Ren,
This is taking the form of an open letter to you because you asked me a question the other week. I realized as I began sifting through my thoughts around the topic that this can’t be answered without a carefully outlined book, which I am unwilling to write. What you get instead is a loose hanging letter that is anecdotal. I am not sure if it answers your question, so much as it lays out how I see the political landscape. It is not tightly written, nor serious in tone. It is merely a letter from one friend to another. Please take it as such. I’m using my blog to make it an open letter for history’s sake. I want my kids to know my heart as it develops. I want them to know why I took the positions I took and did the things I did. That is now the purpose of my blog and you afforded me opportunity to add to the already existing catalog of thoughts. Also, it is not well edited. I am sorry about that. Enjoy my friend, I am so grateful for you.
I find myself in an interesting political situation. Let me explain. I am a long time Libertarian. In college, I was profoundly influenced by the writings of Frederick Bastiat, a French political theorist. He related a scenario in which 10 people found themselves in a community. One of the ten had $1000. two had $100 and the remaining seven only had $10 each. Seven of the ten voted to act as a democracy and then voted to distribute all the cash equally among the ten people. The man with $1000 objected. He had earned the money through hard work and he knew that at least two of the men with only $10 didn’t work at all. So the seven men set upon the man and took his money by force and divided it among themselves. Bastiat pointed out that such behavior was thievery.
That story still resonates with me but perhaps for different reasons than Bastiat’s. Let me explain what I mean before returning to the story and my conundrum. My political theory has to be tied to my theological theory. A few days ago, I posted a post simply entitled, “I Believe.” As I sifted through what I believed, I realized that central to my understanding of life is the belief that both humanity and individuals are made in the image of God. This one statement is at the vortex of my conundrum. For the image of God is a holy thing both in the individual and humanity. Part of my calling is to help individuals live into their Imago Dei; Calling forth glory from within them so that it can be offered as a gift to the rest of the creation.
What makes individuals possess the image of God is up for debate. I am incapable of listing them all here. I will limit this list to some of the teleological aspects of the Imago Dei. Theologians have listed: humanity’s capacity for agape and empathy, people's design for relationships, creativity, and freedom. This does not include the ontological aspects of the image of God in each of us.
I posit when we limit any one of these, we limit the Imago Dei in that individual. When we thwart creativity we actually thwart the Kingdom. When we limit or restrict freedom we do the same thing. And when we limit freedom or stifle creativity, we often limit peoples’ ability to love and live in relationship with others. I need to flesh that out using the story above.
When the majority forced the rich man to share his wealth with them, they stole from him the ability to choose love. His act of giving his money to them was neither loving nor caring. It was coerced. What would have happened if they had offered an invitation instead of an ultimatumIn? They acted from a place of fear instead of relying on their Creator for their sustenance and survival, they trusted in their own power, limiting themselves to the world they could see rather than the world they could not.?
Many argue that such a position is purely utopian. It cannot work in a broken world full of selfishness. I am surprised that many of my friends on the left who reject the very notion of original sin, hating “reformed theology” become very “reformed" on this point. They do nit trust people to be good. They do not trust people to choose love. People must be forced to take the actions of love to protect those who have no opportunity, and who could very well die without their aid.
Meanwhile, my conservative friends also take positions from a place of fear. They think we need to limit the freedom of people to make supposedly, "moral choices" (noneconomic moral choices.) They do not think we can allow people the freedom to choose drugs and addiction because too many will do so. We do not want to allow abortion because too many people will have them. We can’t allow gay marriage because it will promote a gay lifestyle and elevate homosexuals' choices to be in a monogamous gay relationship to the same status as their choice to be in a heterosexual relationship (either monogamous or not). We need to spend trillions on defense, because if we don’t our enemies will choose to destroy us. We can’t allow people to choose to come live in our country whenever they want! THE left doesn’t want to be forgotten here either. We need to outlaw guns because people choose to use them for bad things.
In all of these cases, we limit peoples’ freedom to choose the good because we are afraid. We take power over them to force them to behave in a way we think they should behave. Both my conservative and my liberal friends are guilty of taking power over people to shape their behavior. Whenever they do they limit peoples' freedom to live into their Imago Dei and choose love.
