Questions about Christian Nationalism

The mainstream media and Christian organizations and leaders paint Christian nationalism as at best an error to be avoided and at worst a devilish enemy to be opposed. If you have never heard a word in its defense, please consider the following questions.

Jesus taught that the family as we know it will not exist in heaven (Mark 12:18–27). Does that mean there is no such thing as a Christian family?

Similarly, we can expect no schools and businesses as we know them in heaven. Are “Christian school” and “Christian business” thus misnomers?

There will be people from “every … nation” in heaven, but nations as we know them will not be there. Does that mean there can be no such thing as a Christian nation in this life and it is therefore wrong to attempt to build one?

The message Jesus began to preach is called “the gospel of the kingdom” (Matt 4:23; Mark 1:14). A kingdom is a community of communities—villages, towns, whatever. My church is striving to build one of those “villages”—a fractal, if you will, a part of a whole that has all the characteristics of the whole.

A kingdom has someone in charge; in our case, it is the God who made heaven and earth. The subjects of the kingdom have a way to access the one in charge; in our case, it is through Jesus and his death on the cross. Kingdoms have laws; ours begins with prohibitions against taking life or property, betraying trust, and besmirching reputation and goes on to commend grace, mercy, and compassion. Kingdoms bring due consequences for violations of those laws—here the fractal analogy breaks down because congregations and their networks deal with issues different from those of the larger polity, but in both cases, “we do this; we don’t do that”; the smaller units should deal with issues in consideration of the welfare of the larger units. Finally, a kingdom needs an ultimate goal; ours is eternal life with our creator, redeemer, and sanctifier.

Christian nationalism is simply the idea that the gospel affects not only individuals and congregations but whole societies. Jesus has commissioned his people to “make disciples of all the nations” (Matt 24:19); he said that “repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations” (Luke 24:47). The title of my church’s in-house publication, Spreading Branches, alludes to the idea that the gospel benefits societies—nations—that befriend it (Matt 13:32; cf. Dan 4:12, 20–21). My own view is that by “nations” he meant any group of people “that calls us us and them them,” not the current nation-state, with flags and a privileged few who lord it over those who cannot defend themselves (Luke 22:25). Either way, though, the gospel is to affect society, even people who do not believe.

Any community in which life, property, trust, and reputation are safe is by nature—by definition—just. Justice uninterrupted leads to peace, and peace to prosperity. Is that not what we want for our children?

Cotton Mather famously lamented that godliness—sincere devotion to Jesus for who he is—gave birth to prosperity and the daughter killed the mother. No society is perfect, and what happened to Mather’s society will eventually be true of any society that travels the road of godliness. But is it an insult to God to try to build, maintain, or reclaim such a society?

Christian nationalists are often accused of wanting “political power for its own sake.” What does that look like in measurable terms? Can our brethren in much of the world be forgiven for wishing and praying that God would grant them enough political power to have relief from the persecution and run-of-the-mill chaos they—and other innocents—are currently suffering? What evidence is there for the charge that Christian nationalists’ goal is to become the privileged few who push nobodies around? Or is the goal to bring due consequences to murderers, thieves, frauds, and slanderers so that innocent people can “live a quiet life, and to attend to [their] own business, and to work with [their] hands” (1 Thess 4:11) and spread the gospel?

If wanting to see not only our homes and churches but our society at large characterized by justice and peace is a good thing, then Christian nationalism’s specific imperfections, not its goals, are the proper objects of criticism.

Tetranomy in Action I: Abuse by Church Staff

 

Does anyone among you, if he has a matter against someone else, dare to go to court before the unrighteous and not before the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if by you the world is judged, are you unworthy of the most insignificant courts? Do you not know that we will judge angels, not to mention ordinary matters? Therefore, if you have courts with regard to ordinary matters, do you seat these despised people in the church? I say this to your shame. So is there not anyone wise among you who will be able to render a decision between his brothers? But brother goes to court with brother, and this before unbelievers! Therefore it is already completely a loss for you that you have lawsuits with one another. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? But you wrong and defraud, and do this to brothers! (1 Corinthians 6:1–8)

Now if your brother sins against you, go correct him between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take with you in addition one or two others, so that by ⌊the testimony⌋ of two or three witnesses every matter may be established. And if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses to listen to the church also, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. (Matthew 18:15–17)

