Response to a Correspondent

A friend writes:

Take away a system of force that punishes wickedness and wickedness will increase.

Men will do what is right in their own eyes. In a context of great evil God instituted the death penalty for murder. That institution was a civil action against private murdering citizens. If Henry murders the 7/11 cashier for some spending money, we are not going to ask [mutual friends] to stop over with a bag of stones for a neighborhood stoning. We are calling the cops, who will arrest you and stick you in a holding cage until we have a speedy trial with twelve good men. Then we are going to execute you properly with something other than stones.

Of course as a post-millennialist who believes in the power of God to save, we will also preach the gospel alongside of having the sword of the state to punish the wicked. Salt and light are part of a well ordered cosmos. So is a State with servants who are ministers of God. If Paul called first century Christians to submit to a pre-Christian, Non-biblical State, why do you keep imagining a stateless society when we live in a world that is way better as far as the presence of Christians in American society? Some of these Christians are good people who want to see government held accountable. Why not work to call the State to repentance ? Is the State beyond the power of redemption? I thought the church was tasked with calling all to repentance including Caesar.

My response:

Thanks for writing.

Given a choice between being shot by a firing squad and stoned, I think I’d rather be shot. Hanging and the electric chair might be worse than stoning. Anyway, I like to think that I’ve got better reasons for not killing the 7-11 cashier than fear of execution. Unfortunately, as I said in a recent post, the state might someday decide (in a moment of utter paranoia) that the Quill Pig Chronicles give “material support” to terrorists and execute its version of justice on me. If they just shot me, that wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately, they might decide I’m of more value to them alive than dead, and that would be tough to go through, even if they didn’t waterboard me. . . . .

The church is indeed tasked to call all to repentance, including Caesar. but what incentive does the state have to repent? How can an abstraction repent? What incentives do state agents have to repent?

"We live in a world that is way better as far as the presence of Christians in American society," do we? I started this blog because I think US conservative Christians are no longer salt and light. They are as zealous to defend their place on the tax-subsidized nipple as atheist liberals, and at least as prone to busybodyness and callous to wanton violence. Ask them how they defend their libertinism (see below) and they'll go straight to Romans 13. As you know, one has to read between the lines considerably before one comes up with even the Westminster Confession's take on Romans 13. Maybe when I get to heaven God will say, "I agreed more with Ron Paul and [my correspondent] than with you; anarchy would never work," but I would need a lot of help getting my mind around it. Meanwhile, I try to be a good neighbor as best I understand the Bible's take on that, and it seems to me an easy way to do that is not to act like I'm government agent.

By ascribing legitimacy to the state, you are removing at least one check on its wickedness, and its wickedness has increased in every situation. Read Colson’s book if you don’t believe my blog post that he chronicles in great detail (considering the size of his book) how this happened. Where he and I disagree is that he somehow thinks that that increase in wickedness was not inevitable given the nature of the state and given human nature.

Statism is indeed libertinism. When the FDA approves a drug that ends up damaging people, no bureaucrats lose their jobs, whereas in a private property system, the endorsing agency would be out of business immediately (remember Chi-Chi’s?). When the drug cops break down the wrong door, shoot the family dog, and make the homeowners get out of bed naked and stand around while the room is searched, said homeowners will be lucky to get a verbal apology; nobody will lose their job, and they'll still be stuck with the repair bill for the door. If that isn't libertinism, I don't know what is.

Jesus said that he who is faithful in little will be given charge over much. The state—at least the one we live under—can’t even be trusted to treat biblically innocent pot growers justly (I forgot: you don't think pot growers are innocent; OK, how about ghetto girls who braid hair or out-of-work carpenters who ply their trades without licenses?), and it certainly doesn’t treat either thieves or their victims justly. What makes you think it would treat murderers justly?

I’m surprised that a man who spends as much time in the Bible as you do would prefer to begin with the death penalty and work down and not with, say, embezzlement and work up (smaller to larger); that you prefer a top-down, coercive system when Romans 12:1-2 seems to indicate that God works from the inside out and the Mosaic system (apart from the giving of the law itself, for obvious reasons) from the bottom up. (Where the Catholics seem to think that the saints have God’s ear in a way that mere mundanes don’t, Paul asked the nobodies to pray for him, like he, The Apostle to the Gentiles, needed their prayers more than they needed his, though he did indeed pray for them.)

Men will indeed do what is right in their own eyes; furthermore, they will do what they think is to their advantage. When Jesus told us that there was no profit in gaining the world and losing our souls, he was acknowledging that people go for the bottom line, but he was saying that the bottom line is further down than we think it is.

The refrain of the book of Judges is indeed that people do what is right in their own eyes. Like the people of those days, you think that the solution is a king—though a godly king, like that described in Dt 17. Forgive me for repeating myself: the job of king was too big for a man who was head and shoulders over everyone else in Israel, for a man after God’s own heart, and for the wisest man who ever lived. (So who besides Jesus can ever fill the bill? How is Jesus present and ruling today? Isn't it mostly in the hearts of those who obey him?) Israel got his king, and he fell to his enemies for exactly the same reasons he fell to his enemies in the book of Judges. The problem was not the lack of a state; it was the lack of devotion to God.

There are only two religions in the world: God (the grace of Christ) and power (mammon, Baal, Molech, Allah, the Force, democracy). When George Washington said that government is force, he was putting it in the second category. And he would know, having exercised it as such. Thomas Paine said that government was a necessary evil, but as an atheist he would have no trouble saying that evil was necessary. Romans 6 forbids me to say that.

We live in an age when people who call themselves Americans almost literally worship at least one politician and certainly ascribe godlike powers to the state. How can we call people to faith in God when we ascribe legitimacy to his biggest rival? That evil needs to be opposed, sometimes with force, is not in question: you read the article I recommended to you, right? The author is not opposed to the use of force in certain situations. The question is, under what circumstances is it just? How does the line get drawn? What reason do we have to suppose that an irresistible state will draw that line more justly than an egalitarian contract system?

Note the question marks. Your questions are worth answering, so I'm grateful for the time you have taken. But your assertions leave me with questions, which you are welcome to answer; or ask more questions, if you prefer. Thank you again for writing.

Charles Colson's Justice that Restores

Wise people don't take Charles Colson lightly. He became one of the most powerful people in the world during the Nixon years because he is intelligent, articulate, and sincere. While he is indeed a convicted criminal, he went to jail because of bad decisions sincerely made, and since his release he has shown that his repentance during his prison years was sincere; I would guess that he has spent at least as much time in prison as a free man as he did as a prisoner, and he has done so to spread the gospel. His Justice That Restores is a thin volume, but it's a small bowl of very hearty soup.

Colson and I share the belief that the criminal "justice" system is as fertile ground as there can be for sowing the seeds of the gospel. Crime hurts its victims, of course, and our system, in which victims have literally no chance for compensation, is simply barbaric. It also, at best, leaves perpetrators of crime in their twisted moral and spiritual state; in some cases it twists them even further. So far, so good. But this additional twisting is done by policies based on presuppositions that Colson and most evangelicals share with the system; I will suggest here that they are not biblical.

Colson's audience for this book seems to be nonbelievers: he doesn't quote the Bible until page 46, and he carefully avoids religious jargon. So effective was his packaging that early on I found myself rolling my eyes and expecting another "Christian" argument based on "natural law" rather than the Bible. But he was arguing deductively, describing first what doesn't work, then what is needed, and finally how the Bible prescribes a system that meets that need, first for individuals through the gospel and then for society through restorative justice, which he defines as

one that holds individuals responsible for their actions (that is, fallen individuals have a moral duty) under an objective rule of law (which we believe is rooted in revelation) but always in the context of community and always with the chance of transformation of the individual and the healing of fractured relationships and of the moral order. (p. 115)

The first part of the book is a litany of failed state-based solutions that offers at least prima facie evidence that the more the state is involved in the process, the worse the result is. He follows the evolution of criminal justice theory from the days of common law (not, unfortunately, biblical law), in which crime was considered offense against individuals, to today's unjust situation in which crime is almost exclusively thought of as transgression against the state. He also traces the erosion of belief in the authority of the Bible, then of belief in natural law (by which he specifically means the laws the apostle Paul says are "written on the heart" [Ro 1]), and finally of belief in the existence of absolute truth in any form. Today expediency alone limits political (and sometimes raw) power: both crime and the state's response are whatever those in power determine they should be. Again, so far, so good.

The problem comes with his proposed solutions:

The remedy for this crisis goes far beyond building more prisons. (p. 10)

A solution that goes beond something generally includes it. So his proposed solution involves building more prisons even though the US already incarcerates more people and a higher percentage of the poplulation than any other nation. If he is truly speaking for God here, US citizens, far from being the last great hope for the human race, are depraved at a greater rate than elsewhere. (And if he's right, instead of being sent overseas to bomb women and children in the name of spreading democracy, they should simply be put in cages. That would be good news for the Southwest Asians.) It also seems bizarre in light of the admissions he makes of the obvious:

Prisons ... merely incapacititate, not rehabilitate. (p. 53)

Prisons are filled with many people who are not dangerous to society. (p. 128)

[Victims feel like they are] simply used as the tool of the prosecutors for the state. (p. 138)

[The prison environment is] by its very nature oppressive and often debilitating. (p. 153)

His solution of building more prisons is, according to that last quote, an attempt to solve the problems caused by institutions that are oppressive by nature by building more institutions that are oppressive by nature. The Bible says we are not to do evil hoping that good will come of it (Ro 6:1). Surely we can do better than that.

