Working for over forty years as a lawyer, I occasionally encountered instances where individuals tried, at times successfully, to get other people to take, or acquiesce in, actions they normally wouldn’t. A tactic the instigators sometimes used is known as devaluation—the act of subtly and incrementally devaluing, in the minds of their targets, the moral standards that would prohibit such actions. Devaluation seeks to tear down what is good and true; it is destructive obfuscation, and it’s dishonest. 

But it is nothing new. Devaluation is, quite literally, the oldest trick in “The Book.” The first chapter of the Bible describes everything that God has created as very good. But in a second account of creation given in subsequent chapters, a serpent in the garden of Eden devalues a moral standard—obedience to God’s law—in the thought of one resident of that garden, Eve. 

The Bible says that the serpent was subtle. The serpent began by questioning whether the law even existed and implying that, if it did, it was not to Eve’s advantage and that it made no sense to obey it. When Eve tried to defend God’s law, the serpent told her that God was deceiving her—accusing God of the very thing the serpent was doing! And by that tactic, it convinced Eve that she would be cheated out of something desirable unless she abandoned her moral standard. To her credit, Eve later remorsefully acknowledged that the serpent had manipulated her into believing a lie.