Tetranomy (from tetra, “four,” and nomos, “law”) is my term for a social order in which everyone is bound to respect his neighbor’s life, property, trust, and reputation. Everyone is bound by the sixth through ninth commandments: Do not kill. Do not commit adultery (i.e., fraud). Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. No exception is given in Exodus 20, the rest of the Torah that follows, or any of the summaries in the New Testament (e.g., Mark 10:19; Luke 18:20; Rom 13:9). No one is allowed to violate his neighbor’s physical life, the property that makes that life possible, the trust that enables societies to function, or the reputation that underlies trust.

The problem, of course, is that not everyone lives that way; in fact, nobody lives that way all the time. So what is to be done when the laws are broken? Isn’t some coercively funded agency needed to “administer retribution on the wrongdoer” (Rom 13:4)?

I have answered that question at length beginning here. I would like to present in this post a hypothetical situation that demonstrates how the tetranomic solution to the abuse of parishioners by church staff is superior to the conventional statist alternative. (I have dealt with a similar real-life situation here.)

In this scenario, X, a youth group leader, is accused of having sexual intercourse with Y, an early-teenage girl, after grooming her for years, luring her into a compromising situation, threatening her when she refused his initial advances, and finally forcing himself on her when she resisted. Y has told her parents, who have apprised the head pastor of her accusation. The pastor now has a choice between trying to settle the matter in-house or going to the police.

Before we go any further, we need to establish that 1 Corinthians 6:1–8 and Matthew 18:15–17 apply to this situation. Anyone who would say that Y’s father does not self-evidently “[have] a matter against someone else” needs to come up with a better definition of that phrase that does not include this case. Was Paul talking only about lawsuits, or can we reasonably induce the principle that Christians are sinners who will sin against and thereby damage each other from time to time and lawsuits in the “unrighteous” courts are an example of the wrong way to deal with such sins? To limit Paul’s argument to lawsuits looks to me like limiting “thou shalt not commit adultery” to intercourse and not to, say, bait-and-switch marketing. No, Paul’s words apply to our scenario because he was laying down a principle that applies to any situation in which one Christian is seeking restitution for a sin committed against him by a Christian brother.

Jesus tells us how to deal with a brother—any brother—who sins against us: We are to keep the matter between us if possible. If that fails, we take the matter before “one or two others” who have the wisdom to advise but no power to enforce. If that also fails, we go “to the church,” which I take to refer to the church leadership first and the congregation second. (The Greek term originally referred to any group of people who held regular formal meetings, so it could refer to any regular meeting of Christians from a handful to a throng.) The “one or two others” would have been laymen, so “the church” in a Presbyterian system would be the session (perhaps through the pastor), who would either appoint a committee to hear both sides and render a judgment or do so as a full board. Some churches might take “to the church” to mean that they need to call a meeting of the whole congregation (which I hope would be open only to adult communicant members). Either way, the meetings at that point would have the goal not only of finding the truth but also of setting the terms for the parties to be reconciled. Once the dispute has passed the “one or two others” stage, any party who refuses to allow the dispute to go “to the church” or to submit to the judgment rendered is to be treated “as a Gentile and a tax collector,” not as a church member.

Gentiles (and, presumably, tax collectors) “lord it over” their neighbors (Luke 22:25)—their relationships are determined by power, not by justice or compassion, and Jesus tells his church that those who refuse to submit to the decisions of the church are looking to have the dispute resolved by power, not by justice or compassion, in which case they are to be excommunicated (i.e., have their membership revoked) and allowed to seek their fortunes from the state.

Some would say Romans 13 gives the father no choice but to go to the police: rape is a crime, and prosecuting crime is the state’s responsibility. But this raises two questions. First, who decides what is and is not a crime? Is a crime whatever the state says is a crime? This is a subset of the “render unto Caesar” question: Is anything Caesar puts his name on legitimately his? Does he have the right to put his name on anything he desires? In this case, if he puts his name on Y in the name of protecting her, does she primarily belong to him or to her parents? If she belongs primarily to Caesar in this case, how can she not now be subject to Caesar’s guidelines for education (e.g., Islam, Christianity, atheism, critical theory) and conscription for whatever purposes Caesar has in mind for her (e.g., Est 2:2–4)?