I would suggest that Colson is crippled by his legitimization of the state.

As Walter Block and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have written at length, the idea of the stateless society is simply unthinkable for most people: they have never been taught to question the legitimacy of some people, "government," being able to do with impunity what would be criminal were their subjects to do it, and Colson is no exception. Yet by removing this single presupposition from his argument, he would open himself up to a truly biblical solution to the problem he nails so well. He himself gives examples of detention facilities that exemplify the restorative justice he is promoting, and one trait they share is that none of them are run by government (though they are associated to varying degrees with government-run institutions).

Let me give some examples of how his presuppositions hinder the broader point he's making.

He argues that victims of crime were deprived of justice as never before when crime came to be seen as an offense against the state rather than against the direct victims. How could this not have happened when government agents see themselves as superior to their subjects? What incentive do they have to consider themselves defenders of the individual victim rather than as the primary victim? For example, what incentive does a police officer have to see that a guy mugged for $500 receives restitution when the officer has to put his life in danger to catch the thief? What incentive does the judge or sheriff or county treasurer have have when the cost to catch, cage, and try the thief is greater than what he stole in the first place? What incentive is there for prison wardens and their superiors to decrease the prison population when they can argue for pay raises as the prison population rises?

Delegitimize the state and these problems disappear. To be sure, the problem of what to do with dangerous miscreants remains, but the incentive for building ever more cages to be presided over by ever more highly paid bureaucrats is replaced by incentives to see victims compensated and as few miscreants as possible incarcerated. The delivery of justice becomes like the delivery of potato chips: long-term prosperity goes to those who can deliver the most bang for the buck.

Is this solution biblical? Most evangelicals' knee-jerk reaction is to say no on the basis of Romans 13. Yet their proposed "biblical" solutions are rife with the perverse incentives I just named, and the outworking of those incentives is precisely the barbaric system we have today. So how about if we start somewhere besides Romans 13? How about beginning with the case laws of Exodus 21-23? or Deuteronomy 17:17-20? or Luke 22:25-26?

While it is true that the case laws were given in a context much different from ours, human nature hasn't changed since then, so we can at least hypothesize that if it worked then, it would work now. Certainly if it were moral then, it would be moral now. The objection is often raised that today's industrial society is much more complex than Moses' refugee camp and the agrarian period of the judges, but Jesus tells us that those who are faithful in small matters can be trusted in large matters (Mt 25:21). By that logic what works for three people will work for thirty, three hundred million, or three billion. The burden of proof is on those who claim that a system that was given by God would not work today. Certainly the system they have built is not working, though there are many beneficiaries who owe their positions of power to the new system and so would be reluctant to see it abolished.

Colson also gets in trouble when he praises the first policemen for starting soup kitchens (p. 117). While as a conservative he would be slow to praise the modern welfare state (and perhaps almost as slow to praise the totalitarian police state), here he praises its roots. Unless those soup kitchens started by the police departments were funded entirely by private donations—in which case why did the police need to start them at all?—the money for them was taken under threat of death from those who had earned it through serving their neighbors. How biblical is that?

He also praises the "broken window theory" (117-118), the idea that the fight against theft and murder begins with fighting vagrancy, neglect, and vandalism. This idea rests on two repugnant assumptions, first that the government should own parks, etc. ("public spaces"), and second that how private property owners maintain their property is the government's concern. As to the first, again, the government cannot own what it doesn't alienate from private owners, taking from those who produce and serve and giving to those who don't. The second conflates the idea of public and private; it's the basis of zoning laws, laws that prohibit restaurant owners from allowing their patrons to smoke and from serving food that their patrons would like to eat, and laws regulating how much water you can use in your shower.

In each of these cases, what determines the actual policy that obtains is not justice; rather, it is political expediency, what the politically powerful believe they can get away with. And when everything is the state's business, our lives are run by the politically powerful; in other words, we are slaves.

The private property solutions to the "broken window" is simple and biblical. Without "public spaces" there would be no place for vagrants to congregate; they would need permission from the owners of the space they wanted to occupy: no permission, no vagrants. And while broken windows on private property are indeed ugly, there are ways to deal with it apart from what amounts to confiscation by the government: such poor stewards can be bought out or tolerated.

If we really want restorative justice, our first step has to be the repudiation of the state. Until people regard each other as moral equals forbidden to violate others' bodies and property—that is, they repudiate the foundational principle of the state—and treat miscreants with an eye to restitution, reconciliation, and restoration, there is no incentive to change the barbaric system we live under, we will see the growth of both the criminal class and a self-righteous kleptocracy supposedly dedicated to protecting us from it, and, most importantly, the church will decline in numbers and influence. Repudiate the state and we will find ourselves shaking off our complacency and praying like our very survival depends on God and working like it depends on us.

The state won't go away unless we offer something better to replace it. But we have no incentive to build that something as long as we ascribe legitimacy to its most powerful enemy.

Christian Nudists?

——OK if I ask you a question?

——Sure.

——Should Christians join nudist colonies?

——You're kidding, right?

——No. Seriously, what do you think?

——What do you think I think? Of course not.

——Why not?

——Christians shouldn't join organizations that aren't biblical.

——And what's not biblical about nudism? Or better, how does nudism violate biblical standards?

——People are naked around people who aren't their spouses, that's how. It's an invitation to lust and sexual immorality.

——Doctors see women who aren't their wives in their offices, but up until recently that was considered OK. If a doctor can see another man's wife naked, why can't other people? Assuming no one's being coerced or fooled into participating, of course.

——Well, a doctor's office is different.

——Why? Does a doctor cease to be a guy simply because he's got a license?

——No, but he's there for a purpose, to help the patient. He's not there to look at her.

——Well, if he doesn't look at her, how is he going to help her?

——Don't be ridiculous. You know what I mean.

——You're right, I do, but I'm not sure you do. How is it that a guy who has a natural tendency toward lust is somehow given a pass on that lust just because the woman is paying him?

——Be reasonable, would you? His purpose there is to help her, not to ogle her. And besides, he sees naked women so often that it probably doesn't affect him.

——Granted, but nudist colonies are all about affirming each other for who they are and enjoying the sun and wind while you swim, hike, or whatever. One could argue that a nudist would see nakedness so often it wouldn't affect him either.

——Oh, come on. Nudism is all about sex.

——Some is, yes. But there are also incompetent and lusty doctors, so that doesn't help your case. Isn't it reasonable to think that just as you can't paint all doctors with the lust brush, you can't paint all nudists with the sex brush? Some nudist colonies go out of the way to be family friendly, sort of like Disneyland with a different dress code. Staring, sexual comments, and sexual activity are no more welcome there than at Starbuck's.

——Yeah, but do they live up to their PR? Think of the damage that can be done when things go wrong, Think of the children! Isn't there a horrible risk of kids being abused?

——Kids have been abused by clergy and youth pastors and school teachers. Does that mean they shouldn't go to church or school? If you for some reason decided to go to a nudist resort with your fifteen-year-old daughter, wouldn't you be on the lookout for predators the same way you look out for bears when you go camping or carry safety equipment when you go mountain climbing? Is mountain climbing unbiblical because some people get hurt?

——Of course not. But come on: children shouldn't be looking at naked adults at all.

——Were you ever curious about anatomy when you were little?

——Yes.

——Do you think that curiosity was legitimate?

——I'm not sure. It was natural, I guess, but I can't say that God meant for it to be satisfied outside of marriage.

——Did you satisfy your curiosity?

——Well, yes, but I probably shouldn't have.

——How?

——The same way you probably did: Playboy and National Geographic. But I wasn't a Christian then. I didn't know we should wait until marriage to satisfy that curiosity.

——Should only married men go to medical school?

——Come on! That's different!

——OK. Did you see any difference between Playboy and National Geographic? Would you say they are equally evil?

——I think both of them were using nudity to boost sales.

——Good point. Did you feel guilty looking at the pictures?

——The Playboys, yes. I never told my parents about them. But my folks kept National Geographic on a shelf in the den, so I could go in there anytime and look. I wouldn't look at the topless pictures if others were in the room. I guess I was sneaking peeks there, too, so maybe that was just as much a sin as the Playboys. They also had books of paintings, and I would look at the nudes there, too, but never when others were looking. It was all just as sinful.

——So you felt guilty about satisfying a curiosity that you're not sure was legitimate.

——Right.

——But you can't say for sure it wasn't legitimate either.

——Right.

——Do you think you would have avoided the National Geographics and the art books if you had been a Christian? And if your parents had been Christians and not had either National Geographics or art books at home, would you have successfully avoided them at libraries and friends' houses?

