It’s often said that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers.”

Derived from a passage in Flannery O’Connor’s work, “Mystery and Manners,” the full quote in context gives a solid lesson on how compassion untethered to virtue can lead to disaster and ruin:

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

O’Connor died in 1964 when the Christian faith was beginning its decline in America. Big government, enacted during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, was expanding its acts of compassion – i.e., welfare to single-parent families. The result was a huge decline in marriage rates, multitudes of children born out of wedlock, and an explosion of fatherless families. As Willis Krumholz explains in “Family Breakdown and America’s Welfare System,” welfare workers would show up to ensure that female recipients had no “man in the house.”

Looking again at O’Connor’s passage, we find that tenderness without religious faith “is wrapped in theory.” Today, we’re more inclined to use the word ideology.

Right now, America still professes its diminished faith on its currency but rarely elsewhere. Instead, many leaders and citizens embrace ideology as their religion. The streets of Minneapolis, the hatred on social media, the demand that we all fall lockstep behind some new progressive movement like transgenderism, and the politicians who place ideology ahead of the best interests of Americans are just some examples of this transformation. Ideology soon displaces compassion. Without religious faith, or even the support of the classical virtues, “tenderness,” as O’Connor puts it, “is detached from the support of tenderness.”

Abortion provides the perfect example of this phenomenon. Originally sold to Americans as a measure to assist victims of rape and prevent injuries and deaths from back-alley procedures, abortion now includes laws that allow killing babies up to full term. Tenderness detached from virtue has devolved into an act of barbarism.

Compassion’s cousin, tolerance, is another of our invented virtues – also unsupported by the four classic virtues of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. Calls for tolerance in our day lead inevitably to demands of acceptance. It’s not enough to tolerate the man who dresses and speaks like a five-year-old girl; certain elements among us demand that we accept that person’s behavior as normal. To oppose these forces means automatic censure, with the offender labeled a bigot or fascist.

These, then, are the metaphorical gas chambers O’Connor mentions. Through ideology and false tolerance, we murder the republic built by men like Washington, Franklin, and Lincoln.

Yet there is hope – another of the virtues – of reversing, or at least blunting, this trend. Outfits like the Institute for Family Studies are hard at work demonstrating the value of marriage and family, both to the culture and the individual. Despite the riots in Minneapolis, Americans still favor the deportation of those who entered our country illegally, while a recent Pew Research Center poll shows that church attendance is holding steady.

And this is where we can join this battle for the American soul. We can rebuild the meaning and practice of true compassion and tolerance by fixing them on the firm foundations of religious faith and the primary virtues. We can begin these repairs by teaching our children the virtues through our example and through the classic stories of childhood and adolescence. We can vote and donate monies to charity based on knowledge of the issues and organizations. We can pay attention to local politics and elect officials who share our vision of common sense and virtuous government. Above all, we can lead virtuous lives, thereby serving as examples in our communities.

If you wish to quickly confirm the importance of virtue to a culture and a republic, examine J. David Gowdy’s “Quotes on Liberty and Virtue.” Here are dozens of quotations from the Founding Fathers up to the present. Among them you’ll find these words from Henry David Thoreau: “Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause — nor any charter of immunities and rights.”

As patriots and lovers of liberty, we are called to plead the cause of virtue.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pxhere