Second, what are the likely consequences of this action? The first is that the church and X will get their names in the paper. If X is married, his wife will bear shame before everyone who can identify her. If he has children, they will become objects of ridicule in school and wherever else word travels. If he is convicted and jailed—and if he cannot raise bail before trial—his household will have no breadwinner, and his wife will be essentially widowed and his children orphaned while he is incarcerated, and his ability to find employment once he is released will be severely hampered. And this is if he confesses when he is first confronted or is acquitted by the court!

If he denies the accusation, the prosecution will go through church records with a fine-toothed comb and interview anyone he thinks will be able to strengthen his case. Any defense lawyer engaged by X will be looking for any fault in the accusation that will enable him to win an acquittal. Y will then become a tool for the prosecutor and an enemy to be destroyed by the defense, both in pursuit of their careers. The execution of justice and the welfare of the victim will be secondary at best.

If God truly is the God of justice and of the afflicted, there has to be a better way for Christians to handle this kind of horrible situation, one that brings glory to him alone and provides a greater opportunity for justice. There is, and it involves the church acting as the church.

How can the matter be settled in-house? First, we need to define our phrase settle the matter. It does not mean that X says, “I’m sorry,” and that’s it. The damage has been substantial, so the restitution needs to be substantial. Any satisfactory resolution has to be just that—satisfactory to the victim and the church adjudicators and ideally one the perpetrator agrees is just and even merciful. The primary aim must be to fulfill justice—the question of mercy has to wait until a just solution has been defined and plans made for its implementation—but if “mercy triumphs over [just] judgment [i.e., justice]” (Jas 2:13), the question of mercy will need to be addressed eventually.

Any solution rendered by imperfect adjudicators will be imperfect, but that is no more true for an adjudication by a church than for one by the state. If no one will be satisfied with any solution, not even one provided by the state, perhaps it is better to think of an optimal solution. The optimal solution restores the victim’s personhood and restores the perpetrator to Christian fellowship and to the victim as much as is humanly possible. Is such a course of action more likely from a group of men selected by the congregation for their commitment to Scriptural faith and practice or from those who “[do] not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to [them]” (1 Cor 2:14)?

Of course, any resolution will probably give the victim less than she would like to receive and cost the perpetrator more than he would like to pay, but both are welcome to weigh the likelihood that the state will serve them better and act accordingly.

So the question is now, How can a just course of action be decided upon? According to Matthew 18:15–17, the process should involve as few people as necessary. If Y’s family confronts X and he confesses and is willing to cooperate with the terms Y’s family sets, who else needs to know? If Y were my daughter, I would expect X to resign from his post and pay for any counseling Y needed. I would want X to be kept accountable, and I would ask church leaders to be part (or all) of the process, which would likely include provisions beyond resignation and counseling (e.g., restricted access to church facilities). According to 1 Corinthians 6:1–8, these men should be up to the task; if not, the congregation should be dissolved.

If X makes restitution and submits to the other disciplinary measures imposed by the church leaders, what could be better? But what if he doesn’t?

As noted earlier, if my conversation with X yields no fruit, then I take “one or two others” to listen to both sides and give their unofficial opinions of the merits of our arguments and recommendations for ways the matter can be settled without it going any further. If that doesn’t work, I take the matter up with the church leaders. They appoint a committee to hear both sides, ask questions, and render the best official verdict and terms of resolution they can. This is crucial: the church leaders are redeemed sinners, and their decision will be imperfect. But they are (in Presbyterian circles, at least, though in any congregation that elects its leadership) “as good as it gets,” and those who ordain their leaders covenant before God to obey them. So, if X refuses to abide by their decision, he is excommunicated from the church, 1 Corinthians 6 no longer applies, and I am free to take the matter to the police.

However, if I do so, the horrible consequences of requesting state intervention listed earlier would ensue, so the church leadership would be acting reasonably if they were to beg me not to do so and to try to work out another solution. They might agree to take on my daughter’s restorative care by paying for counseling or whatever and take on the responsibility of keeping track of X to make sure he doesn’t get into positions where he can repeat his offense. Or they might decide that my daughter has not provided enough proof for her accusations to overcome reasonable doubt and consider the case closed.

