Whose Values, Rome's or Jerusalems?

One thing you can be sure of as the 2008 election heats up. We'll be hearing a lot about family values, from both sides of the political spectrum. But is there any difference? As Democrats and Republicans prepare to face off it's an important question.

The cover article inside this month's Newsweek sheds light, though perhaps unwittingly, on the chasm that already exists among today's American body politic. In examining the roots of our fragile, Judeo-Christian, values the writers look back to the time of Christ.

The values of Jewish families were unique given the circumstances of the time. It is true that Romans of the first century had some regard for family, too (in his book "Jewish Marriage in Antiquity," Brown University professor Michael Satlow points out that Roman law esteemed married men with children above married men without children and unmarried men as part of the social order).

But Jewish devotion to family predates the Romans by thousands of years—think of all those begats—and by the time of Jesus, Jewish family values were noticeably different from those of their neighbors. A Roman father could, for any or no reason, choose to kill his newborn infant either by cutting the umbilical cord too close or by leaving the baby outside, and the Jewish refusal to do so was seen as peculiar. "The Jews see to it that their numbers increase," wrote the historian Tacitus around A.D. 100. "It is a deadly sin to kill a born or unborn child, and they think that eternal life is granted to those who die in battle or execution—hence their eagerness to have children, and their contempt for death." Herod himself executed two of his own sons, leading Augustus Caesar to remark that "I'd rather be Herod's pigs than Herod's sons.

In a culture so devoted to children, married sex was a blessing. "The harmonious coming together of man and woman and their consummation is figuratively a house. And everything which is without a woman is imperfect and homeless," wrote the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.-A.D. 40)."

In ways increasingly similar to first century Rome we are witnessing in America a widening gulf between the secular values of liberalism and those of religious Jews and Christians. In Rome, abortion, whether inside or outside the womb, was legal and accepted; in Jerusalem the unborn life was sacred. In Rome sexual deviancy was afforded unfettered license. In Jerusalem, sexual intimacy was representative of the union between God and His people and, therefore, a holy pleasure reserved for husbands and wives within the bounds of a covenant relationship. In Rome the people derived their values from Jupiter and Zeus, gods whose fickleness was exceeded only by their proclivity for sensual self-gratification. Yet in Jerusalem the source of values came from the unchanging LORD, the one true God whose character demanded purity over personal satisfaction.

As the contest for America's future plays out in stump speeches and town hall meetings all across the country listen carefully to whose values are being espoused, Jerusalem's or Rome's. It may sometimes be hard to tell. If you're one of those, however, drawn to the values of Rome bear in mind that the greatness of that empire was followed by the slow but inevitable death of a people that collapsed by the obesity of their own morbid excesses.