——I don't know. I don't think we're supposed to know about those things until the proper time. But come on, the Bible doesn't say anything good about nakedness.

——That's true. Most people don't enjoy being naked around other people. Isaiah probably didn't go around naked, or however naked he was, for the fun of it. I wouldn't expect most nudists would want to go nude around clothed people. So nakedness is a biblical symbol for deprivation and humiliation.

——And so anyone who enjoys going naked is taking pleasure in something the Bible says we should abhor. They're "glorying in their shame." We're supposed to be working to build the kingdom of God, not spending our time and money on idleness and pleasure.

——You've hit the nail on the head, though that could apply equally to going to baseball games. But let's go back to the magazines for a sec. Is there any difference between posing for Playboy and having your picture taken by a National Geographic photographer?

——Well, the women in Playboy are trying to look sexy, and they succeed most of the time. The women in National Geographic were just going about their business. National Geographic was actually more cynical than Playboy. They were using nudity to boost sales and pretending they were advancing knowledge about other cultures, . . .

——Sort of like a doctor who uses helping beautiful women as an excuse to see them naked.

——. . . and they didn't even pay the people they took pictures of, like Playboy did. I'm not sure the women in National Geographic understood that they were giving red-blooded American boys a thrill, but National Geographic knew the score. And I suspect the reason the women in those cultures don't go topless in public places anymore is that they don't want to be exploited.

——Or maybe they think it's sexier to wear clothes.

——How's that?

——Why do you suppose some women's blouses have darts?

——To accentuate the breasts.

——Have you ever grokked a good cleavage in a church narthex?

——Well, they are there, but I look away.

——Good boy. Have you ever used the tiny writing on a tight T-shirt as an excuse to check out a nice set of knockers?

——Yes, in unguarded moments.

——Ever read the writing on the butt of a girl's sweatpants more than once?

——Yes, I've even done that. But I'm not proud of it.

——Am I completely off base saying that a skimpy bikini doesn't so much cover boobs and pubes as much as call attention to them? Or is that OK because they're covered?

——Well, they shouldn't be wearing clothes like that.

——I agree, but should I never attend a church where girls with nice cleavages show them off? Should I complain to the church elders and have them appoint a dress code patrol?

——Maybe that would be a good idea. For sure those girls need a good talking to.

——Do you think the six-year-old boys in those topless villages of yesteryear walked around with hard-ons all day, . . .

——Probably not.

——. . . or do you think boobs were just part of the landscape?

——They saw it all the time, and maybe there's not much sexy about a woman's breasts when as often as not they are being used to nurse babies.

——So boobs don't have to be sexy.

——I guess not.

——And so in a nudist colony . . .

——Look, are you trying to make a nudist out of me?

——No, not at all. I just wanted to see what arguments you'd marshal against it.

——Why?

——Because I think that any argument against nudist colonies also applies to the military and the police force. You have said that nudist colonies are about activities that go against the Bible; OK, putting thieves in jail goes against the Bible's command that they are to make restitution to their victims, so anyone who participates in the jailing of thieves is acting unbiblically, but no church I'm aware of says people shouldn't join the police force. You said that children get hurt when nudism goes wrong; OK, the Bible says nothing about making criminals of people who grow things in their gardens, so jailing pot growers is unbiblical. How long would a policeman be on the force if he refused to go after pot growers? You've said that nudists don't live up to their own PR; have Medicare, Social Security, or the government education system, let alone the wars of the last fifty years, lived up to the PR? You said that doctors and others might see bodies so often that they become numb to the sexual attraction others feel; could it be that soldiers and police officers become numb to treating people unjustly? You've said that you're not sure that natural curiosity about people's bodies is legitimate; does the natural desire to avoid persecution justify the killing of innocent people who happen to be near those we think . . . Hey, where are you going?

——I've heard quite enough, thank you. Good day.

Part 2 is here.

First They Came for the Leftists

The Soviet Union has always been like some sort of Neverland to me; the stories of deprivation, persecution, and oppression were so horrible I frankly couldn't believe they could be true. I heard about the secret police, the propaganda, the jailings of dissidents, and the persecution of Christians, but because I hadn't seen these things with my own eyes and the respectable media didn't talk about them, I couldn't really put it on a par with my daily experience.

It was like reading about demon possession in the Bible: I've never seen it, so yeah, OK, maybe it was true then, but is it as true today? Is it more relevant to me than the baseball game I'm listening to? I could only conclude that if persecution and demon possession did indeed happen they only happened far away and to people I'd never see. I couldn't really justify spending time or effort worrying about such things.

My view of Bible translation was similar: it was a safe profession. We only worked in socially stable places, like our village in Papua New Guinea, where the nasty murders had all happened in the old days. True, on occasion the unattractive and socially marginal mysteriously disappeared, but we were assured that they were witches and the world was better off without them. We didn't see the mutilated bodies, so we forgot about the deceased in less time than it takes to tell.

This worldview carried over into real life, as it were. I remember talking with a fellow translator, a brilliant woman no one would ever confuse with a soldier, a lady of impeccable character, who had spent two summers in Sudan. Oh, how nice—Africa! The languages there have such interesting features!

But much of her conversation had to do with the time she had spent in villages when they were being bombed by the government, and I was simply unable to take in what she was saying. She might as well have told me she had been kinaped by leprechauns for all I could grasp what she was saying—though of course I nodded and smiled and certainly would never have accused her, even to myself, of telling falsehoods. Her words were simply so much mental overload.

I have a hard time believing that Muslims are as nasty as they are portrayed to be. When my son was at university, he said he was making friends with guys from Pakistan. Oh, how nice! Getting to know people from other cultures is such a good way to spread the Gospel! I had heard that Christians are second-class citizens in Muslim countries, and Christian churches in Pakistan and Indonesia get burned occasionsally, but that's there and this is here; in the USA, Muslims play by the rules, right? Didn't National Geographic's story on Beirut include a photo of two Saudis at a rooftop restaurant drinking beer (faces and other identifying features carefully shielded from the camera)? And aren't the Muslim men we meet with a few times a year at our Meetings for Better Understanding obviously human and humane? When I visited my Muslim friend's home, didn't he have going on his big screen a movie he said he'd get in trouble for viewing if he were at home in Bangladesh? Muslim nastiness is far away; it happens to other people.

And Hindus. They may burn churches in India, but here they're OK, right? You know, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and all that? A Hindu woman of my acquaintance has come to Christ in the last few years, but I have a hard time believing her when she says she really is in mortal danger from her husband and doesn't dare tell him about her conversion, even though she is amazingly consistent in her stories.

All this to say I'm having a hard time believing what I'm passing on here. In short, there's pretty good evidence that people like me who vocally oppose the wars in Southwest Asia and attempt to persuade others to join the opposition aren't going to be walking around free all that much longer. I really don't know how long it will be before I am in prison.

A little background: Whenever a government is at war, its success depends on its ability to rally the citizenry to fight. Those who do the grunting, freezing, sweating, living with permanent injuries, dying, and killing know that the men who declare today's wars stay at home, eat catered meals, sleep with their wives, and make speeches. So they need to be convinced that the alternative to suffering on the battlefield is even worse and that those who are maimed or killed in these battles are heroes. Every war is a battle between good ("us") and evil ("them"), and anyone who shows any sympathy to the enemy has to be cast as supporting evil. As Hermann Göring said on the eve of the Nuremburg trials,

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

A man who knows what he's fighting for needs no propaganda to inspire him, and he will not be affected by negative propaganda; the situation is the reverse for the man who doesn't know what he's fighting for. So the less clear the objective of the war, as in the case of the wars the US has fought in my lifetime ("And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? / Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, / Next stop is Vietnam"), the more important propaganda is. The morale of the fighting forces is crucial and must be maintained at all costs, and negative publicity of any kind damages a government's war effort even more than setbacks on the battlefield. There is, unsurprisingly, no incentive for the government to tell the truth, either to the enemy or to the domestic public: "All's fair in love and war," right? and this is doubly true when the interests of the ruling class are at stake.

We in the US tend to think of propaganda as a tool of those governments we're glad we don't live under, but it's as much a part of our history as are the wars it promoted.

After South Carolina seceded, Lincoln shut down newspapers in the North—that's the N-O-R-T-H—that argued against the war he so wanted and jailed the editors and owners. Wilson did the same to promote his war, and FDR did the same with his. Why? Because if they printed the truth (let alone lies—this is war, after all), people would not support the wars. It was that simple.

In our own day, the heroism of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman were front-page news; the good treatment the former received at the hands of her captors and the needless destruction of an Iraqi hospital by her putative rescuers weren't, nor was the revelation that the latter had turned against the war and was killed by "friendly fire."

Journalists need access to the action if they are going to report what's going on. I wasn't alive for Edward R. Murrow's live reports from the European theater (an appropriate term if ever there was one) during FDR's war, but I understand they were not to be missed by patriotic Americans. If he had been asking German prisoners why they were fighting or reporting on the abuse of civilians by US troops (or the sexual immorality—the title of the movie What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? says it all), would he have had the same access to the action and the airwaves? And without access, there's nothing to report, which means no sales and no revenue.

