The Wide Path

Introduction: A Disorder With a Name

In 2005, radio host Michael Savage published Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, a polemical but pointed diagnosis of the modern left. The phrase became a cultural shorthand — provocative, deliberate, and for many conservatives and faithful Catholics, intuitively correct. Savage was not writing a clinical manual. He was naming a recurring pattern of thought that defies reason, contradicts itself, and produces predictable dysfunction. Whether one embraces the phrase or finds it too blunt, it opens a serious question that deserves a serious answer: What exactly is the disorder, and where does it come from?

This article argues that the deepest root of modern liberalism — properly understood as an ideology rather than a political party — is the avoidance of the cost of sin. It is the architecture built by those who want what Christian civilization produces without submitting to what Christian civilization requires. It is the wide path of Matthew 7:13, made into a philosophy. And its most dangerous expression is not found in the streets but in the pew — in the soul that confesses without converting, repents without turning, and uses the grace of God as a bandage rather than a cure.

I. Freedom Versus License: The Foundation of the Error

The Catholic Church has long distinguished between genuine liberty and what Pope Leo XIII called license — the counterfeit version of freedom that severs choice from moral responsibility. In his 1888 encyclical Libertas, Leo XIII wrote sharply of those who “usurping the name of liberty, style themselves liberals,” and who “substitute for true liberty what is sheer and most foolish license.” [1]

Genuine liberty, in the Catholic understanding, is not the absence of constraint. It is the freedom to pursue what is truly good — ordered toward truth, shaped by conscience, answerable to God. License, by contrast, treats the individual’s preference as its own justification. The question shifts from Is this good? to Do I want this? — and once that shift occurs, no stable moral floor remains.

This is the founding error of ideological liberalism: not that it values freedom, but that it makes freedom self-justifying. When individual autonomy becomes the highest principle, every limit is provisional and subject to renegotiation. There is no ground on which to say this far and no further, because the only governing principle is I choose.

The diabolic pole of this principle was stated with perfect honesty by Aleister Crowley in The Book of the Law (1904): “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” [9] Crowley was not being subtle. He was articulating, in its most undisguised form, the absolute sovereignty of individual desire as the supreme moral principle — autonomous self-determination elevated to the status of absolute law, with no authority above the choosing self. Compare it directly with Luke 9:23 — “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” — and the inversion is exact. Where Christ commands self-denial ordered toward God, Crowley commands self-will as the totality of the law. Modern liberalism need not name Crowley, and most of its proponents have never read him. But the architecture is identical. To name the diabolic pole is not to accuse every liberal of deliberate evil. It is to identify, honestly, where the principle of absolute autonomy leads when followed to its logical conclusion.

II. Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

The popular phrase captures something real. Modern liberalism tends to reject the moral claims of Christian civilization while simultaneously demanding the fruits it produces: stable families, trustworthy institutions, social cohesion, dignity, community, consolation in suffering, and a sense of transcendent meaning. It wants the inheritance without the testator’s conditions.

This is not merely hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is a structural contradiction. The dignity it claims for the individual is derived from the Christian understanding that every person bears the image of God — Imago Dei. The compassion it demands for the poor and vulnerable is the outworking of Christian charity. The sense that history moves toward justice is a secularized eschatology. Remove the theological foundation and the borrowed furniture eventually collapses — but the project continues to draw on the capital of the tradition it publicly rejects.

More personally, it can be seen in this pattern: a person rejects Christian moral claims about conduct, yet still seeks the community, consolation, and moral esteem associated with Christian life. They want forgiveness without repentance, mercy without conversion, belonging without submission. They want, in short, the benefits of a relationship with Christ without the terms on which Christ offers it.

