A Mind Game

Let's pretend that the woman who means the most to you [or just you, if you’re a woman] and I, as the apostle Philip was translated to Azotus, are translated to a deserted island where we’re told we’ll be there for a month. There’s enough on the island to make us comfortable, but only if we work together. So we stay for a month and then return. After we return, the lady is asked, “How was it?” She replies, “I would not have chosen to be there, and I wouldn't have chosen to be there with him, but apart from that, it was OK. Nothing bad happened. It wasn’t fantastic. It wasn’t bad. It was OK.”

In one sentence, describe how I would treat her for that to be her sincere response.

I would suggest that your one-sentence answer to my question would be your definition of basic human decency.

Did you imagine me saying to her, “I am my brother’s keeper. I answer only to God. I’m in charge. You will do as I say”?

Or did you imagine me saying, “What’s yours will be yours. Let’s [as equals] decide what’s yours, then let’s [as equals] work out how we’ll work together [as equals]”?

If the lady were not a Christian, which version of me would she be more likely to listen to present the gospel?

Which version of me would be more likely to “needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” after a month alone with a woman?

If it works for two, why would it not work for twenty, or twenty million?

Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Obama, and Evangelicals versus Me

One of the hardest things about going to church anymore is realizing that as much as my conservative fellow US evangelicals hate Barack Obama’s presidency, they would rather have him as president than a strict constitutionalist like Ron Paul, and they definitely prefer Mr. Obama’s mayhem to an experiment in liberty that would de-fund the murderous wars overseas and the caging of those whose activities they dislike but which the Bible nowhere authorizes them to punish, like druggies and prostitutes.

In short, they have little problem comparing Mr. Obama to Mssrs. Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, but they prefer him to me. My moral system is “What’s yours is yours.” Why that is so repugnant I can’t fathom, but it’s apparently worse than mass murder, let alone Mr. Obama’s comparatively minor rapacity.

It’s not that we disagree on everything. We agree that the biblical Jesus was the unique eternal Son of God who became a human being, was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, and died a sacrificial death to purchase the salvation of those who (in some sense) repent of their sins and obey him. And we agree that Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Obama are bad, at least until we start getting into the details.

But in everything we disagree on, they are on Mr. Obama’s side.

• The welfare of the collective outweighs the rights of the individual.
• The law is to be determined by the government; the government is not bound by the law.
• Actions considered illegitimate for private individuals are permissible for government employees.

o   Actions that are malum in se (inherently evil, e.g., killing innocent people, extortion) are permitted to government employees.

o   Actions that are malum prohibitum (“evil” because they are prohibited, e.g., selling raw milk) are to be denied private individuals.

• Private individuals acting in voluntary relationships cannot provide the collective with the necessities of life.

o   The government needs to employ full-time armed agents to deal with foreign and domestic miscreants.

o   Disputes must be decided by tax-funded courts.

o   Government must determine and enforce personal morality.

o   Government must determine what are and are not acceptable ways of making a living.

o   Schools should be funded by taxes so they can pass on the intellectual heritage of the collective.

o   Health care should be funded by taxes and includes restrictions on diet and activities.

o   Retirement should be funded by taxes on current workers.

You get the idea.

A good friend told me a while back that I am a minority of one who has not convinced anyone, and that it’s time to shut up. He’s probably right, but I take inspiration from another minority of one who didn’t convince anyone: Micaiah (mi ka-yahu, “[he] who is like the Lord”).

Like today’s evangelicals, King Jehoshaphat was a godly man: “The Lord was with Jehoshaphat because he followed the example of his father's early years …. He sought his father's God and obeyed his commands … . So the LORD established Jehoshaphat's control over the kingdom of Judah” (2Ch 17:3–5).

Yet when evil King Ahab of Israel invited him to join in a needless war of aggression against the Syrians, he replied, “I am as you are, my people as your people, my horses as your horses” (1Ki 17:4). In perhaps the greatest show of stupidity in the Bible, after asking for a word from the Lord he ignored that word and sent many of his men (presumably) to their deaths. If success is measured in converts, Micaiah was a failure and Ahab was a stellar success.

As a result of Jehoshaphat’s stupidity, the Lord rebuked him: “Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the Lord? Because of this, the wrath of the Lord is upon you” (2Ch 19:2). The parallel of US evangelicals cheering their children off to fight needless wars overseas (most recently, ironically enough, in Syria) on behalf of a government headed by a man they despise is pretty plain to me: I’m writing this now because I do not want to share in the rebuke that will come to them. (I’m expecting to receive enough dreadworthy rebukes, thank you.)

But God’s word to Jehoshaphat will likely also be his word to my evangelical brothers: “There is, however, some good in you” (2Ch 19:3). I have received grace upon grace from them; how to weigh their kindness against their patent stupidity (however sincerely intended) I really don’t know, other than to call both what they are.

