God. Real. Right.

Here are three paragraphs to introduce or perhaps only exemplify why I believe new evangelicals, the evangelical left, and those who claim to be theologically conservative but socially liberal (in the current sense) are actually either just plain liberal-leftist or somewhere between simple and simply confused. I should acknowledge up front that this post is really just an outline of something which would require half a book to defend in the way I believe each line and link both ought to be and can be defended. But such it is, and such it must be, at least for now.

First paragraph—what I’d like to see as a holistic conservative: I’d like to see a free and virtuous society. Because I value freedom of religion I’d like to see freedom of conscience. Because freedom of conscience includes choices about the value of scarce resources, I’d like to see economic freedom (not the same as economic power) as well. A free market is the venue within which economic freedom exists. Of course, that rosy chain of liberty looks cankered when its necessary corollaries, personal responsibility and risk, are included in the picture. And it is true. I want to see a society where freedom, responsibility, and risk are all present. I don’t want to see any of the downside of risk realized, but it will be. So it is true that if I want to see a society with risks present, I must also acknowledge that my ideal society would have hurting people in it as well—cancer victims who did not buy insurance and widows and orphans whose departed provider did not save them any money. But I’m not quite finished with this paragraph. Because I’d also like to see a society where people invite neighbors and strangers into their homes and where they personally help those who are in need. As I said, I don’t just want a free society, but a free and virtuous one.

Second paragraph—why the free and virtuous society appears inadequate to the left: All the idealism of the first paragraph sounds great as long as everyone is virtuous and suffering people don’t fall through the cracks. But not everyone is virtuous, not every person who suffers will be cared for, and therefore people will fall through the cracks. A society in which people’s suffering is so systemically tolerated is simply unacceptable. So we need a systemic approach to sealing the cracks. Economic principles did not seal the cracks, so the only means remaining are non-economic. Well the only non-economic powers over economic resources are virtue (missing in this scenario; hence the problem) and coercion. Coercive power can be either anarchical or centralized. Since anarchy surely will not provide for the suffering, the only coercive power capable of sealing those cracks is a centralized power; that is, a centralized government. Hence, government ought to be given authority over private property so that it can be redistributed as necessary to prevent people from falling below a certain standard of living deemed to be above the cracks. It is true that the freedom to value things other than that “certain standard of living” will be gone; but so will much of the risk—really, all of the risk if things are carried out ideally.

Third paragraph—the value exchange the left has actually made: The second paragraph’s conclusion is a society where there is no room for virtuous benevolence. If a suffering soul’s care ever did fall into the hands of an observant and benevolent person, it would be evidence that the system (the bureau of benevolence) had failed. So the left’s society is one in which material needs would be met (not really, but in their ideal world) and the exercise of personal care—actually voluntarily sharing resources with a person about whom the giver cares—would be impossible. To be clear: the evangelical left sacrifices virtue (morality) for the sake of material security.

Perhaps those three paragraphs call for a footer, even if only a question: “Or what is the point if a person gains the whole material world, but loses his own soul?”

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A weakness in my personal study of texts, biblical and otherwise, has always been my reluctance to rely on secondary sources for interpretation. I’m not sure whether my motive is noble in the sense of relying on self-discipline or arrogant in the sense of rejecting any reading other than my own. But either way, or more likely somewhere in between, there my commitment has lain.

And either as a result of that commitment or in spite of it, I have been blessed to learn from texts some interesting things apparently often overlooked.

As a high-schooler, my argument for my approach was simply that it was not my responsibility to find out what everyone else thought—that it was my responsibility actually to think. My experiences and personal characteristics would create a unique intersection with each text I encountered. Why, I reasoned, would it be worth existing just to think other people’s thoughts? (My vocabulary was not the same then, but my argument was.)

The only serious problem with that line of reasoning is that it presumes there (more…)

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NPR broadcast an interview with President Obama Monday, July 20th, including this little exchange about taxing the wealthy to pay for health-care for the poor. At first glance, what the president says appears to be sensible. Those who have plenty of money should give a little of their wealth to take care of the poor. But how he intends for them to give contradicts the very nature of giving. That is, as he says, they “ought to pay a little more in taxes.”
Leviticus 19′s provision for the poor illustrates the error. In that chapter, wealthy landowners (all landowners) are told not to reap every bit of grain in their fields, but to leave the corners untouched so the poor can come in and glean the leftovers. Verses 9-10 in that chapter say: “9 And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest.  10 And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the LORD your God.” So the wealthy should give a little to help meet the needs of the poor. Good so far.
But the next verse, 11, is: “Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another.” Why? Any number of reasons justify the proximity of the two teachings. But the most important point in two very similar directions: first, that the poor do not have the prerogative of taking from the wealthy what the wealthy have not left behind for them. They could not, for instance, simply go and harvest in someone else’s fields. But second, and even more importantly, the wealthy cannot give what is not theirs. Once private property is no longer respected as such there is no giving going on.
President Obama believes the wealthy should give to meet the needs of the poor. So do I. But I believe the wealthy should be left both their resources and the liberty to succeed or fail in their moral obligation to give toward the needs of the poor.
And the president should say what he means: not just that the wealthy should give to meet the needs of the poor, but that the property (money) of the wealthy should be confiscated so that the rest of us can force on the wealthy what they may or may not have chosen to do freely if given the chance.
There can be no moral giving unless there is a moral respect for the privilege of private property.