This pattern of moral avoidance finds an instructive mirror in modern culture’s growing devotion to animals and the natural environment. God commanded the ancient Israelites to offer animal sacrifices — a costly, blood-demanding ritual designed to fix attention on the gravity of sin and the price of its remedy. Yet as Hebrews 10:4 makes clear, “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” The animal pointed beyond itself, toward the Lamb. Today the direction of that attention has been reversed. Where God once used animals to direct sinners toward the cost of sin and the need for redemption, modern culture lavishes its moral energy on animal welfare and environmental causes while dismissing sin against God and neighbor as a private matter. Paul anticipated this inversion in Romans 1:25: “they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.” The creature absorbs the devotion that belongs to the Creator — and the sinner, consumed by righteous feeling, never kneels.

This displacement reaches its most intimate form in the over-adoration of pets. A pet offers what feels like unconditional love, but it asks nothing morally — it cannot call its owner to repentance, challenge the conscience, or demand the cross. Augustine taught that sin is fundamentally disordered love — ordo amoris, the loving of the right things in the wrong order: God first, neighbor second, creation third. [2] When a creature occupies the emotional and moral center of a life, receiving the devotion that belongs to God and neighbor, the order is inverted without drama, without announcement, and without the discomfort of self-examination. The over-adored pet becomes a spiritual sedative: it offers the warmth of acceptance, the feeling of virtue, and the relief of a relationship that never once asks the one question the unrepented soul cannot afford to answer.

III. Liberalism as a Mental Disorder: The Theological Diagnosis

Savage’s phrase works best when understood not as a clinical judgment but as a moral one. The disorder he names is a disorder of the intellect and will — a consistent pattern of deriving what ought to be allowed from desires one already has, rather than measuring those desires against an objective standard of good.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, observed that this contradiction is impossible to sustain consistently. [6] Every human being, regardless of what they profess, appeals in practice to a moral law they did not invent. The moment a person says that is unfair or you had no right to do that, they are invoking a standard that stands above their own preference. Lewis called this the Law of Human Nature — and he noted that people appeal to it instinctively, automatically, and universally, even when their stated philosophy denies it exists. This is the foundational exposure of ideological liberalism: it rejects objective morality in principle while depending on it entirely the moment it feels wronged. The ideology does not live by its own rules. It cannot.

St. Paul described this pattern in Romans 1, writing of those who suppress the truth they already know, exchange it for a lie, and then approve of those who practice the same things (Romans 1:32). That last detail is significant. The disordered conscience is not content with private justification — it requires social and institutional validation. The ideology must be aggressive precisely because the conscience does not stay silent on its own. It must be shouted down, legislated away, and culturally overwritten.

This is why modern liberalism consistently moves toward compelled affirmation rather than mere tolerance. Tolerance says I will not stop you. Compelled affirmation says You must celebrate me. The difference reveals the driving anxiety: the unquieted conscience seeking external reinforcement for what internal reasoning cannot fully settle.

Pope Leo XIII’s diagnosis and Michael Savage’s phrase, separated by more than a century, are pointing at the same disorder: reason untethered from truth, freedom untethered from moral responsibility, and the restless, escalating demand for validation that follows.

M. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author of People of the Lie (1983), arrived at the same conclusion from the consulting room rather than the pulpit. [5] Peck defines evil not primarily by the magnitude of a person’s sins but by a specific characteristic of the will: the consistent, determined refusal to submit oneself to honest self-examination. The person he describes as evil is not typically a monster. They are often respectable, socially active, even charming — maintaining at all costs a false image of themselves, a lie told first and most persistently to their own conscience. When anything or anyone threatens to expose that image, the response is not contrition but attack: projection, scapegoating, and the aggressive reassignment of their own darkness onto others.

This is the clinical parallel to Romans 1:32. The person who cannot tolerate the truth about themselves will inevitably find others to blame for it. They approve of those who share their disorder — and attack with particular force those whose integrity serves as an implicit indictment. Lewis, Paul, Leo XIII, Savage, and Peck are observing the same disorder from different vantage points: the self enthroned against truth, defended at whatever cost to honesty or to others.