Either way, if I refuse to accept the church leaders’ decision and take the matter to the police, I am excommunicated, and I will have to live with whatever the state provides.

But if tetranomy becomes the law of the wider society and if X refuses to listen to the church or if the church chooses to close the case, there will be no police for me to turn to. Then what?

I assume that tetranomy can become the law of the wider society only through a bottom-up process by which affinity groups become large and strong enough that the state withers away. Specifically, given the choice between taxing their neighbors to finance schools, parents will choose to vote against school levies and the politicians who support them—and win the elections—and they will work alone or with others to build what they consider the optimal education systems for their families. If God blesses their efforts, tax-funded education becomes obsolete. Again, people will vote against the one-size-fits-all healthcare bureaucracy necessitated by tax funding, and it will be replaced by voluntarily funded institutions. They will keep watch over each other’s property and deal with malefactors, obviating the need for career police and military. They will take care of those in need, obviating the need for tax-funded provisions for retirement and unemployment. In short, they will form communities. Some communities will be expressly Christian; others will not. Different Christian communities will have different requirements for entry (e.g., policies on alcohol or beach apparel) and offer different benefits (e.g., grief counseling or firearms training). The hope is that the Christian communities will work so much better than the secular versions that people will be drawn to Christ (1 Pet 3:15) and God will crush Satan under their feet (Rom 16:20; Mal 4:3).

If the wider society devolves into chaos before coercive institutions can be supplanted through the ballot box, then viable communities will of necessity be established by force of arms. The results in that case would probably share many authoritarian characteristics with the state they replace and therefore be inferior to an order established through peaceable supplanting. We can be sure, however, that whatever institutions emerge will be as satisfactory as they are voluntary, and we can hope that they will make establishing voluntarism a goal.

For now, we should strive to build congregations that see that their members’ needs are met—spiritual first, then (in no particular order) physical, educational, health, nutritional, and relational. Part of meeting their spiritual needs is keeping them out of the kind of situation in our scenario. But sinners gonna sin, so second best is learning how to deal with the problems that come up without recourse to “the unrighteous.”

Our scenario neglected a crucial relationship that was damaged by X’s attack on Y: his relationship with his wife. He committed adultery against her. Adultery is a capital offense in the Torah. How does a congregation deal with that or with murder, the ultimate capital crime? Dealing with sexual abuse in-house is currently illegal, but it can be pulled off by competent church elders—and should be. Executing capital offenders is a different matter, if for no other reason than the impossibility of keeping it hidden. I will explore a possible strategy for dealing with capital offenders in part two of this series.

The Universe: It’s God or Magic, Christ or Chaos, Anarchy or Tyranny

My wife has noticed, often in exasperation, that with me, things are either black or white. It’s true—I like to join until there is only one split. You are either alive or dead. You are either standing on top of the cliff or you have fallen over it. You are either innocent or guilty.

So it’s natural that I split the question of cosmology into two alternatives. Either God created the world, or it is the product of magic. Either societies submit to Jesus, or they become chaotic. Either everyone in society is subject to the same laws, or the powerful do as they please with the weak. We will consider those issues in order.

Either there is a conscious being—a god, a creator—outside the universe available to our five senses, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, then it follows that we and all other tangible objects are the result of mindless processes. Furthermore, the question of why anything exists at all is meaningless: If there is nothing outside the universe, it could not have come into existence for any purpose, so it has no inherent meaning. But we’ll get to that later.

The question of the origin of the universe can be answered only one of two ways. Either everything has always existed, or there was a beginning.

If it has always existed, existence is either static or changing. Since we see motion, which is change, we can discount stasis. So we’re left with an ever-existing universe that changes. Are those changes directional or cyclical? While the climate cycle and the life cycles of everything from insects to empires point to cyclicality, statements like “History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme” and “We never cross the same river twice; not only does the river change, but we become different people in the meantime” cast a shadow on strict cyclicality.

One might also point to the observation that the universe seems to be expanding at increasing speed. If the universe’s history were a series of big bangs, expansions, and contractions to a black hole, we would expect that it would be expanding but the speed of expansion was slowing down. (That is, unless we are still in a phase analogous to that in which a bullet accelerates to its maximum speed, in which case we would need to find a source of the energy driving that acceleration.)