Love is so big it has two opposites. First is indifference. If I don’t care, I don’t love. Second is fear. When I act from a "non-immediate" fear I cannot love. Immediate fear is a fear that yells for a person to stop or get run over by a train. It must be separated from the “what if” fear that all people tend to stew in. Both of these opposites come into play in this discussion.
Let’s talk about indifference. When anything is someone else’s responsibility people tend to grow indifferent about it. They no longer need to pay attention to it for it is assumed it has been addressed. I know that when I pass the person on the street holding a sign asking for help I have two responses. The first is skepticism, the second is to hand them a list of service agencies that will provide them the care they need. I have become indifferent because the job to take care of these sometimes unfortunate individuals is the collective’s responsibility. I’ve abdicated my personal responsibility to another. I’ve ceased loving. While it is my responsibility to love no matter what, our welfare state has wrongly created in me a sense that poverty and caring for those who have not, is not my problem. I fear that the move to create more agencies to care for unfortunates is simply an attempt to relinquish responsibility that we no longer want because we are tired of the hard work of loving.
Now let’s talk about fear. To the extent that we are scared that something won’t be accomplished unless we usurp power, we act from a place of idolatry, Usurping God’s role in ongoing creation. We don’t trust him to make things happen the way we want or expect and so we take power over. In the above example we steal, playing Robin Hood to make sure that the neediest in society have enough. Some might say that it is motivated from love, but I suggest it is because we really want to abdicate our responsibilities.
How can we in good conscious ask others to give up their coats when we have not first chosen to give up our own? How can we ask another to give up their property when we have not offered our own?
That is only one side of this argument. Libertarians (small “l” rather than large “L”) hold to the autonomy of the individual. They are wrong. Genesis 1.26-27 does not say that individuals are made in the image of God. It says that humanity is made int he image of God. No individual is autonomous. Science has disproven the myth of autonomy. And my experience has disproven the myth of autonomy. The choices you make have direct effects upon my life. If you own property up stream from me and choose to dam a stream that I rely upon, your actions steal my opportunity to live and thrive. A true libertarian would argue that it is tough on me, the one that “owns” the spring or the glacier from which the stream is born defect owns all the water in the stream. Rarely do you find such a pigheaded libertarian, however. Even libertarians admit limits to their theory.
It is far easier to see autonomy on a continuum. The question becomes where do you end up landing on the continuum? That is a question that I have been wrestling with for the past few weeks. I think I want to suggest (without knowing how it works itself out fully) that instead of autonomy existing on a two-dimensional continuum it must be seen at least three-dimensionally. For no one exists autonomously from God. There is no real autonomy in the world. We are all dependent upon our Creator for our very existence. He is the one that holds evil at bay. He is the one that unleashes and allows love to flow. He is the one that invites us to live in a Kingdom of his making rather than our own.
In Genesis 4 after Cain kills his brother, God curses him and sends him out to wander and never settle. Cain then goes out and starts a city. This is how we as humans typically respond to God. It is as if we give him the finger. I know that sometimes I have given him the finger. This is a picture of our attempt at autonomy. Autonomy and freedom are not equal; nor are they synonymous. The minute we claim freedom to hoard or exert power over another, we cease being free. I realize that this is more of a theological premise than a political one, and yet it has to come into play here.
When I worked at the University of Michigan I got to spend time hanging out with George Mavrodes. He told me the story of the sociologist friend of his that went to live with the Amish during the presidential campaign of 1951 when Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight Eisenhower. The whole Amish community, though they would never vote, supported Eisenhower. This confounded the sociologist. He asked them about it and he was told that Stevenson was divorced and they would never trust a man of that questionable character in the White House and they wanted a strong General to run the country so that they could live in peace. This only served to confuse him more. And so he asked more questions.
The Amish related that people are called to different things and that they were called to be a people of peace, much as a cobbler is called to be a cobbler or a blacksmith to be a blacksmith, but then they acknowledged that such a calling was not universal. All are not called to pacifism. God calls others to be carriers so that they could live in peace.
This enters into this conversation to say that though love demands I not take power over another, that does not mean that it is true for everyone. It is simply true for me. I am called to hold up a banner of invitation for people to give up their need to take power over in the name of love and invite others to join me. If I required it, I would violate my own calling.
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