Tom &
Linda Rawles
Can A
Christian Be A Libertarian?
Earlier this summer, our Southern
Baptist Pastor and I were playing golf.
In our usual discussion of the freedom Christians have in Christ, we
turned our attention to the troubling and divisive issue of abortion. Almost in the middle of my backswing -which
should tell you how seriously we take our golf- he stated that, in his opinion,
government was an agent of immorality by allowing abortions to happen. I
stopped my backswing, turned to him, and asked a question that he has still not
answered. If that is true, I said, is
God also an agent of immorality because He too allows abortions to happen?
That simple encounter, involving one
of the most grace-oriented, non-legalistic pastors I have ever known, captures
the essence of what Linda and I want to discuss today, the reconciliation of
our Christian and libertarian principles.
While the logic of this reconciliation is abundantly clear to us, we are
motivated to share it with you by two separate but connected concepts prevalent
in the world today.
The first is the unfortunately large
and vastly increasing use by Christians of the force of government to promote
their Christian ideals. Thus, the
religious left, driven by Christ's request to feed the hungry, uses the
coercive power of government to redistribute wealth, to take property by force
from those who have to give it to those who have not. By the same token, the religious right, equally driven by
Christ's admonition to "go and sin no more," uses the force of
government to define and, then, dictate morality. Force is, of course, completely anathema to the understanding
libertarian, and it is not our purpose to convince libertarians that the use of
force for either of these purposes is wrong.
You already get it. But it is
our purpose to help Christians understand that the use of force, even in the
name of Christ, is contrary to the teachings of Christ and, ultimately,
contrary to God's greatest gift to Man:
freedom.
Second, we have, sadly, discovered
that there is a great deal of fear and dread surrounding the
interconnectiveness of these two groups. Christians, who do not understand the
freedom they have in and because of Christ, reject libertarianism as the
instrument of immorality. Meanwhile, libertarians frequently reject
Christianity as an inflexible set of rules and regulations that stifle and
destroy the human spirit, crushing all human freedom beneath its heel of
intolerance. Members of each group
frequently view the principles of the other as inconsistent and incompatible
with their own views.
Properly understood, nothing is
further from the truth. And, since both
libertarians and Christians seek the truth, our mission is to convince the
world that both groups seek and serve the same truth: freedom. While we do not and never would contend that
all libertarians must be Christians, we do believe that all Christians can and
should be libertarians.
Interestingly, if we were a group of
Christians, establishing the baseline of understanding would be much more
difficult and take much more time. The
diversity of opinion within the Christian body, even on core principles, is
great. That is not the case, however,
with libertarians. There is an almost
universal appreciation and understanding of the core libertarian
principles. But, so that we can be sure
we are talking the same language, and so that you, as libertarians, may see
that we are not watering down our libertarianism in order to make it compatible
with Christianity, let us spend just a few minutes agreeing on our core
principles.
Freedom and rights are
inseparable. As one of America's
founding fathers put it, "Liberty is the sun and rights are its
beams."
Rights
are the implementation of freedom, yet rights decide only one issue. They decide who gets to decide. Rights do not concern
themselves
with the merits of the decision, whether it is good or bad, moral or immoral,
appropriate or inappropriate. Rights
merely tell us, in a situation where two or more individuals have competing
claims to something, which of the two people gets to decide. For example, if I own a piece of jewellery
(that is, I have a property right in it) and Linda wants to wear it, I possess
the right so I get to decide whether she gets to wear it. The person with the right decides.
That is the power of rights. They are supreme, they are the trump
card. Linda's desire to wear my
jewellery must yield to my right to decide.
Everything must yield to rights:
desires, wants, hopes, expectations, even needs. Rights rule.
Another characteristic of rights is
that they do not concern themselves with the consequences of the decision. Choices have
consequences
because freedom has risks. But, my
recognition of someone's right to do something does not make me part of or
responsible for the decision the other person makes with his right. If bad consequences flow from his decision,
he and he alone is responsible. Thus, rights breed responsibility and accountability
while eliminating opportunities for shifting blame. Again, a simple example. If Linda owns a spring and Bill needs
some of her water to live, she has the right to decide whether to let Bill have
any of her water. If I do nothing while
Linda chooses to withhold her water from Bill, neither Bill nor I are
responsible for Bill's ensuing death.
We merely honoured Linda's right to decide and she alone bears the
responsibility for her decision. Rights
did not kill Bill and neither did my respect for and honouring of Linda's
right. Her decision killed Bill, not
her right to decide.
