Moral Decay and Calvin's Geneva

If prostitution, abortion, wild bars, and recreational drugs are all legal without any legal condemnation against theses things, then it may cause an even greater growth of these kinds of activities. More than ever with the spread of increasing amounts of denominations people may look to civil law and culture for guidance since the institution of the church cannot agree because of so many different oppositions between denominations.

For example many Protestant denominations support openly homosexual ministry, and for many years the number of denominations that supported openly homosexual ministry had been growing instead of declining. What happened is that the government supported homosexual rights, and because many people look to the government's opinion for guidance thus the denominations had not been unified and strong enough to all work together, agree, and present their undivided case against homosexual rights. Now many churches that detest homosexual rights actually have openly homosexual ministers that proclaim homosexuality.

The power of the government to have an undivided unified opinion often outweighs the churches that together have a plurality of opinions that do not all match. The point is that if the government made more bad things legal, then people would think to themselves, "these things must be okay, and we cannot trust the church because they still cannot collectively decide upon these things." Overall, what Calvin did was good in that he organized Geneva to have both civil and divine authority to be in agreement and unified while he took a stance against the, "bad things."

The problem that many people may not consider is that when abortion, recreational drugs, prostitution, and other such things become legal, then it is only a matter of time before a person's own family or friends are effected by the growth of the problem. For example just think of what would happen if a church going person that has some belief in Jesus that is pro life does a little bit of backsliding and soon becomes pregnant and unmarried, and because of both the opinion of her local church regarding unmarried women and because she receives pressure from those that say abortion is okay, then she gets an abortion instead of facing the embarrassment of being unmarried and pregnant. Consider for example what would happen if prostitution is legal and a woman does a little bit of backsliding in her youth and is caught 'making out' with her boyfriend in private, and as a result the strict parents overreact and kick her out and as a result she enters a life of prostitution to support herself (perhaps a few days latter the parents realize that their treatment was to harsh, but now it is to late). Consider what would happen if illegal drug use was made legal and suddenly public schools thus taught no objection to using illegal drugs, and suddenly many people thus used illegal drugs and the Christians because ostracized because they became the only voice of reason speaking against a world that would not want to hear their message.

The point is that Calvin's Geneva having hard rules would have caused people to have less reason not to be a Christian because it would have outlawed those things that would normally get in the way of a person's devotion to God. Not only that but if a land was so full of prostitutes such that almost all women had no other occupation, then if you had been a Christian woman in such a land, then it might be extremely challenges if not almost nearly impossible to be anything other than a prostitute (because few other options would exist for women). The point is that like in the example of the land of prostitution many people may have wanted a different way of life but would not have it because of the main stream societal expectations, and thus Calvin would have saved the day for theses types of people by restructuring societal expectations through legal reform (this would make it easier to be a Christian).