Today’s culture says, “Don’t judge others.” Jesus said, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Aren’t they saying the same thing? As it turns out, they’re not. Karlo Broussard explains how the judgment that our culture condemns is different from the judgment that Jesus condemns.
Transcript:
Host: You are on with Karlo, Anonymous from Davenport, Iowa.
Caller: I would like to ask you a question: yesterday I was having a great interesting car conversation with my eleven-year-old son; I just mentioned that I had to throw away a humorous magazine I had purchased because it turned out there was a bunch of inappropriate material in it. And he said, “Oh,” he said, “well, you know, other families don’t, you know, they use those words, they speak that way, and—you know—just because we’re Catholic and we do that, that’s—all families are different.” And I helped kind of create this relativism, I think, by, you know, as he was growing up, trying not to, you know, pass judgements upon things. So now I’m wondering if this is actually turning around to be bad religion, so to speak. So could I have your advice?
Karlo: Yeah, well, first of all, you know, Anonymous, just as the Church does, and just as Jesus teaches us in the Gospels, there’s nothing wrong with making a judgement about a particular action, that a particular behavior is inappropriate human behavior. I mean, you do it every day with your eleven-year-old son, right? I mean if your eleven-year-old son mouths off to you, momma, you’re gonna have some consequences, right? Okay? So the fact that we make judgements about a behavior and say, “Hey, that’s inappropriate human behavior,” there’s nothing wrong with that. We have to do that as human beings in order to, as we were mentioning earlier, Cy, function as human beings in society.
So you can communicate to your son that there’s a difference between a certain behavior being inappropriate, wrong, immoral—whatever word you wanna use—and one’s responsibility for that immoral behavior. And this is where upbringing comes in, right? So let’s say, for example, your eleven-year-old son heard his friend at school say a bad four-letter word, right? Okay. Now, okay, so you can say, “Okay son, well, that word, it has a certain meaning to it that’s really bad, it’s not good for us as human beings, it contradicts our human dignity and our value created in the image and likeness of God. Now, so that’s bad, and we judge that we ought not to say that word, given the conventions of our society and the meaning that’s attached to it. But whether your friend is responsible for that or not, only God can judge that.” Because it may very well be that your son’s friend was brought up in a home where his parents simply didn’t teach him that these words are so bad and violating of our human dignity and keeping us from loving God and loving each other.
So notice, Anonymous, there’s a distinction to be made between judging a particular action to be wrong, and then judging one’s responsibility—or culpability, as we would say in theology, like whether that person has full knowledge of what they’re doing and whether or not it’s wrong. Does that help, at least for starters?
Caller: It does indeed, thank you very much.
Karlo: Okay, fantastic.
Host: Well, don’t forget to give your address to the call-screener, because you’re gonna be getting a free copy of Karlo’s CD, “Your Truth, My Truth.”
Karlo: And Cy, if I may just follow up very quickly, very briefly: you know, in the Gospels, when Jesus talks about “Do not judge;” he’s not talking about not judging a particular action to be immoral. Jesus did that left and right throughout his whole ministry. He said to the woman caught in adultery, you know, “Go and sin no more;” that implies that what she was doing was wrong. But the judgement that Jesus says for us not to enact, “Do not judge,” has to do with one’s responsibility, one’s culpability; judging one’s knowledge or one’s consent. Only God has access to that subjective dimension, right? Only God has access to the inner workings of the heart and the soul and the mind, but we can judge external behaviors and say “That’s not good for human beings; that is good for human beings; we ought to pursue the good, avoid the evil, etc.”
Host: Thank you very much, Anonymous.