(The objection that too many will be left in need if giving is voluntary is not self-evident since there is no reason to believe an inherently morally void bureaucracy using resources unearned and confiscated from the wealthy would have any greater success than the morally motivated behavior of even a smaller set of free people with their own resources—but that argument is beyond the scope of this brief post!)

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Post-moderns attempt to escape the narrow confines of a culture defined by the Enlightenment. That attempt includes moving from pure individualism to community, from propositional claims to narrative, from strict rationalism to contentment with inconsistency, from truth to authenticity, and from integrity to transparency. Every one of those moves is surrounded by dangerous cliffs overlooking jagged valley floors. But that discussion is for another day.

The point here is that by making those moves, post-moderns also end up embracing a type of community which is organic and emergent rather then artificially planned, engineered, and executed. There is something about post-modernity which expects the unexpected, and does not believe that air-tight solutions really have all the holes sealed up. So natural pressures and and the choices of individuals acting as part of a community within those pressures creatively emerge into solutions unforeseen by those living within strict rationalistic guidelines.

Interestingly, conservatives share exactly the (more…)

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Conservatives have a reputation for discounting the suffering of the needy and for legislating morality. But a swim just under the surface of that accusation reveals that the current is actually moving the other direction. Two strokes should make the point.

Stroke one: a fundamental of conservatism is confidence in the nature of free market economics. After all, anything other than free market force on an economy is actually an unjust intrusion on a system which presumes equality of opportunity for every actor, a basic value for conservatives. The critic asks, how does a free market feed the poor? The direct (but not complete) answer is that it simply doesn’t. The response to which is that the market, therefore, is morally insufficient, if not entirely vacuous, lacking compassionate intervention. (It is peripheral to this argument that hunger and poverty actually motivate productivity and that productivity benefits everyone in the system, including the poor.)

But nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, there is absolutely no reduction of the personal responsibility for benevolence in a free market economy. It is the presumption that benevolence must be the result of an artificial regulation on the market which conservatives reject, not benevolence itself.

And there’s the second stroke: making benevolence the concern of government instead of the concern of charitable organizations and morally responsible individuals is a terrible idea. What motivates it (the terrible idea) is the fear that people will fall through the cracks, and that even those who don’t fall through the cracks completely might be in significant misery before someone notices and gives them help. It’s a legitimate fear.

But in the free market, it is that suffering which motivates those who can to work out of their poverty toward a better future. And it is the aversion to the suffering of others and the fear that they will fall through the cracks which motivates individuals and local organizations to step in and help those in need who cannot work toward that better future. But it is necessarily organically motivated, not bureaucratically. To remove the risk and pain from the system removes the only thing that allows genuine altruism rather than artificial optimism to move the whole system. In other words, if it is moral to meet the needs (not just desires) of the needy, then it is the height of legislating morality to force everyone to meet the need through taxation, rather than to allow those who actually care to do something about it personally.

There are all kinds of practical reasons why it is better for the response to be motivated spiritually and engaged locally (which would also be a feature of the free market), but they are not the point here.

The gist of the issue is that a bureaucracy can enforce mandatory pain-amelioration to salve the public conscience and cover over the need, but it cannot tolerate a constant awareness of real needs and it cannot produce the legitimately helpful response to those needs which personal engagement brings. No. Only morally motivated agents acting either individually or freely in local organizations can do so. It is risky, messy, and in some ways painful (for everyone involved). But it is also both actually moral and actually compassionate. And it is, after all, always better to swim with the current than against it.

(Afterthought: By the way, the notion of compassionate conservatism meaning that conservatives ought to promote welfare-type issues along with conservative values is fundamentally flawed. Real conservatism condemns the legislated redistribution of wealth and promotes real compassion in the same stroke.)

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I read this quotation yesterday on the air and I’ve had a few people ask about it. I received it by e-mail from Penna Dexter so I don’t know the original source, but It is right on the mark, so I’m happy to post it here:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

The late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931 – 2005

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Nancy Pelosi’s Fallacy: Here’s a part of how Nancy Pelosi justified her party’s decision to include family planning and contraceptive funding in the stimulus plan working its way through Congress. “The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception—will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.” Representative Pelosi has crammed two enormous errors into this one small statement.
First, she is wrong economically. Some people will (more…)

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Someone e-mailed me this picture with the caption, redneck seafood. Since I now have less than half-inch hair, I believe I can use the word “redneck” with some impunity. And I must admit, the appearance is better than the traditional “tube steak” look.
The auto industry is tube steak. Congress is playing chef. The loans are precise slices in the “meat”. Political posturing is the presentation. Free market forces are the unchanging reality within which everything is taking place.
Now remind me: after all the cutting and renaming is done, what’s the auto industry again?

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Intercollegiate Studies Institute has posted an online civics/history quiz. You can access it by following the link from here.
Here’s the challenge as they offer it:

Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better? Questions were drawn from past ISI surveys, as well as other nationally recognized exams.

I’d love to know how you did.

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The following paradox is certainly not the only one facing American culture, nor is it the only one contributing to the divisiveness apparent in almost every aspect of that culture. But it is a huge one, perhaps even the most deep-seated and influentially pervasive of all. In a nutshell, the problem is that the enlightenment (in more generic Western terms) and America (more specifically) are based on a commitment to individualism and to improving the human condition. Is the inherent contradiction not obvious?

• Rising Personal Liberty

One of the most basic underlying concepts which motivated the Enlightenment is a high opinion of human nature: the belief that (more…)

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