use them! The neglect of them is simply the decision to willfully put yourself in harm’s way. Or at least, to do nothing to protect yourself or others.

If you have a family, the responsibility is even greater. Fathers of families, our job is to guard our wife and children. That means knowing the evil in the world, and spotting the bad men in advance. It means training your spidey sense to detect dangerous places, people, situations. When you walk with your family through a bad part of town, don’t you go on alert? Start attending to your surroundings, pricking up your senses, forming snap judgements about the people who approach you? Don’t you take up a posture of guard over your wife and children?

Well, we live in a very bad part of town. The West has become a dangerous, ugly, drug-ridden neighbourhood. The West is a crack house full of addicts, and addicts are dangerous.

We cannot be on alert all the time—but we should let our guard down with people whom we have come to know and judged to be trustworthy. And these groups will necessarily be small. Families, small groups of trusted friends, perhaps a circle of families; these will tend to be the limit on where we can really let our guard down, because these are the people we can know well enough.

The situation within the Church is especially dangerous. We know, as Skojec pointed out, that communists and other wicked men have deliberately infiltrated the Church in order to destroy her. Yet within the Church is where we are most invited to let our guard down. And rightly—that is the torturous paradox for Christians today—we ought to be receptive and docile, like little children, to what we receive in Church, to what our Apostles teach. But knowing what we know, we also must be wise as serpents. St Paul said (Galatians 1:8): “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.” There are men within the Church, and not a small number—priests, bishops, cardinals—who are preaching another gospel. We cannot afford to take what they say innocently. We cannot go on imputing good intentions and trying to be charitable when once they reveal themselves as false Apostles, preaching another gospel.

We know also about uglier things, within the Church and without—sexual abuse by family, priests, coaches, teachers. Grooming of children by perverts. Things are bad enough already, and as pornography addiction becomes nearly universal among men, this will certainly get worse. Since one cannot simply avoid everyone, nor avoid (one day) leaving one’s children alone with others, one must exercise judgement about this, too. And this is where one needs very sharp senses and a real willingness to jump to conclusions in the absence of certainty. You can spot the addicts—but you must be willing to listen to your sensations, to your wife’s sensations. Do not try to suppress those feelings that tell you ‘there’s something up with this man’ ‘this man is a liar,’ out of scruples or a guilty conscience. Those are your warning signals, and they may be the only warning you get.

Dare to judge. Jump to conclusions. “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” We’ve been working on the harmless for a long time—better get to work on the wise.