This leaves us with a history that spirals, sort of like a slinky that goes left and right on the floor and up and down over the furniture at a speed that is currently increasing. Maybe the increase in speed will diminish and eventually become negative, the speed itself will decrease to nothing, and the universe will eventually contract again and the process will repeat. But this is a maybe that cannot be proven and seems counterintuitive. So let’s look at the possibility that there was a beginning.

Where would the beginning of that slinky be? And how did it come into existence? That brings us back to the question of the creator. If there was no creator, then everything came out of nothing for no reason. From nothing came everything, including the time by which the history of everything is measured. Not only is this magic, it’s even better than magic: a rabbit has sprung from the empty hat without the agency or desire of a magician. Let us call it capital-M Magic.

Scoffing naturalists score a touchdown when they point out that creationism of any stripe is a convenient solution to the problem of existence. But I’d like to argue that they ultimately lose the game because they can provide a viable alternative neither to that problem nor to any of the problems that follow from it. Not only is the god answer convenient, it’s the only answer that doesn’t evaporate as we look at it closely.

Let’s look at the implications of naturalism’s closed system. Not only do we have the physical universe coming out of nothing for no reason, we have order coming out of randomness for no reason. For what reason should some subatomic particles bond to form hydrogen and some uranium? For what reason should some amalgamations orbit around other amalgamations that themselves become part of discreet structures with complex internal and external relationships?

It depends on what is meant by “reason,” I suppose. The easiest type of reason for scoffers to dispose of is that of consciousness. If there is no conscious being outside the natural system, then it came about for no reason. It is the result of no conscious intention. It simply exists: whatever is, is. Touchdown again.

Then there are reasons that are the bailiwick of physicists. For example, one can posit that in a random explosion some particles end up being closer to each other, thus forming heavier elements, and others being farther apart, thus forming lighter elements. Fine, but for what reason would all combinations of, say, eighteen protons and electrons (and whatever else is in there) be a gas (argon), while all combinations of fewer particles, thirteen, be a metal (aluminum)? For what reason aren’t some combinations of eighteen a metal and some of thirteen a gas? From what I can see, the answers to each question raise questions that require answers that assume that the universe is more, not less, complex than we know.

I don’t read molecular physics, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the horse that says the processes are more complex than anyone has figured out rather than that they occur willy-nilly. Complexity coming from randomness for no reason we can state definitively: Magic.

How does lifeless material produce living beings? Great minds have tried for centuries to reproduce the process—and they can produce, as we are finding to our horror, destructive organisms—but they cannot produce totally from dead matter anything that fulfills the traditional definition of life by being able to both metabolize and reproduce. If the process were random, reverse engineering it should be easy, but everything we learn about living beings points to them being incomprehensibly complex both internally and in relationship to their environments. Similar to—or perhaps a corollary of—complexity from randomness, life from death is either a gift of some god, or it’s Magic.

Sometime after the first living beings appeared by Magic, so the story goes, some of them stopped gaining nutrition from lifeless matter and started consuming other living beings. Now, when I was a kid, we acknowledged cows and pigs and deer as conscious beings, so we thought of hunting and butchering as killing. But plants, we thought, had no consciousness, so we had no trouble with eating apples or cabbage or mushrooms. But science, never settled, has cast a shadow on that view: it seems that plants from mushrooms to trees (including cabbage?) actually communicate with each other, at least within species, so they are not the unconscious organisms I thought they were in my youth. How much the cells of the meat of an apple suffer when I eat them (or when the apple simply rots on the ground) I don’t know, but whatever consciousness the first organism to eat another organism had was probably matched by the organism it ate. So sentient beings began consuming other beings that were in some sense sentient.

As time went on, organisms became more complex, and so did the organisms they ate. As species diversified, the diets of most became specialized. This specialization was purely practical: X “knew” through Magic-endowed cognitive processes (experience? instinct?) that Y had been endowed (by Magic) with something that, if X consumed Y, would benefit X and enable it to metabolize and reproduce.

Metabolism and reproduction: more Magic.