The present solution to the access problem is that jounalists have access to spokespeople. Who needs Edward R. Murrow when you can have Norman Schwartzkopf? Reporters go to briefings, pad every sentence in the prepared remarks with some variant of "he said," and presto! they have their story. Or they can be embedded with combat units—as long as they don't report what Corporal White said about wishing he could get a piece of local ass or show the aftermath of the mortar blast that killed one "suspected insurgent" and half a dozen women and children.

Notice the establishment's complaints about Bradley Manning's release of the video of a US helicopter crew killing innocent people in what seems to be the honest (if far too hastily assumed) belief that they were terrorists. People interested in justice would speak to the issues raised by the video: How warranted was the belief that the photographer was carrying a weapon? Did the crewmen follow standard operating procedures and rules of engagement? What consequences did they face afterward? What steps is the Pentagon taking to see that such killing of innocents not happen in the future?

Instead, the talk was all about how the video would demoralize the homeland, endanger US troops, and raise anger among Iraqis: it was bad propaganda.

Well, folks, the establishment isn't taking what little opposition there is to these wars lying down. They are now following in Lincoln's steps and attacking antiwar types. I've never heard of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and anyone who reads this blog knows I have no sympathy for socialism beyond the words they use to describe their goals ("peace," "justice," "prosperity," "the common good," etc.—I would guess we don't even define those words the same way). So as I write to a somewhat conservative audience, I anticipate a response to the effect of, "I'm not going to worry if the Feds go after a bunch of pinkos or reds. Perilous times require drastic measures."

To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, today the pinkos, tomorrow (or the next day, or the next) the libertarians, and sometime down the road anyone who dares call governemnt rapine what it is. Who knows? Someday Christian churches might provide such a contrast to the evil around them that people will perceive Christians as enough of a threat that to start hauling them off to jail. Who will speak up for them then? "The prudent man keeps quiet in such times, for the times are evil" (Am 5:13).

For now, though, notice how our government is misusing language here by alleging that the FRSO is providing "material support for terrorism." Those who speak against the war are providing "material support" to terrorists? Since when are words material? Material things are tangible; they're made of atoms. Since when is a word made of atoms? Yet on the basis of this verbal travesty, our rulers will criminalize and jail their opponents.

Then again, as I've just explained, the war effort depends crucially on propaganda. Our rulers can't just say, "These people are telling the truth, and if the voters see we're running a racket, we'll be in trouble." They need to respond or they'll lose their fan base. And to the degree that the war really is effective against terrorists, I suppose they can claim that the truth helps terrorists. But I would also argue that this war is an ungodly waste of life and property, and a more godly way would be more respectful of both. But "there's plenty of money to be made / by supplying the army with the tools of the trade," so such suggestions would fall on deaf ears, even if offered by someone with better credentials.

Maybe I'm such a poor writer that this blog, with this readership in single digits on a good day, will never get me in trouble. But when the Roman empire was in trouble, it didn't matter who you were or how vocal your opposition to the government's evil: you had to take the pledge of allegiance ("Caesar is lord") or die. How long before I, along with you, dear reader, have to pledge to support the troops or face draconian (Re 12:9) measures?

Some Christians in the days of the Roman empire were willing to call Caesar lord and toss in the incense, figuring that God knew their hearts and, for that matter, so did the soldiers administering the pledge: everyone knew the emperor was an ordinary, if extraordinarily powerful, mortal, and everyone was just going along to get along. But others, the ones we remember and call heroes today, thinking that their words would affect their standing before God (Mt 12:37), refused to go along with the community and paid, often with their lives.

I've lost good friends because of this blog; I suspect that for them the day I'm arrested will be a day of celebration (Jn 16:2, 20). I'm not betting the farm that my church, which prays regularly for God's protection of the unbelievers in the US military, will pray for their brother in Christ once I'm in prison; I would guess that if they do, they will be praying that I see the error of my ways and start supporting the troops.

"Let him who puts his armor on not boast like him who takes it off" (1 Kg 20:11). I don't know for sure what I'll do when it's time to either live a lie or "live" in prison or die. but it's pretty clear that the day is coming when I'll have to choose, and courage is not exactly my middle name. But if I really love the Lord, my day of crisis will be a day of celebration (2 Ti 3:8) for me, too.

Shooting the Perp's PR Man

I believe in scouting out the enemy when convenient, so I'm on the list for e-mailings from Change.org, President Obama's clearinghouse for political activism. I can't remember any time I have agreed with any of their suggestions ("Demand that private security corporations raise professional standards for security officers to keep America safe"), but one this week got me going enough to forego a possibly remunerative assignment to comment here: "Sign the petition demanding that Craigslist fight human [sex] trafficking on all of its sites."

Obviously human trafficking in any form is immoral, a violation of people's bodies and property, so I'm no friend of Craigslist's trafficking customers. However, going after Craigslist is precisely the wrong way to fight the problem. If the authorities were really serious about saving present and future victims of trafficking, instead of forcing Craigslist to shut down their "adult services" sites, they would send undercover agents to answer suspicious ads, gather the evidence needed to get a warrant, and arrest, prosecute, and execute the traffickers (Ex 21:16). That they go after Craigslist apparently without going after the traffickers is yet more proof that the various wars they whip up hysteria over are about protecting and expanding their power, not protecting us Mundanes.

Government policy regarding the sex industry is completely off any biblical base.

While the only sexual expression that truly pleases God is that between a man and a woman in a monogamous marriage, the Bible doesn't criminalize all suboptimal activities: Polygamy carries no stated penalty, and all women in plural marriages are always called wives. Further, while the Old Testament would have used the word harlotry to describe what we in the sixties called dating, only in the case of the daughter of a priest was there any civil sanction called for. Homosexual actvities call for the death penalty in the Old Testament, but in today's US, homosexuals are joined only by abortionists in the glow of politically correct rights. Meanwhile, prositutes (and their customers) are subject to arrest and jailing.

Given the nature of men and women—the typical woman will not consent to sex without a good reason, while the typical man needs only an opportunity—there is a certain quid pro quo in all heterosexual activity. Wise women put out only for their husbands (who, if they are wise, make their wives' happiness their number one priority); others will settle for dinner and a movie, others just for the thrill, and others for cash. I would guess that the Fantines who are reduced to reluctant prostitution ("Don't they know they're making love to one already dead?") outnumber the Xaviera Hollanders who consider it the ultimate profession about a hundred to one. I see no justice, let alone Christian discipleship or even compassion, in putting such women in cages and later releasing them to the same destitution that reduced them to prostitution in the first place. But this is a minority view.

If we were to go for a government solution to the sex trade, we could straighten out the system without increasing government spending: the money and manpower we spend on the unbiblical war on drugs could be used instead to fight sex kidnapping, a biblical mandate we are ignoring. Think about it.

We spend billions of dollars every year searching for and jailing marijuana growers. This includes aircraft and land vehicles equipped with equipment that can distinguish marijuana from surrounding vegetation. The porno-scanners coming to an airport near you are also coming to your street to strip you as you walk on the sidewalk and to see everything that goes on in your house; it doesn't take a cynic to hypothesize that these devices' "anti-terrorism" functions will be augmented with add-ons for the drug warriors and that the data gathered and stored might contain tidbits of, shall we say, nonprofessional interest to those with access to it (and their friends, and their friends' friends). All this comes at a high price to both our wallets and our privacy. And again, there is no biblical justification for the war on drugs, and the terrorism we face is a response to our government's evil, not to our freedoms.

So, one would think that a people who revere the Bible and are filled with the Holy Spirit and speak of their zeal to defend freedom would latch on to the idea of abandoning an unbiblical pursuit that helps no one and taking up beneficial activities the Bible supports. But one could be wrong.

When Helping Hurts

The deacons' Sunday school class at my church has been studying Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert's When Helping Hurts: How to Help People without Hurting Them and Yourself. This is an important issue for me because I'm convinced that just as biblical faith is more than intellectual assent to a body of doctrines—"faith without deeds is dead"—true Christian witness goes beyond the verbal presentation of the gospel: Christians are "created in Christ Jesus for good works."

Yet as the phenomenon of "rice Christians" evidentiates, the "help" well-intentioned Christians give their neighbors often actually harms them. So how can we really help people the way we're convinced God wants us to? While this book is aimed at white, middle-class, North American Christians who would work with the starving poor, the principles Corbett and Fikkert proposes are equally appropriate for working with a millionaire estranged from his spouse.

The authors attribute the failure of antipoverty programs to three things: a "material definition of poverty," god-complexes among those who would help, and feelings of inferiority experienced by the materially poor, and they place the blame in precisely the right place: the fall of Adam.