The lie that most reliably maintains this enthronement is one of the greatest deceits from hell, heard with depressing regularity even in Catholic circles: God does not judge. It is typically offered as a misreading of John 3:17 (“God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world”) or Matthew 7:1 (“Judge not”) — verses wrenched free of their context and weaponized to dissolve all weight from sin. Scripture, however, speaks without ambiguity. Hebrews 9:27 states flatly: “It is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment.” Romans 14:12: “Each of us will give an account of himself to God.” 2 Corinthians 5:10: “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.” The Nicene Creed, professed at every Sunday Mass, ends with a declaration every Catholic speaks aloud: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” [3] The lie does not merely misread these texts — it removes the ultimate weight from sin, makes repentance optional, reduces the sacraments to consoling customs, and deploys the mercy of God as a weapon against the very justice that makes mercy necessary. God does prefer mercy — Ezekiel 33:11 makes that clear. But mercy has terms: genuine repentance, honest confession, real amendment. A mercy that requires nothing is not mercy; it is the comfortable assurance that nothing will be measured and no one need turn. That lie is from hell precisely because it is kind-sounding, broadly accepted, and spiritually lethal.

IV. The Unrepented Soul Cannot Find Peace

Here the diagnosis reaches its root. Augustine of Hippo, writing in his Confessions in the 4th century, stated it in a single line that has never been improved upon: “Our heart is restless until it repose in Thee.” [2]

The soul is structured toward God. That is not sentiment — it is anthropology. Refusing the orientation toward God does not eliminate the longing it was designed to fulfill. It simply leaves that longing permanently unsatisfied, driving the person toward substitutes that cannot hold.

Isaiah 48:22 states the consequence without softening it: “There is no peace for the wicked.” Not as an external punishment imposed by an angry deity, but as a structural consequence of the soul’s architecture. The conscience, as Paul confirms in Romans 2:15, is not erased by rejection — it is suppressed. And suppression requires continuous effort.

This is the mechanism beneath the cultural noise of modern liberalism: the restlessness of unrepented souls, collectively organized into an ideology that manages the suppression at scale. More consumption, more pleasure, more validation, more demands — not because these things satisfy, but because the silence they temporarily fill returns louder each time.

Peck illuminates exactly why. In his clinical observation, people who have hardened themselves against self-knowledge are not at rest — they are perpetually vigilant. [5] The energy required to maintain the lie is inexhaustible because the conscience does not cease its pressure. What appears from the outside as confidence or self-possession is, on the inside, a continuous defensive operation — managing perception, deflecting scrutiny, controlling the narrative. Augustine’s restlessness and Peck’s vigilance are the same reality: a soul that has refused its true orientation does not simply go quiet. It goes to work — endlessly, exhaustingly, and fruitlessly — keeping the truth at bay.

V. The Wide Path: Gradual, Boundless, Building Momentum

Christ’s description in Matthew 7:13-14 is architectural: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

The imagery is a road, not a cliff. Nobody walks off a cliff without noticing. A road is different — you can travel a great distance and no single step feels catastrophic. The width of the broad road is not dramatic. It is comfortable, gradual, and socially reinforced at every point.

Hebrews 3:13 names the mechanism within the person: being “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Hardening is not sudden. It is incremental. Each compromise reduces the resistance to the next. What seemed unthinkable ten years ago becomes unremarkable today, and the standard is repositioned again for tomorrow.

Peck makes the same observation from decades of clinical practice: evil rarely announces itself. [5] It does not arrive fully formed in dramatic wickedness. It accumulates through ordinary, incremental, socially unremarkable acts of self-deception — small refusals of the truth, small reassignments of blame, small adjustments to the story one tells about oneself. Each refusal makes the next more natural and the original conscience harder to hear. The capacity for this is not confined to exceptional criminals; it is distributed widely among ordinary people living ordinary lives, making ordinary choices that compound silently over time. The wide path is wide precisely because it requires no single dramatic crossing of a line — only the willingness to keep walking.

The few boundaries of modern liberalism follow directly from its founding principle. If autonomy is sovereign and no external moral standard binds, then every limit is provisional. The road widens because widening is its nature. And the momentum builds — each normalization makes the next demand possible, the speed increases, and the destination, though never announced, is fixed.