Now we get into the uniquely human question of morality. Note that the question whether X should (in the moral sense) eat Y was not, shall we say, on the table before the appearance of homo Sapiens. When a tyrannosaur attacked a hadrosaur, the outcome was equally moral whether the hadrosaur escaped or the tyrannosaur ate it. The same cannot be said about a virgin’s relationship with a rapist or a merchant’s relationship with a shoplifter. Even the terms used in the previous sentence speak to the importance we place on morality—it is an important part of what makes us human.

But where did this sense of morality, the idea of should, come from? What evolutionary benefit came with the idea that we should not kill those who stand between us and what we need or desire? One can argue that it is simply an extension of pragmatics—human life is better in society than in isolation, and respect for others’ lives and property makes society possible. But that doesn’t explain people forgiving and even adopting their enemies (as in the biblical examples of Saul’s adoption of Agag and Evil-Merodach’s adoption of Jehoiachin).

At best, it simply kicks the can down the road: Where did the idea of society come from in the first place? Even once sexual reproduction (more Magic, whether it’s a bug or a feature) became part of the picture, society wasn’t inevitable. Koalas mate like welfare mothers—slam, bam, thank you ma’am, and Dad disappears.

Society and compassion coming from individual self-preservation at any cost: more Magic.

Either that or the system has been constructed by something outside it. I find the latter explanation more plausible. (Only the Abrahamic religions attribute the material world to a supernatural creator, I will follow their assumption that there is only one god, most often named simply God, and I will also follow their exclusive use of masculine singular pronouns.)

The most important question after whether God exists is whether he is perfectly good. Though few would find absolutely nothing good about the material world, fewer still would consider it perfectly good. Reasonable people see suffering and death and infer that the God who created the universe is less than perfectly good. To avoid harm, so the thinking goes, we have to find ways to get and stay on his good side, such as incantations or child sacrifice or burnt animals or fasts or self-flagellation or boring convocations or the giving of alms. And maybe, just maybe, he’s like people in that we can go against his will and get away with it if we don’t get caught or we patch things up in time. But even if he has made his requirements known so clearly that we can be sure we have met them, we will always have the nagging fear of being betrayed in the end. And, of course, if we know we has not lived up to the requirements, we live in fear of being condemned by justice or whim.

One way of avoiding this fear is to make up a god who accepts us the way we are, period. Whether such a god would treat sadistic torturers and murderers differently from their victims is not addressed definitively by any of the Abrahamic religions’ sacred scriptures, so one man’s view is just as good as another’s.

But what if God really is perfectly good and hates anything that goes against his desires? What if he has revealed all we need to know about him somewhere and any of our ideas about him or desires or words or actions that do not comport with what he has revealed are not just errors but offenses against him? What if our default setting is to be at war against him?

To fall short of the requirements of a perfectly good God is to deserve what that God considers just recompense. He sets the terms—we don’t. The Christian God says we all have fallen short of his requirements and so deserve eternal punishment. The only way to escape that punishment is to enter into a covenant with him mediated by the blood sacrifice of his Son Jesus, which is done by believing that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth and that God raised him from the dead.

Simple assent to those facts, however, carries with it life-changing implications. The war does not cease when we realize we need to change sides. The pardon for sins is free, but it will eventually, at least potentially, cost us everything we valued when we were God’s enemies. Jesus, God’s Son, gave up everything of his for us, and so he has the right to ask us to give up everything we consider ours for him—guilty pleasures, innocent pleasures, comfort, reputation, even life—everything.

People become like the gods they worship, and those in covenant with God through Jesus show evidence of that covenant by being like God and treating as holy what God calls holy, beginning with a devotion to truth. There is only one God, and he is not only primarily good but also invisible. His ways are better than our ways, and so we cannot claim his endorsement of anything he has not specifically endorsed. We are to set time aside to focus on our relationship with him and to honor those people who have graciously given us the benefits we enjoy. We are to consider all human life holy, including the property that makes life possible, the trust that makes society possible, and the reputations that make trust possible. As individuals take on these characteristics, the societies they form will also take them on. Such societies will be characterized by respect for—and reverent treatment of—life, property, trust, and reputation.