God created people to be in relationship four ways: with God, with themselves, with other people, and with the rest of creation. When Adam went his own way, he broke his relationship with God. Because of that, he was ashamed of who he was, so he tried to hide from God and, it would seem, from his wife, as evidenced by his blame-casting when he was confronted by God. And God has stated that the adversarial relationship we have with the nonhuman creation is a direct result of the fall (Gn 3:18-19; Ro 8:21-22).

While the scarcity of material goods is the first thing fallen humans think of as the result of the fall, the most important result is separation from God and consequently from ourselves, our human neighbors, and the rest of creation. In turn, we tend to think of poverty as the lack of material resources instead of the rupture of the relationships that God originally intended for us to have; this misconception is what Corbett and Fikkert call the "material definition of poverty," the first ingredient in failed efforts to alleviate poverty.

Yet when poor people themselves are asked what they suffer from, the lack of money per se is not at the top of the list; instead, "poor people typically talk in terms of shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation and voicelessness." So "helping" someone who suffers from humiliation by giving them money is going to compound their suffering, probably without dealing with the real problem, what made him needy in the first place.

The second ingredient in failed pverty-alleviation programs is god-complexes among those who would help. As Adam wanted to "be like God," those who are materially well off have a hard time avoiding the tendency to consider their wealth the product of their own merit and to view the materially poor as somehow inferior; even those who don't want to play "blame the victim" can still view themselves as messiahs helping the helpless when in fact they are trampling on people who could solve the problems themselves if they could see how to make the best use of their present resources.

One of the biggest problems in many poverty-alleviation efforts is that their design and implementation exacerbates the poverty of being of the economically rich—their god-complexes—and the poverty of being of the economically poor—their feelings of inferiority and shame.

If poverty is the result of broken relationships, what should poverty alleviation aim for? The answer the book presents is that true poverty alleviation is

working to reconcile the four foundational relationships so that people can fulfill their callings of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruit of that work.

This is accomplished through different strategies that depend on the situation of the one being helped. Relief is for those who need immediate help because they have no other way to forestall serious consequences: for example, someone whose house has just been flooded needs shelter and dry clothes, and for a while will need food. Rehabilitation helps those whose bad decisions have brought them to their situations to make better decisions in the future: one should not build houses in flood plains. Development helps people to use the resources they already have more effectively: the flood victim will need help rearranging his life if he is to buy a new home.

It follows from this that treating someone who needs rehabilitation as though he needs relief harms both giver and receiver. As a sign outside a local convenience store used to say, "The more you give change [to the panhandlers they were trying to get rid of], the more things stay the same."

The solutions proposed in the book aren't a few quick 'n easy steps. One small group that sought to improve housing in a poor section of Baltimore did literally nothing but live in the neighborhood and meet their neighbors for years before beginning actual work on houses. During this get-acquainted time, their approach to their neighbors was not the messianic "How can we help you?" of the relief worker. Rather, they could see that what was needed was rehabilitation and development, so they (presumably—the authors don't say so) modeled responsible living and looked for resources within the community that could be channeled into improved housing.

Indeed, a theme that ran through the book was that those who really want to help need to realize that God has been working with those he wants us to help both directly and through other people. Before we do anything to help the poor (except, obviously, those in dire need of immediate relief), we need to be in relationship with them so we can hear what they think their problems are, what their strengths are, and what goals they have set. We also need to listen to those God has placed in the local context, private and (yes, I am holding my nose) "public." It's a win-win situation: if those already there are our friends, they're our friends; if they're our enemies, we have a chance to make them our friends (Pr 16:7). Anyone who has actually been somewhere we're new to knows something about that situation that we don't, and we can make friends with them as well as increase the effectiveness of our help for the poor by honoring them for the time they have spent there.

(Speaking of those we're not sure we'd like to work with, I've always wondered what Jesus talked about at those meals with tax collectors and prostitutes. Could it be that he was nonjudgmentally letting them describe experiences he had never had? "I've never done what you do. Tell me what it's like to be you.")

This "What can you do?" rather than "How can we help you?" mentality is completely antithetical to the way I've always looked at loving my less-fortunate neighbors. Yet it fits with my experience: when I was between jobs and really had no idea what to do next, a couple from church offered to counsel me. They wanted me to get the full benefit of the sessions, so I had to pay for it—it is more blessed to give than to receive—but I was glad to part with my money after the first session because my first homework was to answer exactly the right question, though in different forms: What jobs have you done that you enjoyed? What jobs have you felt you did well? We eventually got around to the usual battery of tests that I had taken to no benefit a few years before, but I had a much better attitude about them than I would have had otherwise because I was taking them in a context of a conversation that was based on my strengths, not on my weaknesses.

The deacons' class decided that this book was well worth reading. But during our final session, we found ourselves scratching our heads and wondering how to put all this into practice. We couldn't imagine going around the church's solidly working-class neighborhood asking people what their strengths are. We all live in pretty comfortable neighborhoods. Does God want us to "go about looking for monsters to destroy"?

We eventually stumbled upon an idea that we would have thought of right away if we had asked ourselves what our own successes looked like. Someone remembered that we had helped a man who had been referred to us by his landlord, who happened to own the bar the man frequented. The deacons had asked some questions around and had eventually given him an airplane ticket to Florida so he could work for his brother, who had promised over the phone to give him a job.

We decided to check to make sure the man was still working, then thank the bar owner for the referral, tell him he is welcome to refer such people to us in the future, and ask him if he would be willing to spread the word to other bar owners he knows. (Being Presbyterians, we thought the best way to celebrate the success of the program was with a sizable tab and tip at his establishment.) We'll see how that goes, but at least we had planned a first step by the end of the class.

Corbett and Fikkert are somewhat sympathetic to tax-funded "help" for the poor, so I would be remiss if I didn't point out how "public compassion" goes against the main tenets of this otherwise excellent book.

If the primary form of poverty is a broken relationship with God, for that reason government help is useless because governments cannot evangelize. Hezekiah tried it and it didn't work (2Ch 30:1-11). While much is made of Paul's appeal to Caesar for justice (Ac 25:11), that sword had two edges: "This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar" (Ac 26:32); and, of course, it was government that killed John the Baptist, Jesus himself, James, Stephen, Peter, and eventually Paul. I know of no state church that exists today that really preaches the gospel. Some Christians defend "public" schools because they had this or that teacher or administrator who led them to Christ, but I would argue that the gospel was communicated despite the system, not because of it. In Papua New Guinea the government schools have a specifically Christian "religious instruction" component, but no one would accuse the average graduate of having a meaningful understanding, let alone reverence for, the Bible. My experience is the same with the handful of Kenyans I have met who have gone through that government's religious instruction programs. I don't see how government poverty-alleviation programs could ever include a gospel component that really restored people's relationships to God.

If god-complexes plague erstwhile helpers and keep them from truly helping, and if power and privilege are the essence of godhood, for that reason governments, which embody power and privilege, cannot help anyone. The essence of government is the idea that some people are more equal than others and therefore have rights and privileges that others don't have, so they can therefore justly use their powers to deprive people of the fruits of their labors (taxation) and go on to deprive them of privacy and freedom (substance prohibition, conscription, hiring quotas, permit systems, etc.). Success at alleviating poverty would provide incentive to increase the god-complex inherent in government, and government agencies would more likely blame failure on those less-than-gods they were trying to help than take the blame themselves.

If what affects the poor more than material lack is feelings of inferiority, for that reason government cannot alleviate poverty. The more inferior the populace feels, the more power accrues to the government: if the taxpayer cannot resist, taxes rise, which enables the system to grow; similarly, the more helpless the recipients feel, the more justified the government is perceived in raising taxes and expanding its "helping" functions. The incentives inherent to a system of government "compassion" are totally perverse: as the problem to be solved becomes worse, the tax-paid "helpers" gain power and prestige (and remuneration and job security) and more "aid" becomes available to those who "need" it.

If the primary means of poverty alleviation is the restoration of relationships with creation, for that reason government cannot alleviate poverty. Not only is the primary incentive to continue the program and pay those who run it, but the underlying assumption is that the "helpers" who run it are by virtue of being government employees superior to the "helpees" whom they "help." The "helpees" therefore are cast as inferior from the get-go, which prevents them from ever entering into relationship with their "helpers" as equals.

If we really want to help our neighbors—all together now—we need to get government out of the business and use our own resources for the glory of God. When Helping Hurts argues this point better than the authors knew.

The Peace of Jerusalem

Brother Peterson shares Christ with more strangers in a week than I do in a year. He stands at the entrance to the Market East railway station every afternoon during peak hours with hand-lettered signs calling on passersby to repent of their sins and come to Christ. At least once a week I see him talking with someone who has stopped by, and judging by the body language, they are nonbelievers who are trying to figure out what this crazy old guy is all about.

Brother Peterson is old, probably in his mid-sixties, he hobbles with a cane, he's missing a few teeth, and he is unlettered, but he's not crazy. And he genuinely loves the Lord. His face has somewhat of a basset hound sadness to it, and the first few times I saw him, I avoided him, thinking, "What a horrible advertisement for the gospel." But God convicted me, and one day I decided to break the ice by offering to buy him a smoothie from the nearby fruit stand. He turned the smoothie down, but we got to talking about the Lord, and the basset hound turned into a beagle in an instant. His eyes lit up, and he was very chatty. I don't spend enough time at Market East for it to depress me much, but in four years I've spent probably as much time there as he did his first month on duty, and I have grown to appreciate how hard it is for him to smile: there isn't much there to cheer one longing for heaven. That man is a soldier of the cross.

