Good afternoon everyone. I hope that this new year finds you healthy and hopeful. I would like to spend a few minutes talking about the social contract under which we live and the relationship of organized religion with that contract.

Back when homo sapiens became a distinct species in the African savannah with our smaller brains, sweaty bodies, and our unique ability to run down antelopes until they died of heat stroke, the social rule was the law of the jungle. The one with the most muscle, clubs and spears gets to have their way. Everyone else is secondary. Over thousands of years, agriculture and domestication of livestock and dogs developed. Humans moved into family groups and later, villages. Labor began to specialize. This is the story of humanity starting about 200,000 years ago.

Of course, spoken language developed in this time. The late Carl Sagan proposed in his book “Broca’s Brain” that children at play developed action words or verbs while adults developed names for things or nouns. The use of fire to cook food meant that humans did not have to spend most of their day foraging and chewing rough, raw plants and meat like our primate relatives. This freed up time to spend hunting, building, communicating and living together. As Jesus once said, “whenever two or three of you are gathered, you are living under a social contract.”

Well, he didn’t say exactly that, but it is true. Social contracts can be implied such as the norms, traditions and values under which we live. For example, at a restaurant, you would not go to a stranger’s table and start eating their food. That is a social norm. Social contracts can also be explicit such as the laws that govern our behavior. For example, you are not allowed to legally drive your vehicle the wrong way down a street. We can have religious aspects to our social contracts such as the Ten Commandments. And we can have church (and other religious) teachings and traditions governing our behavioral choices in a social world. For example, a Christian would not place a statue of Buddha on a church altar.

In this complex mélange of laws, customs, norms, and religious teachings we can have conflicts between different sources of authority. For example, in 2001 the Taliban dynamited two ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. They claimed that their religious teachings prohibit representations of God, the human form or the presence of other religions. Their real aim was to erase the pre-Muslim history of the country. They were proud of their accomplishment and felt that their coreligionists should respect them more. The rest of the world was aghast and outraged at the destruction of a UNESCO cultural heritage site.

This week in Washington, D.C., we witnessed the equivalent of blowing up Buddha statues. Our norms of civility, our tradition of peaceful transition of power, our cherished constitution, our legal code and our Christian moral values were trampled into the mud by people who, like the Taliban, felt that their noble goal justified any means necessary including murder and violence. What troubles me deeply is the lack of real outrage and the fact of support for this behavior in high places.

We have tossed aside our behavioral social contracts including church teachings in favor of a single point of moral decision-making authority – the self. As long as there are no norms, values, laws or moral teachings to worry about, anything goes. And it did. Four people are now dead because of it.

The role of the church going forward is complicated by the fact that the wider Christian church has for centuries monetized misinterpretations of scripture and the subsequent church doctrine. Misinformation from all corners of the church has led to its fracture into a thousand denominations. We will go into greater detail on this at a later time, but what can faithful Christians do today to help rebuild?