VI. Calvary and the Weight of Collective Sin

The Passion of Christ is not an abstraction. It is the point in history where the full weight of collective human sin converged and was absorbed. Look at what is present at Calvary:

• Betrayal for personal gain — Judas
• Political cowardice — Pilate, sacrificing truth for approval
• Institutional corruption — the Sanhedrin, protecting power over justice
• Mob violence — the crowd choosing Barabbas
• Personal cowardice — Peter, the disciples fleeing
• Cruelty normalized by role — the soldiers mocking and scourging
• Abandonment of the innocent — nearly everyone

Every category of collective human moral failure is present and visible. Isaiah 53 had prophesied it: “He bore our iniquities... the punishment that brought us peace was upon him.” [3] Paul states it with almost unbearable directness: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Colossians 2:14 describes the cancellation of “the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us.”

The debt was real. The consequences were real. They did not dissolve — they were absorbed at a specific place, in a specific moment, by a specific Person who had the capacity to bear them entirely.

VII. The Asymmetry of the Exchange

This is where the refusal to repent becomes most exposed.

What was absorbed: the full, collective weight of human sin — its shame, violence, spiritual consequence, and separation from God — carried by the God-man in a real body, in real time, to completion on a cross.

What is asked in return: Repent — acknowledge the direction was wrong and turn around. Try — cooperate with grace daily, bearing the ordinary cross of a life oriented toward God.

Luke 9:23: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

Three elements in that verse deserve attention:

• Daily — not a single heroic moment, but the repeated, ordinary discipline of each morning
• His cross — the specific weight that comes from following Christ in this particular life
• Deny himself — the precise opposite of the liberal principle of self-affirmation

The disproportion between what He absorbed and what He asks is staggering. And yet the minimal ask — the daily turning, the cooperation with grace — is precisely what is refused. Philippians 2:12-13 holds the balance: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling — for it is God who works in you.” The effort is real; the enablement of that effort is grace.

Lewis reframes what this turning actually means at its root. In Mere Christianity he writes that fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement — he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. [6] This is not self-improvement. It is not a resolution to do better. It is the surrender of the self that has been holding out against God — the moment the will stops negotiating and yields. The cross is not a program of gradual moral progress. It is the instrument of capitulation to the One who has already absorbed everything the rebellion produced. To take it up daily is to renew that surrender each morning.

VIII. The Sacrament of Reconciliation: Grace Made Concrete

The Passion accomplished the redemption of humanity. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is the mechanism by which that accomplishment is personally applied to the individual soul.

Christ instituted it directly in John 20:22-23, breathing the Holy Spirit on the Apostles: “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” This authority passes through the Church. The priest acts in persona Christi — it is Christ who absolves through him.

The sacrament requires five elements:

1. Examination of conscience — honest accounting against an objective moral standard
2. Contrition — genuine sorrow, ideally from love of God rather than fear of punishment alone
3. Confession — specific and honest naming of sins
4. Absolution — the objective act of the priest in Christ’s authority, removing guilt and eternal punishment
5. Penance and satisfaction — the assigned cooperation with grace; the cross made specific and concrete

Catholic theology also distinguishes between guilt and eternal punishment — removed entirely by absolution — and temporal punishment, which may remain. This is why the Church offers indulgences: the application of the Treasury of Merit — Christ’s infinite merits, together with those of the Blessed Virgin and the saints — to remit the temporal punishment due to sin. A plenary indulgence removes all remaining temporal punishment. A partial indulgence removes a portion. Both require the state of grace, sacramental confession, reception of the Eucharist, and genuine detachment from sin. [4]

The structure is generous beyond measure. The means of grace are available, abundant, and inexhaustible. The only requirement is the one thing the unrepented state refuses: to come, name it honestly, and receive what was purchased at infinite cost — freely, on terms of truth.