Societies composed of people who worship imperfect gods whom they must placate and can manipulate, on the other hand, are essentially wildernesses in which hadrosaurs and tyrannosaurs play their hunger games. Truth and others’ lives, property, trust, and reputations are worth preserving only if they serve the needs of the individual or collective. And the bar of the god’s approval and disapproval is always just a bit lower than the individual or collective can jump.

This, then, is our choice: Christ or chaos. Either we take Christ as king as revealed in Scripture, upholding the holiness of all life, property, reputation, and trust and prescribing, again through Scripture, the responses for violations, or we have the chaos of life, property, trust, and reputation up for grabs by the rich and powerful—that is, tyranny.

Not sure the connection holds? OK, you tell me: Is Christ honored in any sense more in your society today than twenty years ago? Are life and property safer? Can you think of a society in which the answer to one of those questions would be yes but the other no?

What does a Christian society look like? The first answer, of course, is that is would be imperfect; it would be, after all the product of imperfect people. So perhaps the proper question is what Christians should aim for their societies to look like.

Let me suggest that the answer is found in Romans 13—no, not the first seven verses, but the next three:

 Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another, for the one who loves someone else has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are summed up in this statement: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does not commit evil against a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

The fulfillment of the law, the fullness of Christian love, consists of reverence for life, property, reputation (“You shall not bear false witness” being subsumed under “any other commandment”), and trust. Note that property is part of that: “You shall not steal.” Stealing is taking what belongs to another by direct action, deceit, or extortion. Extortion is giving a person a choice between obedience or worse suffering: “Do as I say or I’ll kill you.”

Taxation is extortion by another name, and those who would extract taxes are by definition acting as though they are above God’s law. They are without exception those with power over their defenseless neighbors. Any Christian who advocates for a tax-funded body “to keep order” is thus sowing the seeds of that society’s destruction by making the most powerful people in the society exempt from God’s law. The combination of human nature—which, as noted earlier, is at war with God—and the perverse incentives inherent in exemption from God’s law is practically an engraved invitation to tyranny and chaos.

So the choice is clear. People live under either the beneficent reign of Christ or under the tyranny of chaos. And the choice matters only in a universe made by a perfectly good God.

Evangelicals might have further questions: What about Romans 13:1–7? Is that not God’s word? What about “Render unto Caesar” and “Honor the king”?

I have addressed these questions at length. I discuss Romans 13 here, “Render unto Caesar” “here, and “honor the king” here.

The Conventional Reading of “Give to Caesar” Leads Inevitably to Oppression

 

I’ve heard from a number of WORLD readers who refer to [the transfer of wealth through taxation] as theft, which involves the Eighth Commandment. That, I think, goes too far. A thief has no right to take what belongs to someone else. If a government, though, has an inherent right to tax its citizens, who can say at what point such taxation constitutes taking something to which it is not entitled? Jesus told us to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. At which marginal tax rate does Caesar’s right end? A 32 percent tax rate might strike me as destructively high for the national good—but I’m not sure I can call it theft. A Christian in a thoroughly socialist nation is still Biblically obligated to pay his taxes fully and honestly. —  Joel Belz, “When Politics Is Cover for Coveting,” WORLD, Oct 9, 2010, republished Feb 10, 2024

Judging from this excerpt, Joel Belz (r.i.p.) believed that governments have the right to take whatever they please from their subjects. No matter what the tax rate, he’s not sure he can call it theft. If a tax rate “destructively high for the national good” is not theft and therefore not sinful, a tax rate “destructively high” for an individual household—that is, by definition, something that makes it impossible for a household full of flesh-and-blood human beings to survive—is not theft and therefore is not sin. Is this really what Jesus is all about?

His argument hinges on an assumption, “a government ... has an inherent right to tax its citizens.” But does it?

Governments are abstractions. Do abstractions have rights? How do we know if a given abstraction, whether government or freedom or poverty, has rights? How do we know that an abstraction’s rights supersede the rights of living beings? The New Testament does attach importance to abstractions: The fruits of the Holy Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, meekness, temperance, goodness, and faith—and the characteristics of the kingdom of God—righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit—are indeed abstractions. But are these abstractions important as abstractions, or do those abstractions gain importance only insofar as they apply to the actions and attitudes of living beings?