We have been called to tell our neighbors all over the world the good news of salvation in Christ. On what basis do we think they will listen to a church that prefers shedding blood on behalf of an increasingly ungodly society to an ethic that says “what’s  yours is yours” and works peacefully and peaceably to resolve differences?

The Vietnam Vet

We sat across the picnic table a few evenings ago. I’d heard him mention that he’d been a Marine in Vietnam, so I asked him to tell me his story. The two things that he said most emotionally were, “We couldn’t trust any of them,” and “When we got home, they spat on us in airports and called us baby killers.”

In a rare show of restraint, I didn’t remind him that Vietnamese babies did indeed die as a result of US military action, nor did I suggest that if the Mexicans or Chinese or Afghans were to invade the US, they wouldn’t be able to trust us either. Nor did I get a chance to ask whether he had been drafted or had enlisted. All I knew was that he was a human being who had done what he thought was an honorable thing and had been hated by those on both sides of the ocean whose welfare he thought he was fighting to protect.

And I really want to give him credit for thinking: I can’t imagine anyone going someplace he could get killed without thinking about it first. I’m guessing, but he had probably been told that the welfare of the nation depended on victory in Vietnam, that the American way of life was in jeopardy unless that war were won. And being a man of good will, he went there to do his part.

He had no way of knowing that ten years after he returned from Vietnam, the US army would beat a full-scale retreat and—nothing bad came of it, at least not within our borders, and not done by those my interlocutor went to fight. The war had been forgotten before it ended. I remember reading the newspaper headline about the retreat from Saigon, but it didn’t move me enough to make me buy the paper, and I suspect my reaction was not uncommon.

Countless human beings were killed or maimed in a war that turned out to have been for nothing. Who knew?

The Central Intelligence Agency was at that time arguably the most sophisticated information-gathering agency in the world, rivaled only by the KGB. The US military was arguably the best funded in the world, and gathering information is a big part of their job. I have a hard time believing that between the two of them they didn’t know that the US would be secure even if Vietnam fell. Yet somehow they didn’t tell the man in the street, let alone the soldiers it sent to become casualties.

Daniel Ellsburg and the Berrigan brothers did try to tell the man in the street. And it was the scruffs—the hippies and queers—who believed them and told the government to go to hell—beginning with those whose faith in the government led them to don uniforms. Good Christians remembered Romans 13 and submitted to authority—and got snookered.

What possible good could any government do that would make the damage it did to the man across the table—to say nothing of the sixty thousand dead and countless maimed US soldiers and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese casualties—worth it? Does building schools or dams, or providing parks or unemployment insurance, make up for it? Or is there reason to believe that the state—the entity that supposedly justifies some people lording it over others—is entirely the wrong tool for the job of protecting people and their property from violence and deceit?

What possible good can such a state do to further the cause of Christ? How can Christians who have supported such an evil entity be credible when they claim that they have living inside them an omniscient God who guides them away from sin and toward righteousness? How is this letting our light so shine before men that they will see our good deeds and glorify our father in heaven?

Christians are called to tell the world about Jesus. Throwing our lot in with the state—in our case, a government that through either incompetence or malice told us untruths in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to do so today—is not the way to fulfill the Great Commission.

Martin and Zimmermann: The Anarchist Alternative

Even given (what I take to be) the preponderance of evidence in favor of George Zimmermann’s story, it is not impossible that he was indeed guilty of murder. Certainly thousands of people in the US today believe that he was, and they’re hoping the civil suit will cause him to pay as much as possible for his crime. I should point out that those who protest the court’s decision the loudest have good reason for distrusting the system. While it is true that the modern welfare system, including affirmative action, has been a conscious attempt by the white powers that be to offer blacks restitution for slavery, Jim Crow, lynching with impunity, and other injustices, it has been a dismal failure. More blacks are in poverty today than ever before, the black family has been all but destroyed, the war on drugs punishes blacks more than whites, and affirmative action is simply an admission that blacks can compete with whites only in athletics and entertainment.

As Sojourners’ Jim Wallis asks, “If black youth in America can’t rely on the police, the law, or their own neighborhood for protection—where can they go?” Let me suggest that the police and the law—the government, “the very institutions created to protect our own wellbeing,” in Wallis’ words—is precisely the wrong place to look for justice. It is voluntary institutions that will prevent incidents like this in the future and resolve in a just manner those that come up anyway.

The most important thing about the violence, verbal and otherwise, that has followed the announcement of the Zimmermann verdict is so obvious that no one seems to notice it—certainly Wallis doesn’t: those most in need of justice in this country, poor blacks, do not trust the system.