I was early arriving today, and Brother Peterson didn't have anyone on the line, so I stopped to say hi. After the initial pleasantries, he said, "Brother, I want you to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. We need to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the apple of God's eye, and those Iranians . . . ."

Great God who lives in heaven above, Lord of glory, Lord of love, what has gotten into this man? Who is the apple of God's eye? Is it a nation of people who reject the Christ who is truly the apple of God's eye, or is it those who have given their lives to Christ?

Not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." In other words, it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring. (Ro 9:6-8)

Who are the children of the promise? Is it not Christ's brothers?

Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written,
"Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear;
Break forth and shout, you who are not in labor;
For more are the children of the desolate
Than of the one who has a husband."
And you brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. (Gal 4:25-28)

It is only the heavenly Jerusalem that really counts today; it is only those who have surrendered to Jesus Christ who are headed for an afterlife worth looking forward to. It is only those who love the one whom God loves above all else who have the possibility of pleasing God in this life.

I'm not writing this to beat up on Brother Peterson. I sang his praises because he is an exemplary Christian. Unfortunately, he is not alone in having his priorities out of order. I don't know if the ones who have bewitched him and others (Ga 3:1) are the media mouthpieces of the American-Israeli Politcal Action Committee or the spiritual heirs of C. I. Scofield, but someone has done great damage to the cause of Christ and to men of goodwill like Brother Peterson by promoting the idea that one can please God apart from Christ.

He went on to talk about how the United States is crumbling before our eyes and we need to pray that God will keep it from total destruction. Again, I had to shake my head. Our nation is literally going to hell; every year a smaller proportion of our fellow citizens who leave this life are headed for glory. I like to think that a massive turning to Christ would stay God's hand of judgment against our wicked society, but it didn't happen in Jeremiah's day, so I'm not counting on it now. But whether or not God's hand is stayed, these are individuals no different from me who are facing an eternity of suffering. Yes, they will receive justice; but God calls us to urge them to receive grace and mercy (2Co 5:20). I like good neighbors and want to live in a prosperous society, but not if it means people who have lived as good neighbors die without Christ. And if it's true that the bigger they are the harder they fall, and Uncle Sam is getting bigger every day, I say the sooner he meets his doom the less bad things will be.

Brother Peterson is in the convinving business, not the listening business, so I didn't waste too much of my breath discussing the matter with him. And as I left, he called, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!"

I replied, "I'll be praying that they come to Christ. Beyond that, nothing matters." I hope I'm not missing something, because more people than I would have planned on heard it. Imagine that: me preaching the gospel at a train station!

"We're from the Government, and We're Here to Help You"

That wasn't quite what they said. What they said was, "Hands off your computers." There were about twenty of them in flak vests, most with sidearms. They just walked in the front door of my workplace this morning, and just like that, all productive labor ceased.

Oh, they were friendly enough. No "sorry for the inconvenience," but one can be grateful for no drawn weapons, no shouted orders, and no patdowns or strip searches. The atmosphere was essentially, do what we ask and there won't be any trouble—exactly what a robber or rapist would want to communicate. We were pretty free to walk around and chat, and even go home. (I took the option to leave and am writing this on the train home. But before I could leave, they inspected my laptop.) They asked us for identification, addresses, and what we do at work, and they videoed and photographed the whole office and were going through all books and anything else that might contain the information they were looking for. We were properly obsequious (except for RMP-M, a petite lady who had the balls to say out loud what we were all thinking and didn't suffer for it), so there were no "incidents."

But let's run some numbers.

There are about twenty of us in the office. Given my salary and bennies, plus other costs the company has that they amortize into employee costs, I'm guessing I have to produce about $35 per hour for the company to break even. I'm far from the sharpest knife in the drawer, but we've got a lot of new hires, so my rate is probably near the middle for the office. So, for every hour we can't work, the company loses $700, $5600 for the day. That's my company's costs.

I would guess that the agents' salaries and bennies are well over twice mine, but let's call it twice mine, $70 per hour. That's $1400 per hour for the crew that came in. They estimated a six-hour on-site investigation, but government projects are always estimated low and delivered high, so I'll call it eight hours there; and the analysis stage of any operation is always more time consuming than the data-gathering stage, but let's assume they realize quickly that we're innocent and they only match the data-gathering time. So, $1400 x 8 x 2 = $22,400. The money Uncle Sam has spent on the investigation of this office alone is worth the price of a nice new family-sized car. One can safely assume that the investigation will target other people, so a total cost of $100,000 is probably not unreasonable.

Now what wickedness, you ask, was my workplace involved in?

According to the piece of paper the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (I guess; the caps only said "CID") of the FBI, the Treasury Department, and the IRS (they were all represented, at least on the clothing) waved at our office manager, they were investigating "a whole laundry list of violations" having to do with a nonprofit organization with which someone in our company has had some connection. I had heard about the connection when I first began working there in 2006, but I heard no specifics then or and have heard nothing since. It is the sort of organization of which only Ayn Rand would disapprove (though she would not think of forcibly disbanding it). There are some people you can tell are crooked almost when you meet them, but the person involved has had ample opportunity to reveal streaks of unscrupulousness or dishonesty and so far has not. In fact, another worker said that the same matters were under investigation before I started working there and the investigation came to nothing. So, to put it kindly, it would appear that someone has too much time on his hands.

In my rants about jury duty, I pointed out that in my case the system pulled a dozen not-rich people away from their jobs to settle a dispute between two wealthy people (which, after one day of trial, they settled out of court; I almost forgot the dozens of people who lost a day of work but were not selected to be on the jury). Today an innocent man lost $5600 and at least two of his clients didn't take delivery of goods they needed to serve their customers, other business owners will likely each lose more, and US taxpayers will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. For what?

I don't know the dollar amount at stake in the nonprofit organization. Maybe it was thousands of dollars, maybe it was millions. I don't know who the plaintiff is or what he thinks he lost. But the men and women who barged into our workplace today were all federal agents, so I'm guessing that the problem was i's not dotted and t's not crossed. Maybe the nonprofit forgot to pay some fees; more likely they forgot to follow some procedure that would have been grossly inconvenient for them, of little benefit to the government, and of no benefit to anyone not a net receiver of tax revenue. I can't believe that the monetary loss to the federal government amounted to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it is spending to investigate the matter.

I have a coworker from Kenya, one of those awful, nasty, third-world countries US citizens pride themselves on not being part of. She has been at government-run boarding schools that dictate when you get up, what you wear, what and when you can eat, when you can pee, when you can go to bed, what you can learn, and I forget what else. Her family has at times literally had to drop everything and run into the woods to escape gangs of marauding bandits. She half-whispered to me before I left, "I've never seen anything like this."

The numbers I ran are pretty good evidence that the issue is not the money. That this matter has lain dormant for more than four years tells me no one is suffering any great injustice. I think the issue is power.

Adam ate the fruit because he wanted to be "like God." That is the essence of rebellion against the God who is there: the desire for power, autonomy, and the pleasures that we think will follow them. Uncle Sam is nothing if not a personification of rebellion against God, and he's out to eliminate his rivals. The obsequiousness in our office was proof that we got the message of who's really whose servant in Uncle Sam's dominion.

Whatever "our brave men and women" are fighting for in Southwesta Asia, it isn't freedom—not ours, anyway. And the sooner we divorce the Cross from Old Glory, the more chance we have that our grandchildren will not be trapped in the police state we see growing before our eyes.

USPS Muslim Stamp

A friend sent me an e-mail today that is essentially the text found here. I wrote a response before checking to see whether the information was a hoax. Apparently it is. However, the passion behind the e-mail calls for a response, so I'm offering one here.

***

America is the idea that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Wake up, Americans! The Post Office is simply the little toenail on your worst enemy, the “powers and principalities” that have Uncle Sam on strings. Our government is no more American than Sweden’s or Burkina Faso’s.

Remember the thousands of Muslims tortured by the US-CIA-installed Shah of Iran? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the thousands of Muslims gassed by then-US ally Saddam Hussein in Kurdistan and killed in his US-funded war against Iran? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the thousands of women oppressed under the US-funded Taliban in Afghanistan? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by the Bush-Clinton sanctions on Iraq after Desert Storm? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the thousands of Muslim women and children killed by shock and awe and predator drones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, what General McChrystal called the “amazing number of people who meant us no harm”? You can bet the Muslims do!

Remember the money Uncle Sam gives Planned Parenthood! Do you think perhaps that callous disregard for life could extend to his foreign policy?

Remember the bankster bailouts that your grandchildren will never finish paying for! Do you think the business interests that profit from our wars really care about the Kingdom of God?