But, says the non-libertarian, what of
Bill's right to life? Didn't Linda's refusal to give Bill water deprive Bill of
his right to
life? The answer is yes, but for a very important
reason. Once Linda exercised her right
to decide by refusing to give Bill water, the only way Bill or I or anyone else
can get Bill the water he needs to maintain his life is to use force against
Linda. And libertarians abhor the
initiation of force even more than they abhor Bill's death. Let there be no mistake: force can and does overcome rights. But, force should never be initiated to
implement rights. Thus, while Bill had
a right to life, his right to that life can not be fulfilled by violating
Linda's right to decide and forcing her to give him water any more than force
can be used to take one of Linda's kidneys because Bill needs a kidney
transplant. Admittedly, force can be
used to protect and preserve the right to decide from force, but force can
never be used to fulfil rights.
Unfortunately, in today's world, where
the currency of rights has been devalued by the creation of positive rights,
all systems of governments in the world are premised upon the use of force to
deprive one person of a negative right (the right to decide) in order to supply
another person with a positive right (the right to a thing). Thus, returning to our first example, my
right to decide how and when my piece of jewellery is used is violated in order
to fulfil Linda's positive right to a certain minimum standard of
jewellery-enhanced beauty. On a more
realistic level, your positive right to food deprives me of my negative right
to decide how my crop (or my money) is utilized while my positive right to health
care deprives you of your negative right to decide how, when and for what
purpose your property is used. Positive
rights destroy negative rights.
Positive rights depend upon force for
their fulfilment and are, therefore, not real rights. Negative rights do not depend upon the initiation of force; they
depend merely upon others respecting and honouring the right to decide. The rise of positive rights has cheapened
negative rights, making the real rights harder to identify and defend. The
creation of positive rights has also given rise to the most ludicrous
perversion of rights: the use of force to fulfil those rights.
And, now, we reach the crux of the
matter. Force is immoral. The use of
force to achieve an objective, any objective, deprives the result of any
morality at all. It degrades and
demeans both the objective and the result.
Compelled charity is no charity; coerced faith is no faith; enforced
morality is no morality. The use of
force is wrong, immoral and, in today's world, on the rise. And Christians are leading the charge. God help me, they are, and by doing so they
are doing violence to God's plan for man, perverting the basic element of God's
relationship with man, his free will.
For those who are counting, that is
twice that I have suggested that freedom is the core element in God's plan for
man. It is now time for me to defend
that premise, and I will. But, two
quick caveats are required first. This
is not the speech for proving the existence of God; it assumes the existence of
God. For those of you who do not share
that belief, remember that this speech and our book is intended to make
Christians comfortable with liberty.
Critique it in that context.
Second, there is a school of Christianity (and others)
that believes everything is predestined.
In that case, our approach has nothing to offer for neither secular
freedom nor God's freedom is particularly important. We reject that theory and begin with the question, "What is
the essence of Christianity?"
John 3:15-16 provides the answer:
"that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his
one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have
eternal life." Thus, we become
right with God and enter into His grace when we, by faith, believe in Jesus
Christ as the Son of God, as the Saviour of the world who died on the Cross for
our sins and as the one who rose from the dead in order to give us everlasting
life. That is the essence of
Christianity.
But, on this core function of
Christian theology--who is saved and who is not--God leave the issue entirely
to man. God knows that faith cannot be
forced any more than love can be coerced.
The single most important thing to God-that man love and believe in
Him-he leaves to man, to man's choice, to man's freedom. God does not compel love or faith; He leaves
man alone to come to his own conclusion, his own decision. He gives man the freedom, the right, to
decide for himself. It is the ultimate personal decision.
With the single exception recounted in
chapter 3 of Genesis, where God said that man must not be allowed to eat of the
tree of life and He physically made it impossible for man to do so, the entire
Bible is a story of God giving man freedom to decide. God set rules, yes, but he gave man the complete freedom to
obey or not. Sure there were consequences for disobedience, but we already
established that every choice has consequences. That is part of the essential nature of freedom. Thus, Noah could have refused to build the
Ark, Abraham could have refused to circumcise his entire family, and Lot's wife
could have kept looking forward. No one forced her to turn around.
The life of Jesus is another perfect
example of biblical freedom. Jesus possessed
the ultimate freedom. He could have
avoided the Cross. At any moment during
his arrest, questioning, beating, and crucifixion, Jesus could have brought the
entire process to a stop. He could have
avoided it all. As he said in rebuking
Peter for drawing his sword in his defence, "Do you think that I cannot
call on my Father and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve
legions of angels." (Mt 26:53).
The man who healed the sick, raised the dead, gave sight to the blind,
and could call upon twelve legions of angels could have escaped, could have
changed Pilate's mind, could have vanished into thin air, could have done any
number of things to avoid his crucifixion.
