Some Objections

Today's Scripture

The Bible knows exactly what a society sounds like when every person becomes their own standard.

Judges 21:25 — "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

Proverbs 14:12 — "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death."

Isaiah 5:20 — "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!"

The Big Idea

Yesterday Lewis argued that everyone appeals to a real standard of right and wrong. Today he answers the most popular objection: "Morality is just culture — different times and places have different rules." Lewis's reply is simple and devastating. The moment you call any culture's morality better or worse than another's — and everyone does — you have admitted there is a real standard above all cultures. The question is where that standard lives.

Reflection

The objection everyone raises

Say "right and wrong are real" out loud in a classroom or a comment section, and the reply comes fast: "Whose right and wrong? The Vikings praised raiding. Some cultures honored revenge. Morality is just whatever your tribe taught you."

It sounds humble, and that is its appeal. Nobody wants to be the arrogant tourist who declares that everything back home is the only right way. And there is a grain of truth in it: customs really do vary. Whether you greet with a handshake or a bow, eat with forks or fingers, drive on the left or the right — these are conventions, and a wise traveler holds them loosely. The relativist's mistake is sliding from "customs vary" to "justice varies." Those are very different claims, and the second one collapses the moment anyone is actually wronged.

The Bible has met this idea before. The book of Judges describes Israel's darkest centuries with one chilling sentence, repeated like a drumbeat: Judges 21:25 — "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." Notice that everyone still used the word right. They just relocated it — from God's eyes to their own. The chapters around that verse describe the wreckage: violence, betrayal, chaos.

Lewis was broadcasting in the middle of World War II, so he reached for the example his listeners could not wave away:

"If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Here is the trap relativism cannot escape. The same person who says "morality is just cultural" also says "but the Nazis were evil." Both sentences cannot be true. If moral codes are only local customs, like driving on the left or the right, then the Nazis simply had different customs — and no one can object. But everything in us does object. That objection is evidence.

The measuring stick problem

Lewis presses the point to its hinge:

"The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

You cannot call one wall straighter than another without a level. You cannot call one answer closer than another without a true answer. And you cannot rank moralities — kinder, fairer, more just — without a measuring stick that stands above every culture being measured, including your own.

"If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something — some Real Morality — for them to be true about." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The prophet Isaiah shows what happens when a nation throws the measuring stick away. Isaiah 5:20 — "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness." Notice: evil does not usually announce itself as evil. It rebrands. It calls cruelty "strength," greed "ambition," and lies "my truth." Without a fixed standard, the rebranding always wins, because the loudest voice gets to print the labels.

Francis Schaeffer, a Christian thinker who spent his life talking with skeptical students, warned where that road ends:

"If there is no absolute by which to judge society, then society is absolute." — Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?

An "absolute" is a standard that does not move. If there is none above the crowd, then the crowd itself becomes the standard — and crowds have approved some monstrous things. The only protection the weak have ever had against the strong is a law higher than the strong.

The maps mostly agree

But wait — don't cultures really disagree about morality? Lewis answers: less than you have been told. He asks you to run a thought experiment:

"Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Cultures differ over the details — how many wives, which foods, what counts as polite. But no civilization has ever admired cowardice, celebrated betrayal of friends, or taught that selfishness is the highest good. The moral codes of the world are like maps of the same coastline: drawn with different skill, some badly distorted, but all clearly tracing one real shore.

"But what about slavery?" someone will ask. "Whole societies approved of it for centuries." Exactly — and how did it end? Not because the standard changed, but because reformers like William Wilberforce held their own culture up against a law higher than the culture and showed the gap. If morality were nothing but a society's customs, a moral reformer would be impossible — by definition, whoever disagrees with the majority would always be wrong. The abolitionist, the whistleblower, the lone kid who defends the bullied student in the cafeteria: every one of them is appealing past the crowd to the Real Morality. Deep down we know they are the heroes, which means we know the crowd is not the final court.

And here is the quiet kicker. If moralities can be drawn better, then moral progress is possible — and we all believe it is. We say abolishing slavery was progress, not just change.

"Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"Better" smuggles the standard back in. So does Proverbs 14:12 — "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death." A way can only seem right and actually be wrong if rightness is real and outside us. That is why Proverbs 1:7 sets the foundation where it belongs: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge." Not the fear of the crowd. The fear — meaning awed respect — of the One who made the coastline all our maps are tracing.

G.K. Chesterton noticed that even a culture in moral confusion is still running on borrowed goods:

"The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone." — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Our age is not short on moral passion — scroll any feed and you will find outrage about justice within seconds. The passion is real, and much of it is right. What is missing is the fixed standard that keeps virtues sane — that tells compassion when it has become indulgence, and truth-telling when it has become cruelty. A virtue wandering alone, Chesterton saw, does enormous damage precisely because it is half right. Only the whole standard, held together, keeps each piece in its place.

The standard has a face

So where does this leave us? Holding a measuring stick we did not make, in a world that keeps telling us to whittle it down to local taste. Paul's counsel to Christians in Rome — a city with its own powerful culture — was this: Romans 12:2 — "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." The standard is not the mood of the moment. And it is not lost in the clouds, either. God has published it.

Psalm 119:89 — "Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens." Fixed — the one thing our shifting cultures cannot offer.

But Christianity says something even better than "the standard is fixed." It says the standard is personal. John 14:6 — Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Truth is not finally a rulebook; it is a face. When you watch Jesus forgive enemies, defend the weak, tell the truth under pressure, and lay down his life, you are not seeing one culture's preferences. You are seeing the Real Morality every map was reaching for — walking around in sandals.

This is worth sitting with, because it answers the relativist's best instinct. The relativist is afraid of moral bullies — people who weaponize "absolute truth" to crush whoever differs from them. History justifies the fear. But look at what the absolute standard does when it shows up in person: it touches lepers, eats with outcasts, and saves its hardest words for the religious bullies. The truth, it turns out, is not a club in the hands of the powerful. He is a servant who washes feet.

And here the gospel does what relativism never could. A fixed standard alone would crush us, because we have all bent it. But Hebrews 13:8 — "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" — is not just a statement about unchanging truth. It is a statement about unchanging mercy. The same Jesus who embodies the standard also died for the people who broke it, and his welcome does not shift with the culture either. The standard has a face, and the face is turned toward you in love.

Going Deeper

Today, catch one rebrand. Watch for a moment — in conversation, in your feed, in your own head — where something wrong gets a flattering new label ("everyone exaggerates on résumés," "it's just drama," "I'm only being honest"). Don't post about it. Just quietly name it to God the way Isaiah would, and ask: which of my own labels need peeling off? Then read John 14:6 again and remember that the Truth you just measured yourself against is also the Way back home.