Big Government Inevitably Bad Government

The debate between the left and right in our politics today is a debate over the size and roll of government. Lisa Sharon Harper and I have the same debate.

Lisa dismisses this as a "mantra" and as a false dichotomy between big and small government. She claims that the real choice is between good and bad big government. But where is this good big government apart from in the imaginations of liberals?

In his review of Left, Right and Christ in World magazine, "Left, Right, Fight, Fight, Fight," Marvin Olasky tells us why.

Centers of power attract power-seekers who then attract money-seekers, and the result is a new ruling class: In a fallen world, equality of result is an ever-receding horizon. ... Most evangelicals also favor limited government and political decentralization, because we know both from the Bible and from history that concentrations of political power lead to oppression.

I am deeply grateful to Marvin for writing the foreword (with Jim Wallis) to this book. In his review, he has nailed the issue separating the two of us, drawing attention to why the tragically misguided Evangelical left is not just biblically wrong but morally dangerous.

Christian Political Judgment

A recent commenter named Tim accused Harold and me of offering our personal opinions on politics as the Christian positions on those matters.

We are all free as citizens to think and say whatever we feel. My issue is, and has been, that this site claims to be presenting a "Christian" point of view. There is nothing "Christian" about the comments you are posting. Having a political point of view is fine. The religious right has fooled many people into believing that its views are reflective of Jesus's views. They are not! In fact, they are often in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus. Please stop soiling the name of Jesus with your politics.

Marvin Olasky addresses this issue, with particular regard to the task of the Christian journalist, in his 1995 book, Telling the Truth.

The opportunity to approach true objectivity also depends on the nature of the issue. White-water rafters speak of six classes of rapids: class-one rapids are easy enough for a novice to navigate, and class-six rapids whisper death. The issues that journalists report are rapids; providentially, the Bible is clear enough so that many of them fall into class one or two. Here are the classes and examples:


Class one: explicit biblical embrace or condemnation. The Bible condemns homosexuality so clearly that only the most shameless of those who twist Scripture can try to assert the practice’s biblical acceptability. Biblical objectivity means showing the evil of homosexuality; balancing such stories by giving equal time to gay activists is ungodly journalism. Similarly, in an article showing the sad consequences of heterosexual adultery there is no need to quote proadultery sources.

Class two: clearly implicit biblical position. Even though there is no explicit biblical injunction to place children in Christian or home schools, the emphasis on providing a godly education under parental supervision is clear. Biblical objectivity means supporting the establishment and improvement of Bible-based education, and criticizing government schools, in the understanding that turning education over to "professionals" who have no regard for God is an abdication of biblical parental responsibility.

Class three: partisans of both sides quote Scripture but careful study allows biblical conclusions. On poverty-fighting issues, partisans from the left talk of God’s "preferential option" for the poor, but the biblical understanding of justice means giving the poor full legal rights and not treating them as more worthy than the rich by virtue of their class position. Since even widows are not automatically entitled to aid, broad entitlement programs are suspect. Biblically, provision of material help should be coupled with the provision of spiritual lessons; the poor should be given the opportunity to glean but challenged to work.

Next, Olasky moves from a dependence primarily on Scripture to a much greater dependence on general revelation or philosophical reflection on nature and history.

Class four: biblical understanding backed by historical experience. Even though there is no indisputable biblical commandment that strictly limits government, chapter 8 of 1 Samuel describes the dangers of human kingship, and it is clearly bad theology to see government as savior in areas such as health care. The historical record over the centuries is clear, and in recent American experience we have particular reason to be suspicious of the person who says, "I’m from the government and I’m here to help you."