If we can assume that abstractions are shorthand for the actions and attitudes of living beings, then Belz’s assumption can be rephrased as “government officials have an inherent right to tax the people under their rule.” Furthermore, because he sees no limit to that right, he sees all taxation as legitimate, no matter the financial harm it does to taxpayers.

Since those who have the power to tax are usually comparatively rich and certainly by definition more powerful than those whom they tax, and since they set the tax rates by doing “what is right in their own eyes,” Belz believes, again by definition, that the richest and most powerful people in a society have the right to take what they deem expedient from those less powerful who cannot resist them. He takes away from the poor and powerless the one earthly defense they have against plunder by the rich and powerful: the words “This is mine. You have no right to take it.”

Isaiah writes, “Learn to do good! Seek justice! Rescue the oppressed! Defend the orphan! Plead for the widow!” (1:17). If a ruinous tax rate is justice, what is there to seek? If it is not oppression, who needs to be rescued? He goes on: “Those who enact unjust policies are as good as dead, those who are always instituting unfair regulations . . . so they can steal what widows own, and loot what belongs to orphans” (10:1–2). If this is not a description of taxing widows and orphans off their land, what is it? Belz is, apparenly, “not sure,” and he is not alone. I have never heard anyone defend the conventional reading of “render unto Caesar” and give the poor and powerless any defense against plunder.

But it gets worse. Not only are the poor and powerless also defenseless, rulers have no way of knowing where, if anywhere, they are to draw the line.

Belz rightly notes that the tax-gathering class and net tax receivers might be motivated by the sin of covetousness, but he is unable to help either know if they are indeed being covetous. How is a Christian politician or public educator to know whether his salary is to be $75,000 per year or $125,000 or only $50,000? Or if he should vote for an appropriation to start a graduate school of microbiology at a university in his district—and how is he to know if his daughter’s plans to become a microbiologist influence his decision? Should he provide retirement benefits that enable recipients to live in beachfront condos and drive new luxury cars? Does his inherent right to tax extend to the conscription of children (1 Sam 8:11–13)? To the confiscation of land (1 Sam 8:14–15)?

Further, do people respond to incentives? What incentive does a zealous “public servant” have to lower taxes and spending rates? If the ideal citizenry needs schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, why not also history? Calculus? Chemistry and physics? Anatomy and physiology? Why not hospitals and clinics? Why not sports complexes, theaters, drama and dance troupes? Where does the Bible give guidance on the subject? If nowhere, is it more likely that God doesn’t care where the line is drawn or that the line is drawn at the one measurable mark: No one can rightfully take innocent people’s property?

Belz’s answer is pure pragmatism: “At the end of the day, even if the tax law gets changed so that rich people have to pay 40 percent of their income instead of just 30 percent, the coveters end up with virtually none of that difference. . . . We’ve gotten to the point that it doesn’t matter much anymore how we change things. All the taxpayers together haven’t got enough money now to change the fact that we’ve spent ourselves into oblivion.” That is, the system’s failure is purely pragmatic; the practical failure has no moral basis.

For that matter, who is this “we” he speaks of? Can those who voted against the election winners who assessed the taxes and built up the debt by appropriating the expenditures be held responsible for the descent into oblivion? Or is it rather the powerful who are the “we” who have spent the money and the powerless are the “ourselves” who are bearing the consequences?

Worse, he is no help to net tax payers. How are they supposed to know if they are being covetous for desiring or calling for a 3.2 percent tax rate when they are being assessed ten times that amount? Because he believes that “a government . . . has an inherent right to tax its citizens” and he places no limit on “what is Caesar’s,” he—again—takes from the powerless their one earthly defense: the words “In the name of God, I tell you that you have no right to take this from me.”

Or does God simply regard poverty as an abstraction to be spiritualized to the state of not having asked Christ into one’s heart? Does he not care about the material deprivation brought about by people with a generous view of Caesar’s domain? Do those responsible for tax increases that they and their associates profit from bear no responsibility for the people who lose their homes or livelihoods as a result? Or is God simply a heavenly Donald Trump who sacrifices individuals on the altar of what the powerful call progress?

Has he given no measurable guide to justice that can be used to fulfill the Great Commission?

I think he has: No human beings, not even those called the government, have the right to do as they please with the defenseless.

The one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet,” (and if there is any other commandment) are summed up in this, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:8b–10)