The rioters are disproportionately poor and black; the protesting word-slingers tend to be better off, but blacks are overrepresented there also. After 237 years to work on the system, after decades of preferential treatment from at least the most visible agents of government, and even with a “black” president at the top of the pile, blacks still do not trust the system.[1] And I don’t blame them: even though I agree with the acquittal, I consider the system evil.

Let’s back up and assume that Mr. Zimmermann is indeed guilty. How can any sane person regard the system that failed to convict him as anything other than a total failure? In a high-profile case with race at the center, the prosecutor couldn’t be bothered to seat even one black on the jury. Furthermore, I assume the resources available for the prosecution would have been essentially endless, and a conviction would have looked good on her curriculum vitae. And yet a guilty man walked. No wonder Wallis claims that “12-year-old black boys … asked to sleep in bed with their parents because they were afraid” after the conviction: the mockingbird is killed once again.

The system is broken. It cannot be fixed. We need an alternative. Here it is: an anarchic system of private arbitration or adjudication.

The first advantage an anarchic system would have had for Mr. Martin’s loved ones would have been that they (or their hired agents) would have had final say in who adjudicated the trial. As it was, they were stuck with a prosecutor who was content to allow an all-white jury to decide the case and a white judge to preside over it. Given the central place of race in the matter, this was insane. In private arbitration they could have chosen their own prosecutor and insisted that at least some members of the adjudication team be black: both they and Mr. Zimmermann’s side would have been able to put forth candidates black and otherwise to be “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

If the two sides had been unable to agree on the adjudicators, the trial would not have gone forward, but the innocent party would have had great incentive to have the proceedings public outsiders could hear and judge the objections to the adjudicators offered by the other side. Surely the guilty party’s agents would want to avoid charges of stonewalling, lest their other clients be considered outlaws—“We don’t want clients of XYZ living in this neighborhood because it’s impossible to deal with them when they misbehave.”—so any deadlock would likely have been short lived.

The matter might even have been settled within the guilty party’s agency, with the agency buying off the offended party without a public hearing ever taking place. Think about it: Are you better off because you know about the shooting, or would your life be just as good if you didn’t? Is it possible that you—and the Martins and the Zimmermanns—would be just as well off if they had settled the matter just between them?

No small benefit of anarchy here would have been to allow the Martins’ and Zimmermanns’ business to remain theirs and kept the rest of the world from taking a dog by the ears (Prov. 26:17).

As for the stigma attached to “buying off” the victim: Who would have been better off if Mr. Zimmermann had gone to jail? Who would be better off if he is bankrupted by the civil suit? Would the Martins get their son back? Can any amount of money compensate for the loss of a son? Would white people who agree with the verdict as it stands be more or less likely to welcome blacks into their neighborhoods, workplaces, and social networks? Would blacks who agree with the verdict be more or less likely to achieve their economic and social goals? I see no benefit to anyone from the matter having become public.

A second advantage to an anarchic system is that those accused are treated as innocent until they are convicted. Where under the current system those accused of crimes are incarcerated (or forced to pay interest on bail loans) and forced to bear the cost of hiring lawyers while still legally innocent, under an anarchic system the accused’s agency would be responsible and motivated both to keep track of him and to make sure that he was treated well so he was could get on with his life. Mr. Zimmermann would not have had to incur inconvenience and expense before he was convicted.  Furthermore, after the trial the guilty party and his agents would have had to compensate the innocent party for the expenses of the proceedings, so they would want the matter cleared up as cheaply as possible.

As it is, of course, even though Mr. Zimmermann has been exonerated, he is out the time he spent incarcerated, the expense of his lawyers, his public reputation, and his safety from vengeful outsiders. The government, meanwhile, has lost nothing and has nothing to lose from future such incidents. And again, if Mr. Zimmermann is guilty, the present system has failed totally yet lost nothing. Either way, it deserves not a penny more of our money.

By contrast, agents in an anarchic system would have had every incentive to resolve this situation to the greatest possible satisfaction of both the Martins and the Zimmermanns. No resolution could have perfectly satisfied both parties, but an anarchic system could have done no worse than the present system which, judging by the ubiquity of Yankee flags wherever one looks, is as good as any government system can be.

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[1]  I will leave it to others to argue that the protesters could see a video from God’s point of view that clearly showed Mr. Martin’s guilt and still want Mr. Zimmermann hanged.

Good Neighbors in Armed Service

For K.R.

Those who uphold the legitimacy of the state tell us that Christians should obey the state in every matter that does not involve disobedience to God. What that means in practice, however, can be difficult to determine, and as one who often finds simple things, especially simple things that involve obedience to God’s inconvenient demands, almost impossible, I would have to posit that once one has come up with a reasonably certain answer to these difficult moral questions, obedience is difficult at best.

So I offer the following study questions about a fairly straightforward passage of Scripture to show that questioning the legitimacy of the state is at best no more problematical than attempting to obey its dictates. The passage is taken from Acts 12:1-19.