IX. The Presumptuous Sinner: The Worst Form

Having identified liberalism as an avoidance of the cost of sin, and the Sacrament of Reconciliation as the appointed remedy, we arrive at the most dangerous expression of the disorder: the person inside the Church who uses confession not as a transformative encounter with Christ but as a maintenance tool — a bandage applied repeatedly to a wound they have no intention of allowing to heal.

The Catechism names this presumption and classifies it among the sins against the Holy Spirit. CCC 2092 defines it as expecting forgiveness without repentance or conversion — not a failure of weakness, but a failure of the will, which makes it structurally more serious than sins committed in passion or ignorance. [4]

The distinction is critical:

• The person who sins, falls, genuinely repents, confesses, and falls again is exhibiting human weakness. The sacrament exists precisely for them. The daily cross acknowledges this pattern.
• The person who sins, confesses intending to return to the sin, using absolution as a reset mechanism — this is presumption. The contrition is not genuine because genuine contrition includes a firm purpose of amendment.

A confession made without firm purpose of amendment is not a valid confession. The absolution does not take full effect because the required condition — genuine sorrow and real intention to avoid the sin — is absent. The person departs with the form of the sacrament but not its substance.

Lewis identifies the spiritual root of this condition precisely. In Mere Christianity he calls pride “the complete anti-God state of mind” and names it the great sin — the one vice from which all others proceed. [6] The proud person is always looking down — on things, on people, on their own sins, which they manage rather than mourn. And as Lewis observes, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see what is above you. The presumptuous penitent is a portrait in pride: they kneel in the confessional but they do not bow. They present their sins for processing but do not surrender the self that produces them. It is pride, finally, that makes the firm purpose of amendment so difficult — because genuine amendment requires admitting that the self is not the measure, that the sin was not negotiable, and that God’s standard stands above personal comfort. Pride resists every one of those admissions.

X. The Lukewarm: The Laodicean Condition

This is the soul Christ addresses most severely in all of Scripture — not the open pagan, not the declared enemy, but the comfortable, self-satisfied, religiously active person who has just enough Christianity to feel secure and not enough to be transformed.

Lewis sets the standard with unsparing clarity in Mere Christianity: “Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it.’” [6] The lukewarm soul gives some — time, attendance, the form of the sacraments, a measure of moral respectability — and keeps the rest. Lewis identifies this not as partial obedience but as a fundamental misunderstanding of the transaction. Christ is not negotiating a share. He is asking for the whole person. Anything less is not a reduced version of Christianity — it is a different thing entirely.

Revelation 3:15-16: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

The imagery is visceral and deliberate. Cold water refreshes. Hot water heals. Lukewarm water accomplishes neither and offends the one who receives it.

Laodicea was prosperous, self-sufficient, comfortable. Christ’s verdict in verse 17 is precise: they say “I am rich, I have prospered, I need nothing” — and do not know they are “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.” The self-assessment and the reality are inverted. This is the spiritual condition of the presumptuous penitent: they believe they are in good standing because they have performed the external act, while the internal reality is unchanged or worsening.

Peck warns, with the authority of clinical experience, that the most dangerous place to encounter the people of the lie is not in the margins of society but within respectable communities — and, most troublingly, within religious ones. [5] The person who has mastered the maintenance of a false self-image finds religion a particularly useful instrument, because religious language and religious practice provide the most socially credible veneer of goodness. Attendance, charitable activity, the language of faith — all of it can be recruited into the service of the lie rather than into a genuine encounter with truth. Peck does not say this to condemn religion. He says it to identify the precise mechanism by which the appearance of holiness can become the most effective mask against it. The Laodicean does not look dangerous. They look fine. That is the problem.

The connection to the entire conversation is direct. Three scriptural images confirm it:

2 Peter 2:22 — “A dog returns to its vomit, and a sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mud.” The washing accomplished nothing because the nature beneath it was not changed.

Matthew 12:43-45 — The unclean spirit cast out, the house swept clean, the spirit returning with seven others worse than itself. A spiritual state that appears cleaned but has not been filled with genuine good ends worse than it began. This is the trajectory of confession without conversion.