If nothing else, remember who “our President” is! If he’s willing to play fast and loose with the truth about his domestic programs, what makes you think he’s telling the truth when he says our foreign wars are all about protecting us little guys?

End the Federal Reserve! End the federal government! Better still, get rid of the idea that some people have rights (like taxation, censorship, regulation, and war) that others don’t have.

We are all children of Adam through Noah. A Christian’s citizenship is in heaven, never (according to the NT) in the country that collects his taxes (except when such is expedient, Acts 16:37). Otherwise we are our neighbor’s neighbor, not our brother’s keeper, and charged only with being an ambassador for Christ to persuade men (2 Corinthians 5:11, 20-21).

No one’s sin nature goes away when he gets a government job. He simply finds himself in a position to exploit his fellow men with impunity. Not all tax-feeders are evil, but those who aren’t can probably testify that they could get away with less good and more evil than they do; that is, the system provides perverse incentives. We need to get rid of the system. See Deuteronomy 17:16-20.

The greatest nation that ever was has devolved into tyranny and debt beyond repayment. It’s time to scrap it and start over. The Torah would be a good place to start.

On Judging Other Nations

Andy's comment on the previous post: "Is it fair for God to use a nation like Babylon to punish other nations, then punish Babylon for doing exactly what God directed them to do?"

My cynical answer is, if God says it's fair, it's fair. It's God's universe and he makes the rules. He can make them, and he can break them.

I can even back the first two sentences up with Scripture: All have sinned and the wages of sin is death. We deserve to die and go to hell, and anything better than that is God's grace to the undeserving.

I don't think Andy claims that God appeared to Nebuchadnezzar and told him to invade Judah; rather, through that relationship between God's total sovereignty and man's total free will and responsibility—a relationship that believers consider beyond human comprehension and unbelievers consider simply irrational and thus impossible—God worked his sovereign will through Nebuchadnezzar's will to bring judgment on Judah. So how can God condemn Babylon for doing what he wanted them to do?

I don't know. Paul addresses the question and Job deals with it through the bulk of his book, and the answer is the same both times: "You didn't make the universe, you don't know how it works, and you can't do anything about it, so shut up" (Job 38–41; Ro 9).

I do think we need to question our assumption that God is using the US to judge other nations' wickedness. He never called Israel to judge the wickedness of its neighbors. Ammon was clearly the aggressor in 1 Samuel 12; other than that, I can't think of any time Israel's military went outside its borders. (Philistia was within the borders God described to Joshua.) The closest they got to a preemptive strike against potential aggressors was Jonah's mission to Nineveh, and need I point out that that was not a government operation?

As Andy mentions, Uncle Sam's reason for invading Iraq and Afgbhanistan was imperialist theft. That Uncle Sam is God's agent of judgment against those nations is a reasonable proposition, But the fate of Babylon, an imperialist power that was also God's agent of judgment, against Judah, should give us pause: do we want to suffer the same fate? If not, is there anything we can do about it? What privilege is it to be used as God's agent of judgment if God's just going to punish me for it? I wouldn't mind being God's agent of judgment against pretty girls who dress provocatively, but I can't imagine that a thousand years from now I'd be glad I did so. Somewhere in this deceitful, wicked heart I wouldn't even want to live in a universe in which I would be.

If my church is typical, US Christians spend over three times as much in taxes to "punish" Iraq alone than they give in support for all missionaries. If this situation were simply a matter of an evil government ruling over a helpless people, that would be no cause for concern. What bothers me is that US Christians want to spend more money doing who-cares-what in Iraq than they do on fulfilling the Great Commission: I have lost a lot of friends simply by pointing out Uncle Sam's evils and questioning the wisdom of identifying with him. If they want to share Babylon's fate, that's their choice. Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to get out of Babylon, so I'll have to share it with them.

This blog is an attempt to convince Christians to remember that their only citizenship described as such is in heaven (Php 3:20) and to make the Great Commission, through simple good neighborliness if nothing else, their first priority. As April Glaspie told Saddam, "We have no opinion about your [nationalist or imperialist] conflicts"; we don't see that anyone is on the side of justice. We can do better.

Another Reply to Andy

A blogger's best friends are his critics, and my friend Andy has come through again, taking vigorous exception to my last post (and, it would seem, others). Blog posts need to be short, so one can't reiterate one's foundational principles every time, but I can't do Andy's comment justice without doing so here, so what follows might sound familiar.

I consider the first principles of good neighborliness to be keeping one's hands to oneself and telling the truth. That means we have no authority from God to so much as touch people's bodies or their property without their consent, either directly or through fraud, and we are not to tell falsehoods about others. We are all descendants of Adam through Noah and therefore equals. We have all sinned and therefore do not deserve anything but God's wrath. We are all trapped in the consequences of the fall, having unlimited desires and limited means of satisfying them, and so we are all subject to the same temptations to maximize our own benefit at the expense of others.

God has, in his providence, equipped some people to be leaders, but that in no way entitles them to go beyond those first principles. The Torah specifically forbids the king from considering himself "better than his brothers" (Dt 17:18-20), and Jesus makes it clear that leadership is primarily service, not power (Lu 22:35-26).

Fine and dandy, you say, but people don't act that way; that's why we need governments to protect us. To which I say, look around: how many governments can you name today, let alone through history, that have actually protected their subjects? Wouldn't a broad-brush painting of human history show that governments are more interested in self-preservation and self-enrichment than in the welfare of their subjects?

It seems to me the question isn't why governments are generally rapacious; it's why some aren't. When the government—any government—makes the laws and determines how they are to be enforced, how much its subjects will pay for it, and what avenues are available for redress of grievances, what incentive do the people who comprise it have to act in behalf of their subjects rather than in their own self-interests? Not all governments or government agents are rapacious, but what is there besides personal scruples and political expediency to limit the raw power of those who have it?

We have just completed the century of benign government, in which almost everyone in the world believed that it is the government's job to actively promote the welfare of its subjects. Of all the governments of the last 110 years, how many of them actually did so? Or are we more likely to think of the death camps, torture chambers, and deadly wars? And weren't the nations that shed the most blood also those with the strongest, most proactive governments?

My argument is not that Uncle Sam is especially unrighteous; rather, contrary to those who think he is somehow above transgression, he is made of exactly the same stuff as other governments: some people consider themselves authorized, yea commanded, to do things that would be criminal if their subjects did it (except as government deputies) and that members of that group would never tolerate if done to them. We're a long way from Argentina, let alone North Korea in that regard, but every law Congress considers takes us closer to them and farther away from the comparatively free society I grew up in (pace Jim Crow), and more so the society where people could go months without any contact with government except the Post Office, where anyone able to handle the money could buy heroin at the local pharmacy, and, most importantly, where the church of Jesus Christ was esteemed to a degree unthinkable today. The purpose of this blog is to challenge Christians to look at our society—yes, North Korea is worse, but there's little to be done about it without violating the first principles of neighborliness—and stop supporting those things that make us bad neighbors.

My opposition to all of what we consider government follows from all this: if we are children of Noah, then giving someone a government job will not per se get rid of his selfishness, nor does it exempt him from keeping his hands to himself or telling the truth. Yet all governments begin by taking people's property, killing those who resist forcibly, and then lying about what happened and making false promises for the future. Unless you're one of those rare birds who voted for Clinton, Bush, and Obama, you have probably argued that our government is guilty of those sins to some degree at some point in the last eighteen years. Why am I wrong for pointing out that both sides, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, accuse each other correctly of using government as a tool of oppression?

It also follows that no terrorist is righteous: my connection of the word with Faisal Shahzad (whom I called in the post a "mass-murderer [wannabe]," remember) was in the context of Judah and Tamar, neither of whom was truly righteous. I take Judah's words "She is more righteous than I" to mean "She was wrong to do what she did, but I am not innocent of sin." Was the only fruit of Judah's repentance that he stopped having sex with Tamar? Who raised the children? Did they have regular contact with their father, or was Tamar a welfare queen the rest of her life? I was suggesting that we see if the present conflict is in some respect a result of our sins. We are, after all, sinners, are we not? Nobody's memory is exhaustive, but isn't it a bit selective to remember only Muslims' attacks against us and not ours against them?

No colonial government is righteous. There has perhaps never been as benign a colonial power as England, but if you read Kipling ("Gunga Din" is a good place to start) or Orwell (Burmese Days), you will, I trust, see that the British Empire was primarily about enriching the homeland at the colonies' expense; civilizing the heathen was good only as long as it didn't interfere with the primary goal. The British colonized China for their benefit, not that of the Chinese; the US was there in 1941, too, which is why those ships were in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were particularly vicious colonists (e.g., the Rape of Nanking; however, I recently freelance edited a master's thesis by a Korean student at Harvard who made the point several times in passing that the Japanese really were attempting to be of benefit to the Koreans—talk about something hard for me to swallow!), but in all cases it was plunder, differing only in degree. If you don't want to say Pearl Harbor was our fault, fine; but we were not innocent. We were blockading Japan to keep them from expanding their empire into Indochina (to keep the Brits and rapacious French and Dutch from having competition). They wanted to negotiate, but Roosevelt wanted to play hardball; he was purposely working to get the Japanese to fire the first shot so he could undermine the antiwar sentiment in the US. He succeeded.