King Herod Agrippa began to persecute some believers in the church. He had the apostle James (John's brother) killed with a sword. When Herod saw how much this pleased the Jewish leaders, he arrested Peter during the Passover celebration and imprisoned him, placing him under the guard of four squads of four soldiers each. Herod's intention was to bring Peter out for public trial after the Passover.

We can assume that Herod did not personally go out and arrest Peter. He gave a command to an officer, who dispatched some underlings to find Peter and arrest him. Keep in mind that Peter had not been convicted of any crime or even brought to trial. He was, even officially, innocent of any wrongdoing, and certainly of any violence against people or their property, yet here was a command given, at the very least, to deprive him of his liberty.

1. Should a Christian officer have obeyed Herod’s command and ordered his subordinates to arrest Peter?

2. Should Christian subordinates have obeyed the order?

3. Was Peter being persecuted for the offense of the cross?

But while Peter was in prison, the church prayed very earnestly for him. The night before Peter was to be placed on trial, he was asleep, chained between two soldiers, with others standing guard at the prison gate.

4. Should Christians have taken the assignment as guards in the inner chamber with Peter? At the prison gate?

Suddenly, there was a bright light in the cell, and an angel of the Lord stood before Peter. The angel tapped him on the side to awaken him and said, "Quick! Get up!" And the chains fell off his wrists. Then the angel told him, "Get dressed and put on your sandals." And he did. "Now put on your coat and follow me," the angel ordered. So Peter left the cell, following the angel. But all the time he thought it was a vision. He didn't realize it was really happening.

5. If Peter had known that he was really leaving the prison and not having a vision, should he have left the prison? In what way was he obeying duly constituted authority by leaving?

At dawn, there was a great commotion among the soldiers about what had happened to Peter. Herod Agrippa ordered a thorough search for him. When he couldn't be found, Herod interrogated the guards and sentenced them to death.

6. If the guards were sentenced to death, what can we guess Peter’s sentence would have been had he been found guilty? Should a Christian have volunteered or consented to be on the detail that executed him, or on the chain of command that passed on the order to have him executed?

7. Romans 13:3 says, “The authorities do not frighten people who are doing right, but they frighten those who do wrong.” If “just following [the] orders” to guard Peter was “doing right,” in what sense did the guards have no reason to be frightened of the authorities?

8. Should a Christian have been part of the detail that executed the guards, or on the chain of command that passed on the order to have them executed?

9. What indication does the text give that the state’s treatment of Peter was unusual? If this was not unusual treatment, what biblical wisdom would a Christian be following to enlist or submit to conscription to join the armed forces of that state?

10. If Peter had been acquitted, would depriving him of his liberty have been a sin? If so, who would have been guilty? What consequences would that sin have merited? If it was no sin, why not?

11. Compare the similar treatment given Paul and Silas in Acts 16. Were Paul and Silas duly convicted of a crime meriting violent retribution? Were they being persecuted for the offense of the cross?

12. How should a Christian in the chain of command, from the authorities in the marketplace, to the gendarmes who beat them, to the guards who guarded them, reacted to orders to inflict the violence that took place?

13. How does the severity with which Paul and Silas were treated affect the legitimacy of their detention? Had they been treated as peaceably as Peter seems to have been, would an otherwise illegitimate detention have been legitimate? If Peter had been treated as roughly as Paul and Silas were, would an otherwise legitimate detention have been illegitimate?

14. What consequences would those in the chain of command in Acts 12 have faced if they refused to obey the orders they were given? In Acts 16? Given the consequences for insubordination, what biblical wisdom would a Christian be following to enlist or submit to conscription to join the armed forces of that state?

The arrests of Peter and of Paul and Silas raise a slew of questions for which there are no good answers if one assumes the legitimacy of the state; if nothing else, if all those who share the guilt for its injustices were to receive the just (earthly) consequences for their crimes (not to be confused with the eternal consequences for their sins), very few workers would be left at liberty.

Compare the chaotic situations brought about by the state in these two passages to the order of anarchy. Under anarchy, if you, either as an individual or as part of a voluntary organization, own the Temple or any other property and you don’t want Peter there claiming that a man you hate has come back to life, you tell him to leave, if necessary get your bouncers to throw him off the property, and that’s that. (I infer from 1 Peter 4:15 that Peter wouldn’t consider preaching the gospel a justification for trespassing.) If Paul and Silas chase away the demon who gives your employee supernatural powers, then you and the two of them find a mutually agreed-upon arbitrator to decide whether doing so was a proper response for her telling the truth at inconvenient times. And, of course, if you want to impress people, you’ll have to find a better way to do it than killing innocent people.

If we Christians are to be good neighbors to our unsaved friends, we can do much better than being part of the state's armed forces.