Hebrews 3:13 — “Hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Each cycle of sin-confess-return without genuine amendment engraves the pattern more deeply. When the sacrament is recruited into the cycle of avoidance, the hardening accelerates.

XI. The Complete Picture

The full arc of the disorder now has a shape:

The wide path begins with the refusal to acknowledge moral truth above the self. Lewis showed that this refusal is never fully consistent — the person who denies objective morality still invokes it when wronged. Paul showed that the truth being suppressed is already known. Peck showed that the mechanism of suppression is the lie maintained against the self, defended by projection and attack. And Leo XIII showed that when this disorder is organized into an ideology, it calls itself liberty while practicing bondage.

That ideology requires a system — political, cultural, institutional — to validate the refusal, suppress the conscience that challenges it, and provide the social reinforcement that private reasoning cannot sustain alone. The system has no stable floor because its only governing principle is self-determination. It widens and accelerates because each compromise costs less than the one before it. It displaces moral obligation onto creatures — animals, ecosystems, pets — because creatures ask nothing in return and threaten nothing within. And it persists because the restlessness it generates is always mistaken for a problem requiring more of the same solution.

Its most dangerous expression appears inside the Church, in the soul that accesses the sacraments without submitting to their substance — confessing without converting, repenting in word without turning in will, using grace as management rather than transformation. This soul, as Lewis warned, is not giving Christ what He asked for. It has inoculated itself against the real thing by repeated exposure to the form of it. It is Laodicea: comfortable, self-assessed as rich, unknown to itself as it actually is, and offering a portion when everything was asked.

The remedy is not more frequent confession in itself. It is one honest examination of the will: Has it actually turned? Is the firm purpose of amendment real or performed? Is the attachment to the sin still present beneath the sorrow for its consequences? If the answer is honest — even if the answer is no, I am not yet fully turned — the Church and the sacrament can receive even that. What they cannot substitute for is a will that refuses to actually move.

XII. Conclusion: The Only Thing Required

Christ absorbed the full collective consequences of human sin. Every betrayal, every cowardice, every cruelty, every lie was present at Calvary and was taken on entirely. The price was infinite.

The only thing required in return is the one thing that the wide path, the liberal ideology, the presumptuous conscience, and the lukewarm soul all systematically refuse: to turn — genuinely, in the will, not merely in feeling — and to come. Lewis named it surrender. The Church calls it repentance. Scripture calls it taking up the cross. They are the same movement: the rebel laying down arms before the One who was wounded by the rebellion and absorbed its cost regardless.

The means of grace are available. The sacraments are open. The Treasury of Merit is inexhaustible. The door of the confessional does not require perfection before entry — it requires honesty. The restlessness Augustine described, the hardening Hebrews warned of, the vigilance Peck diagnosed, the widening road of Matthew 7 — all of it can be arrested at the moment the will genuinely turns.

The unrepented sinner will not find peace. But they are never beyond the reach of the One whose peace surpasses understanding — provided only that they stop managing the distance and close it.

In Luke 18:9-14, Christ sets the whole structure of the Gospel in a single parable. [3] Two men go to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee catalogs his virtues: he fasts twice a week, tithes all he possesses, is not like the tax collector. He presents his record. The tax collector does not raise his eyes to heaven. He beats his breast and says only: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Christ’s verdict is unambiguous — the tax collector goes home justified; the Pharisee does not. The Pharisee’s record was probably accurate. His fasting was real, his tithing was real, his moral standing was real. None of it was the point. No one stands before infinite holiness on the strength of their own record. The measuring of self against neighbor — at least I am not like him — is precisely the posture that fails before God. The only safe posture before the throne of infinite holiness is the one the tax collector took: empty hands, honest heart, and complete reliance on what Christ purchased at Calvary. That is not weakness. It is the only accurate accounting of where the human soul actually stands before God — and the only posture grace can fill.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” — Revelation 3:20