Class five: biblical sense of human nature. On class-five issues there is no clear biblical mandate and no clear historical trail, but certain understandings of human nature can be brought to bear. For example, those who believe that peace is natural emphasize negotiations and disarmament. A biblical understanding of sin, however, leads to some tough questions: What if war is the natural habit of sinful, post-Fall man? What if some leaders see war as a useful way to gain more power in the belief that they can achieve victory without overwhelming losses? History is full of mistaken calculations of that sort–dictators have a tendency to overrate their own power–but they may still plunge ahead unless restrained by the obvious power of their adversaries. Objectivity in such a situation emphasizes discernment rather than credulity: If we do not assume a benign human nature concerning warfare, we need to plan for military preparedness and raise the cost of war to potential aggressors.

Class six: Navigable only by experts, who might themselves be overturned. On a class-six issue there is no clear biblical position, no historical trail for the discerning to apply, and not much else to mark our path. On an issue of this kind–NAFTA is a good example–you should balance views and perspectives.

With these distinctions in mind, I would say that our opposition to the policies of the Obama administration falls into various classes of controversy.

Class one includes the broadly Democratic drive to normalize homosexuality.

Class two includes Obama's aggressive advocacy of abortion rights.

Class three includes his plans to overhaul the health care system, but only insofar as it is, arguably from a biblical standpoint, none of the government's business to concern itself with this matter.

Class four includes, again, health care reform, as well as the system of "cap and trade" to control overall carbon emissions. 

Class five includes Obama's naive foreign policy.

Class six includes the question of climate change, which is obviously a very technical question. But what concerns us most on that matter is what this government proposes to do in response to the issue. That falls into class four.

I hope that this helps you, Tim, in understanding how Harold and I, in good conscience, speak specifically as Christians against this government on these various matters of grave concern.

Debating Christianity? Debate Hitchens!

Miserable Old Sinner

Source: www.observer.com

We are debating all sorts of new ideas these days, from homosexual marriage to the flat tax. But strangely enough, we have also taken up debating Christianity which has been around for almost 2000 years (thousands more years if you trace it back to its seed in God's promise to Adam). Last night, The King's College, along with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and ToTheSource.org, sponsored a debate between Dinesh D'Souza and Christopher Hitchens on the question, "Is Christianity the Problem?" (The debate will be aired on BookTV (C-SPAN2), Saturday, October 27, at 7 p.m., or you can view it on The King's College webite) Of course, this debate is in response not only to Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, but also to a wave of angry, aggressively atheist books that argue not only that religion is delusional, but also that, for the sake of humanity, it should be wiped out and religious people should be disenfranchised.

I seriously wonder if Hitchens actually believes this stuff he spouts, or if he is largely an entertainer, something like a shock jock for the literati. He mentioned that Giuseppe Verdi, though he wrote beautiful sacred music for the Catholic Church, was himself an unbeliever. There was good money in it. It is possible that Hitchens is writing these books because they create controversy, and controversy sells books and produces lucrative speaking tours. If I am right, look for a well timed Hitchens conversion and then another series of fortune-generating books and speaking engagements.

As for the debate itself, I think that I am the only one at The King's College who thinks that Hitchens won. (Correct me if I am wrong...about being the only one, that is.) Not that I think he argued the correct position, but his arguments were more forceful and went unrefuted. He attacked Christianity on three points. God’s sovereign rule itself (God is a divine totalitarian despot who wants us groveling in slavish subservience), God’s providential ordering of history (he has watched the torture chamber that is human history, only to intervene much too late with a solution that only compounds the problem), and the redemptive work of Christ in his death and resurrection (barbaric, sadistic nonsense). D’Souza had nothing to say in response. He offered ad hominim arguments (Hitchens hates God) and some charges of logical inconsistency (Hitchens traces the horrors of modern totalitarianism back to Christianity where he lays the blame, but does not trace his own moral sentiments to the same source, as he ought, and offer praise). But his opponent’s blasphemous charges lay untouched.

