The New Morality Police? How Secularism Enforces Its Own Code While Condemning Christians for Theirs

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” — Isaiah 5:20

In Part One, we saw that Christianity was born into a culture it did not control. The earliest Christians had no ability to legislate morality—and yet their witness transformed the Roman Empire from the inside out. Laws eventually changed because hearts changed.

But something strange has happened in the modern world. Today’s secular critics accuse Christians of trying to “force” their morality onto others, while simultaneously pushing their own moral framework into law, education, and media. The result is not moral neutrality—it’s a new moral orthodoxy that punishes dissenters.

Let’s call it what it is: secular moral imperialism.

Morality Is Always Legislated—By Someone

The idea that you can have a legal system free from moral values is a myth. Every society enforces some vision of right and wrong. In fact, most laws are moral statements: Murder is wrong. Theft is wrong. Discrimination is wrong. You can’t escape the moral nature of legislation—you can only change the foundation it’s built on.

Secularism doesn’t eliminate morality. It simply replaces Christian ethics with a new code—one rooted in expressive individualism, sexual autonomy, and subjective identity.

As G.K. Chesterton warned over a century ago:

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad… They have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”¹

Today’s moral crusaders still preach justice, tolerance, and equality—but ripped from their biblical roots, these concepts become distorted. Justice becomes vengeance. Tolerance becomes censorship. Equality becomes uniformity.

The New Moral Absolutes

Modern secularism has its own set of “Ten Commandments,” though unwritten. Among them:

• Thou shalt not offend anyone (except Christians)
• Thou shalt celebrate all sexual identities without question
• Thou shalt affirm the self-defined truth of every individual
• Thou shalt not invoke divine authority in public debates

Failure to comply? You’ll be labeled hateful, backward, or dangerous. In some cases, you’ll be de-platformed or lose your job. The irony? The same people who cry, “Don’t impose your beliefs!” are busy enforcing their own with cultural and legal pressure.

This is not tolerance. This is soft totalitarianism dressed in the language of progress.

Atheists Impose Morality Too

Atheists often claim to reject “religious morality” in favor of reason. But moral reasoning doesn’t float in a vacuum. It must be grounded in something. For Christians, morality flows from the nature of God—unchanging, just, and loving. For atheists, it’s far murkier.

Richard Dawkins famously admitted:

“There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good—nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”²

Yet in the next breath, many atheists are morally outraged by Christian views on sexuality, abortion, or marriage. But if moral values are subjective or evolutionary, what gives them the right to impose their version of morality on others?

Peter Singer, one of the world’s leading atheist ethicists, has argued that killing disabled infants can be morally permissible.³ That’s the trajectory of secular moral logic untethered from divine value.

And yet, these same voices call Christian morality dangerous.

Tolerance or Tyranny?

True tolerance means allowing people to live according to their convictions—even when you disagree. But today, tolerance has been weaponized to silence traditional views. In a strange twist, Christianity is the only worldview expected to keep its convictions private, while secular ideologies parade theirs openly and demand compliance.

As Os Guinness writes:

“In the name of tolerance, tolerance is being abolished.”⁴

Christians are told: You can believe whatever you want—just don’t act on it publicly. But that’s not religious freedom. That’s religion muzzled.

The Christian Response

We must not be bullied into silence. But we also must not mirror the rage culture of the secular world. Our calling is to speak truth in love (Eph. 4:15), to be salt and light (Matt. 5:13–16), and to contend for the faith (Jude 3) with humility and courage.

History is clear: Christianity doesn’t require government power to thrive. It thrives wherever people are willing to live and die by the truth. That truth doesn’t need to be forced. It needs to be lived and proclaimed.

So let the world rage. Let them call us bigots or zealots. We are not here to impose morality by coercion, but to propose a better way—the way of Christ, whose kingdom is not of this world but who still transforms it from within.

Final Challenge to the Skeptic

You say Christians shouldn’t legislate their morality. But aren’t you doing the same?

If all laws are moral statements—and everyone votes their values—then the real issue is not whether morality should shape law, but which morality is most true, most just, and most life-giving.

We believe it is the morality of Jesus Christ.

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Endnotes
¹ G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1908), 33.
² Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 132.
³ Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 187–191.
⁴ Os Guinness, The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 83.