People who think they have the moral authority to hit others are dangerous.

And a lot of people seem to think they have the moral authority to hit others.

I witnessed this impulse most recently in a discussion about free speech.

“When the person’s voice is designed to incite violence against a group of people then you can totally tolerate silencing that voice. Protesting his [Milo Yiannopoulos] presence on a college campus is not really very different from protesting KKK from coming onto a college campus. Except Milo hasn’t been designated as a hate group yet, though he probably should be.”

This woman was completely unconcerned by the fact any effort to silence those she perceives as trying to incite violence requires ACTUAL VIOLENCE.

People justify all kinds of actions when they believe they hold the moral high ground. I’ve seen a similar willingness to use violence against those deemed to be “Nazis.”

“Of course it’s OK to hit a Nazi. They’re Nazis!”

When placed on a political stage and institutionalized in government, this impulse to use the moral high ground to justify violence leads to all kinds of horrors, from  caging a teenager for smoking a plant, to droning weddings, to nuking entire cities.

Dr. Daniel Napier explores the potential for mob violence arising from a collective sense of moral superiority in his dissection of the story of the woman caught in adultery found in John 8. The crowd was fully prepared to throw rocks at a woman because they were utterly convinced they held the moral high ground. Napier reminds us that God calls us to a different way of interacting with the world. We are to overcome evil with good – not more evil. Turning our moral gaze inward instead of outward will help us develop this attitude.

“Our need is to always get our moral clarity focused inward first. My moral compass only works when I know that moral injunctions apply to me before they apply to anyone else. I can know I’m responsible in a situation regardless of what anyone else does. This is both a touchstone of moral experience and among the first things forgotten by humans in our degeneracy. The Judean leaders and this mob have forgotten it. Their moral evaluation is aimed strictly and dangerously outward. Jesus needs to help an angry – one might say a ‘righteously indignant’ – crowd understand true morality.”

I don’t intend to  justify Nazism, or to excuse people who run around inciting others with inflammatory speech, any more than Jesus was justifying adultery.  But the point is we don’t have the right, nor do we have the authority, to use force and violence to try to modify behavior we find offensive, or even immoral.

“Morality, among other things, is a means of self-regulation. Moral knowledge and focus enables a person to do the good that he does not want to do. It also empowers him to refrain from the wrong that he badly wants to do. This self-submitting impulse not only names what moral goodness is, but also how it must go about its work. Moral actions lose their morality when forced. A generous donation, if given at the point of a gun or even under extreme social pressure, loses a significant degree of its moral goodness. If you shame your spouse into saying, ‘I love you,’ the words don’t mean much. Fully moral acts are chosen. This is why gentleness, and a refusal to manipulate others, is at the heart of Jesus’ strategy for moral transformation.”

Jesus rejected the use of violence, coercion and force as a means to establishing his kingdom. Instead, he took the route of self-sacrifice, mercy and grace. We should do the same.

“Let anyone who is without sin throw the first stone.”