This is the poverty of classical, evidentialist apologetics. D’Souza restricted himself from the outset to naturalistic arguments, foreswearing reference to Scripture. He caged the lion. For his part, Hitchens, who knows all those arguments, used the Bible freely. A good student or Cornelius Van Til with a presuppositionalist apologetic would have struck at the root of the disagreement, and had this guy for breakfast, as formidable as he is. Hitchens’ attack was at the biblical and theological level, where the Christian should have had the advantage. (“The cross is monstrous? Yes it is! Because sin is monstrous! You know it is!”) Had D’Souza presented a biblically more sophisticated and theologically more substantive rebuttal, he could have educated the audience and exposed Hitchens as the straw man slayer that he is. Instead, he wasted his time with discussions about science and the laws of nature, and with various sociological, consequentialist defenses. (Look at all the hospitals, and see how we abolished slavery.) Of course D'Souza made many excellent points, though Hitchens ably countered many of them. But D'Souza was defending the religion while Hitchens was attacking the faith.

Source: www.stanfordreview.org

But this also is worth mentioning. I was struck during the debate with how cheerful D'Souza seemed and how clearly miserable Hitchens is. After the debate, one of my students asked him if he is happy. He said no, but his goal is not to be happy. Of course, that is nonsense. Everyone seeks happiness, even if sometimes perversely in self-indulgent grumpiness. Someone else remarked on his continuous drinking. He said that he drinks so that the people around him will appear more interesting than they are. So he hates life and he generally dislikes the people with whom he has to share it. But it is religion that poisons everything. If religion, or even the Lord himself, is not the source of well-being in this world, Christopher Hitchens cannot offer anything in himself or in his experience as an alternative.

In the Q&A, another of my students, a mature student from Tonga, posed one of the best questions of the evening to Prof. Hitchens. He said that before Christianity came to his region, people in Figi were eating each other and on his own island...well, all he said was "what a mess!" He then asked, "If you had arrived there first, what would you have offered us in place of Christianity." Hitchens did not answer the question, but instead returned to an earlier rant against God for leaving such people in misery without intervening with effective relief. That silence in response to the student's simple challenge spoke volumes to anyone who was listening.


Let me repeat, you can view the debate on The King's College website at www.tkc.edu/debate/

The last word goes to the Lord (as of course in the end it will):

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (I Cornthians 1:18-25 ESV)

Religious Cleansing by Illiberal Liberals? Why Not?

Imagine that you are a Jew in Germany in the 1930s. You are going about your business as you always do, but you start to notice that some people are protesting very loudly that you and your kind are the embodiment of evil and a grave threat to civilization. We have been hearing such shouts this past year from a spate of anti-religious authors who are most beside themselves with rage when fulminating against Christianity and the biblical God.

If it were up to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and several others,* Christian religion as well as the thinking it engenders would be illegal and vigorously suppressed. That, at any rate, is where their rhetoric leads. As they describe religion in general and Christianity in particular, it is simply institutionalized hatred. It is easy to imagine the Supreme Court one day exempting Christianity from the protections of the first amendment with statements like, "This cannot be dignified with the name of religion. This is nothing other than organized hatred: hatred toward religion and atheism alike; hatred toward neighbor and children alike. These doctrines and ways do not merit the protection of law. Rather, law itself was instituted to protect the public against evils such as this." Any legal mind that can find constitutional protection for murdering babies as they are being born is capable of embracing this kind of legal "reasoning" as well. It's not a stretch.

Of course, these writers are only saying overtly what we see portrayed on television all the time. In "Backward atheist soldiers!" (WORLD June 30/July 7, 2007; pp. 58-60), Marvin Olasky reports a New York Times writer saying, "Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say." But the liberal media elite say it all the time. Christians, especially evangelicals, are regularly depicted as Dawkins et al. describe them: greedy, hateful and utterly miserable people who are just itching to overthrow liberal democracy and establish a new Age of Darkness...something like a Taliban regime, but more universal and without the international charm.