Remember that Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill, and Hirohito all shared the primary assumption that it is the duty of the government to provide for the needs of its subjects. Joseph Kennedy's support for Hitler outlasted its political expediency while he was emissary to England to the point that he had to be gagged; Prescott Bush (GHWB's dad), Averill Harriman, and Henry Ford all supported Hitler, and Roosevelt initially called Mussolini "that charming Italian gentleman" precisely because they all believed that "some people are more equal than others." Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court to keep his unconstitutional domestic policies is cousin, if not brother, to Hitler's maneuverings to acquire power. The war was not about freedom; it was about whose version of tyranny would prevail over what plots of ground.

So yes, the Japanese attack was murder; but it was one imperialist murdering another. Further, the Japanese were aiming at military targets, so most of the casualties were military people; most of Uncle Sam's victims these days are innocents.

I'm not sure who is meant by "people who support and defend killers." If he means the women and children who died in the US sanctions against Iraq, I guess we have a fundamental disagreement about how the world works. I didn't vote for Obama, or for anyone currently in Congress, so I would not accept some Chinese soldier's or politician's protestations that he killed my wife because of US foreign policy; I therefore would side with an anti-Saddam Iraqi who is angered by US activities that kill his loved ones. As for pro-Saddam Iraqis, I would turn the question around: how should the Afghans who suffer under the Taliban think about Americans who support and defend those who kill innocents there?

"We came to the defense of an ally who asked us for help when they were being attacked." I don't know if the reference here is China, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia. I've addressed the situation in China. As for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, when Saddam told GHWB's emissary April Glaspie that he was planning to attack Kuwait, her response was, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." It was only after he took over the oil fields, the true focus of Uncle Sam's concern in the Middle East, that suddenly Saddam was no longer our ally and we had to send in the troops to retake the oil wells and Red Adair to fix them. Our concern with Saudi Arabia was probably also petroleum based. Rush Limbaugh said as much one of the first times I heard him in 1991: "The war was to guarantee the free flow of oil at market prices."

So the Saudi government invited us to defend them. I don't know that the Saudi government represents Osama any more than Obama represents me. I wouldn't welcome the Chinese here even if Obama invited them, so I can understand Osama's objection, even if his response was murderous.

(And again, I don't think the evidence that Osama was behind 9/11 is conclusive; too many odd things happened that day to allow me think whoever did it didn't have help from inside the US power structure. Osama's name came up just too conveniently on that day, and he has not acted since like he wants credit for the attack. There were many in the US power structure who were looking, even, it would seem, hoping, for "a new Pearl Harbor" to occur so they could bring about precisely the national security police state we have today.)

Bottom line: murder is murder, no matter who does it, terrorists or government agents, uniformed or not. Osama (it seems) and Obama are guilty, as are those who support them. We can continue the cycle of retribution or we can admit our guilt and try to achieve reconciliation. This blog is my attempt to do the latter.

The Most Important Sound Bite of the Twenty-First Century

Just as the most important person of the twentieth century, Karl Marx, lived in the previous century, the words that defined the twenty-first century were spoken in the twentieth.

Here Bill Clinton's Sectretary of State Madeleine Albright tells the world that the death of half a million Iraqi women and children is "worth it" to the interests of US citizens.

I don't remember anyone telling me in the mid-1990s that Saddam would force my wife and daughters to wear burqas, but apparently preventing him from doing so was worth killing half a million innocent oppressed people.

Jesus seems to have thought so, too. His people were more concerned with Clinton's hanky-panky with Monica Lewinsky than with his murderous sanctions against Iraq, and they consider Muslim admiration for Osama, whose fatwa was triggered by the carnage, proof of depravity.

A decade and a half later, we have ObamaCare, scanners at airports that virtually strip passengers naked, two wars in which "our" generals can't define what victory would look like, and a debt burden the whole planet couldn't hope to pay off. Tell me, adopted sibling of Jesus, has it been worth it? Is it worth more of the same?

Down on Main Street

Lansdale, Pennsylvania, my domicile—I can't get myself to call it home—for the last nine years, is a dying small town of rusted girders, crumbling brick, and peeling paint, populated by, oh, eight thousand people carrying the weight of at least ten thousand, many sporting tattoos and a fair amount of piercing. The three notable festivals it hosts are Under the Lights, which shuts down Main Street and lines it with antique cars from the mid-twentieth century (fully a quarter of which had for sale signs this year); Bike Night, which shuts down Main Street and lines it with motorcycles; and Mardi Gras, the parade in which Santa Claus arrives every November (yes, you read that right).

The hosiery and dumpster manufacturies that fueled the housing boom before Roosevelt's war were gone by the time I was born. The former was razed to make room for Starbucks and Walgreen's a couple of years ago, and the elevated conveyor of the latter presides over a field weeds. There is a plastics factory on the outskirts one direction and a pharmaceuticals factory on the outskirts in the other, but the economy in the borough—I think a borough is not part of the township or the county across the borders—is strictly services. The classiest shop to open recently began by landscaping the postage-stamp garden between the display window and the sidewalk, including decorative diode lights. The interior was also a couple of steps above those of the thrift stores and nail salons with which it shares Main Street. Yessir, I had great hopes for the place—until I read the sign: Red Lotus Tattoo Parlor. When the classiest new business on the street is a tattoo parlor, even Kansas isn't Kansas anymore.

Lansdale's slide into the Third World got a boost, if you can call it that, a few years ago when the North Penn Symphony Orchestra needed a summer home. I don't have the chronology straight, but someone decided that White's Road Park needed a band shell—maybe they felt outclassed by Souderton, a much smaller borough five miles away, which has had a band shell for years and hosts concerts every Sunday evening during the summer—and got the borough council on board. So, at a cost of somewhere in the double digits per citizen, Lansdale built a band shell, and at the cost of somewhere in single digits per year, it hosts a couple of dozen concerts on Wednesday nights. I'm not sure how many of those concerts the NPSO (remember them?) plays in, but I don't remember seeing their names on the schedule for this year.

Ah, but the NPSO also needed a winter home. Rehearsing and giving concerts in the local middle school wasn't cutting it. And it just so happened that the Masonic Temple on Main Street had been vacant for years, so all that was needed was to convert it into a concert venue. But while the tax burden of putting up a band shell is pretty innocuous, revamping a building involves real money the borough didn't have.

Never fear, however: state Senator Robert Wonderling is here. (Well, he was; he's since moved on to the Chamber of Commerce.) Senator Wonderling secured funding from the state for what is now the Lansdale Center for the Performing Arts. How do I know he's responsible? Well, for over a year a huge banner has festooned the Main Street side of the LCPA (the main entrance is on the back side, by the city parking lot) proclaiming, "Thank you, Senator Wonderling!" Now Senator Wonderling is an outspoken Christian, so Jesus is no doubt getting all sorts of great publicity from this.

When the LCPA first opened, the display windows on Main Street were pretty much empty save for a picture of a ballerina in that pose where she's swooning backwards and being held by a ballerino. In this picture you couldn't see the people's heads, only enough of the bodies so you'd know what was going on. Maybe I'm just a pervert, but I would say that since they were right in the middle of the picture, the point of interest was the ballerina's tits. Thank you, Senator Wonderling!

But it gets better. A family in our church is very interested in the arts, and one member is employed in some capacity by the LCPA. She mentioned a while back that they were having trouble booking acts there. "It's a public works project looking for a reason to exist." With a fan like that, who needs a critic like me?

Except that I would add that the LCPA is a microcosm of the borough government as a whole. It takes away our money and adds nothing to our lives. The things that matter most, like friendship and family and church, and even Bike Night and Under the Lights and the Red Lotus Tattoo Parlor, would exist without it. It owes its continued existence solely to people's faith in the beneficence of government, that fiction by which each person seeks to live at the expense of others.

The ballerina has recently been replaced by plasma displays that run advertisements and news. Just the other day, they announced that Ghana had beaten the United States in the World Cup. That was weeks ago, but who's counting? The news service they carry is the North Penn News Service, another government operation, this time at the intertownship level, I guess.

Now I get to the impetus for post. Lansdale has its own Development Commission. And you thought only Third World countries had development commissions. Anyway, the Lansdale Development Commission decided that what would jumpstart the economy would be—you guessed it—a pub, Molly Maguire's Pub. So they pulled some strings and played havoc with nearby businesses' parking and put a pub on Main Street, complete with a deck overlooking the parking lot and railroad. I was impressed that the doors actually opened yesterday, in July, the same month the movers and shakers promised up front. It wasn't in time for the First Annual Lansdale Beer Tasting Festival (another civic venture, I'm sure) last weekend, but there was a sign out on Monday that they would be open on Thursday, and open they did.

I'm guessing things didn't quite turn out as planned, though. This morning there was a sign in the window: Closed until further notice.

At least no one can blame Senator Wonderling.