But he didn't.
We also know that he did not want to
go to the Cross. He prayed for God to
take that particular cup away. But, he
loved God and wanted to do God's will rather than his own: thus he chose to proceed. He exercised his freedom by choosing to do
as God wanted, not as He wanted. Possessing the absolute power and freedom to
do whatever he wanted, Jesus Christ voluntarily and freely chose to die on the
Cross for God and for man. He decided.
What role did the rules and
regulations of God, the Law, play in Jesus' exercise of his freedom to
decide? Jesus said in Matthew 5:7 that
he did not come to abolish the Law but to fulfil it. He did so, in every particular, in every way. In order for his death to be the ultimate
punishment for all our sins, he had to be blameless and pure. He had to be
perfect and without sin because we are neither. But, his perfect adherence to the Law earned him nothing on
earth: no pardon, no stay of execution,
nothing. The Law was irrelevant to
Christ's freedom.
And that is why the Bible tell us that
the Law was crucified on the Cross with Jesus, that Chris abolished the Law in
his flesh, that the Law lacks any value, that the Law is weak and useless, that
the Law is destined to perish, and that the Law is a curse. Romans 3:20 tells us that adherence to the
law makes no man righteous in God's sight. Galatians 2:16 reminds us that no
man is justified by observing the law. Man is reconciled to God solely by
exercising his freedom to believe in a particular way. No man comes to God by adhering to God's
Law.
And man's law is no more effective,
especially when it is used as an instrument to force God's Law upon man. Unfortunately, that is how man's law is used
most often today, especially in the States.
That was not always the case. Jefferson emphasized in the Declaration of
Independence that governments are instituted among men to secure the blessings
of liberty. George Will recently said
that governments exist to secure our freedoms, not our happiness. In short, governments exist to protect
freedoms. Included in these freedoms that
government should protect is the freedom to do as God wants because we
voluntarily choose to, not because we are forced.
For instance, when Jesus said to feed
the hungry, he did not add that you should go to Caesar and get a law passed
requiring all your neighbours to give money to the government so that the
hungry could be fed. It was a personal
and intimate request of you, out of love for him, to voluntarily and freely
feed the hungry. How you respond is up
to you. When Jesus said to the woman caught
in adultery, "Go and sin no more", he did not follow that up by
hiring a lobbyist to get the Roman Senate to pass a law ensuring that lady's
future conduct. It was, again, an
intimate and personal request, and compliance was based upon the yearnings of
the heart, upon the love of Christ. How
she, and we, respond is up to us. We
have the freedom to decide, a very libertarian notion.
How, then, do we live? What guides our conduct? The apostle Paul provides the perfect answer
in 1 Corinthians 10:23 and 31. In verse
23 he writes that all things are lawful for you. That means that nothing is unlawful, that there are no laws. Thus, there are no rules, regulations,
restrictions, or prohibitions. But, he
continues in verse 31, "whatever you do, do it all for the glory of
God." Each of us needs to have the
power to decide for ourselves, for without that power of decision we can not
make the decision that glorifies God.
Without freedom, I can not choose to believe in God and I can not make
the decision or choice that will glorify God.
If I feed the hungry by paying my taxes out of fear of going to jail if
I don't, there is no glory for God.
There is just fear and force. If
I don't commit adultery because I am afraid of going to jail rather than because
God has asked me not to, there is no glory for or love of God. There is just fear and force.
When government reduces my freedoms to
choose, government diminishes the opportunities I have to glorify God by
voluntarily and freely choosing the option most pleasing to God. I must be free to not hire, not serve, not
sell to and, even, hate a black man, a disabled person and/or a Christian. I must be free to kill myself, ingest drugs,
eat red meat, and drink myself into a drunken stupor. I must be free to fornicate my brains out with as many creatures
as are willing. I must be free to keep
and/or spend my property, including my money, as I see fit. I must have all these freedoms so that I can
decide, so that I can choose not to do these things, so that by choosing not to
do these things I can honour and glorify God.
Government destroys freedom of choice, and in the process, government
destroys my opportunity to please
God.
Let us end with one final
thought. God knows we are sinners and
that we will make the wrong choices many times. Returning, finally, to answer the question I asked my golfing
pastor, that does not, however, make God an agent of immorality. It makes Him an agent of freedom, and if God
allows each of us to be free, why can't we allow each other to be free? If freedom is good enough for God, why isn't
it good enough for us?
This
speech was given at the XVIII Annual ISIL World Conference,
Costa
Rica, August 22-26 1999