Alister & Joanna McGrath, in The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (IVP), detect "a whiff of panic" in all of this. "Until recently, Western atheism has waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out." Thomas Jefferson, who took the liberty of editing the New Testament to include only the true parts, thus excluding the virgin birth and the resurrection, expected that by the 19th century, religion would have become so enlightened and rationalistic that everyone would be a Unitarian. He was disappointed. The rampant atheism represented in these books goes beyond disappointment to loathing, fear and open warfare.

Every Christmas and Easter, the major news magazines faithfully produce their cover stories asking who Jesus "was" and telling us, on the basis of respectable liberal scholarship, that he was not who the Bible and our pastors tell us he "is." Why do they do this, and so consistently? After the 2000 presidential election, I noticed a sharp increase in media efforts to enlighten the public on the evils of Christian religion. Christians (along with the Supreme Court and the dark arts) put George W. Bush in the White House. George W. Bush is a mortal threat to liberty, enlightenment and world peace. Therefore Christians are a mortal threat to liberty, enlightenment and world peace. As if Ronald Reagan weren't enough! Will and Grace started playing almost continuously. Law and Order started portraying Christians as something like Nazis in a bad mood.

So what are we to make of this? And where does this lead?

The "religious cleansing," shall we call it, to which this demagoguery leads has precedent. There were various persecutions in the early centuries of the church's life.

1. Persecution under Nero (c. 64-68).
2. Persecution under Domitian (r. 81-96).
3. Persecution under Trajan (112-117). Christianity is outlawed, but Christians are not sought out.
4. Persecution under Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180).
5. Persecution under Septimus Severus (202-210).
6. Persecution under Decius (250-251). Christians are actively sought out by requiring public sacrifice. Could buy certificates (libelli) instead of sacrificing. Bishops of Rome, Jerusalem and Antioch are martyred.
7. Persecution under Valerian (257-59).
8. Persecution under Maximinus the Thracian (235-38).
9. Persecution under Aurelian (r. 270–275).
10. Severe persecution under Diocletian and Galerius (303-324). (www.religionfacts.com/christianity/history/persecution.htm)

Religionfacts.com also writes: "Pliny, a Roman governor writing circa 110 AD, called Christianity a "superstition taken to extravagant lengths." Similarly, the Roman historian Tacitus called it "a deadly superstition." (Hitchens calls it poisonous.) Christians were accused of cannibalism (on account of the Eucharist) and sexual license (on the basis of rumor that they loved each other). They were also blamed for the fall of Rome, a charge in response to which Augustine of Hippo wrote his classic, The City of God.


But fear not little church!

1. We have the sovereign creator God on our side. His enemies may strike out in panic, but his children can respond with calm assurance of what we read in Psalm 2: "Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?... He who sits in the heavens laughs... Blessed are all who take refuge in him." (vv. 1, 4, 12; ESV)

2. We have reason on our side. God made the world a rational place (that's why the sun comes up each morning and why the light goes on when you flip the switch), and so, in public debate, honest inquiry is on our side. Despite all the talk about post-modernity, a good argument still carries weight.

3. Even if God were to allow persecution (real, boot-in-the-face, let-goods-and-kindred-go persecution), it would only purify and strengthen the church, as it has done in times past and still does in many parts of the world today.

4. But even short of such seemingly fictional times (though they don't seem to fictional in places where Christians are pillaged and killed for their faith, places like Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, Sudan, North Korea and, recently, Turkey), these volleys open opportunities for public discussion of the gospel, it's claims and consequences. This is an apologetic opportunity. ("Apologetics," from the Greek apologia, are the rational, public defense of the faith.) Thus we see several books published in response to these. I have mentioned the McGrath book, but there is also Doug Wilson's Letter from a Christian Citizen (American Vision) along with several others like it. As the war on Christianity moves into this overt stage, Christians will seize this opportunity to expose the fallacies, correct the record and proclaim the good news. And because Christ is risen and reigning, we can do with arresting charity.

* Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin); Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (Twelve); Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf); also Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press) and others.