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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

o   Disputes must be decided by tax-funded courts.

o   Government must determine and enforce personal morality.

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

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

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

o   Retirement should be funded by taxes on current workers.

You get the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vietnam Vet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin and Zimmermann: The Anarchist Alternative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Neighbors in Armed Service

For K.R.

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

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

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

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

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

2. Should Christian subordinates have obeyed the order?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Words for the Oppressed

We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: "The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me." For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God. (Rom 14:1-7) 

Your land has been invaded. Your spouse and one of your children are dead, various cousins and friends are dead or maimed, your house is rubble, your employer has shuttered his business, and every day the struggle to find food, drinkable water, and shelter from the weather is made more difficult by an astonishing number and variety of rules put in place by the invaders, rules that seem to be put in place not because they improve the lot of anyone, even the invaders, but simply for spite.

As time goes on, you notice that the invaders, who are now occupiers, boast less of their military superiority than of their moral superiority. While as far as you can tell, life is worse now than it was before the invasion—it certainly is for you—the occupiers seem sincerely convinced that you should be grateful for their presence and consider the death and destruction they have wrought and continue to wreak as the price of progress.

About the time you are able to convince yourself that God wants you to love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you, you walk into church on Sunday morning and see an occupier, proudly decked out in new battle fatigues, obviously there for the same reason you are—to praise God for forgiveness in Christ.

What do you do? What does Jesus want you to do?

These questions have been faced by our brothers and sisters throughout church history. I expect that the first Jewish Christians to host Cornelius and his family had to overcome gut-level revulsion, not only at his being a Gentile, but also at his association with Roman oppression.¹ The same can be said for those who hosted Zacchaeus and the centurion of Matthew 8, assuming both remained in the faith after Pentecost.

More recently, I would guess more than one Christian Turkish soldier wanted to worship with his Armenian brethren during the genocide, and it’s even more likely that German Christians would have wanted to join their voices with their Dutch brethren after the Blitzkrieg. Biafran Christians have had to put aside the memories of the megadeath inflicted on them by their Nigerian brethren and Palestinian Christians have been called on to worship with Israeli Christians for quite some time. Today there are so many Christian US soldiers in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan that some have surely expected to be welcomed by local churches. (There have been Christian churches in Iraq for two thousand years and in Pakistan for almost a century; I understand they are not unknown in Afghanistan.)

And, of course, as one who believes that what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine, I consider myself in territory occupied by people who believe that what’s theirs is theirs and what’s mine is negotiable, so not only that they are perfectly justified in taking my money through taxation to fund activities I find morally repugnant, that they are commanded to do so by Jesus.

How are we to act when the enemies we are called to love are part of the household of faith?

Does Jesus allow me to consider them my enemies? Or am I to accept them as “weaker brothers” and strive for “a spirit of unity” above all? (Or am I the “weaker brother” here?) The parable of the unforgiving servant leaves no doubt that I am to love them and forgive them whether they repent or not—have I truly repented of all my sins?—but am I to be silent in the face of ongoing injustice about which my oppressors feel no pangs of conscience? At what point do I have to shut up in the face of their complaints that I’m trying to do the Holy Spirit’s job? (Were Jeremiah and John the Baptist, neither known for their warm fuzzies, “trying to do the Holy Spirit’s job”?) Is there no point at which I, a non-ordained layman, can say I’ve had enough and it’s time to dissociate myself from what I can see as nothing short of apostasy?

As our society goes into moral and legal freefall, I have spent probably too much time thinking about what the future holds, specifically in the area of personal liberty. I have concluded, as here, that those who take over the reins from the current band of thieves and murderers will be more oppressive, not less. I’m also guessing that it will be harder to love heathen invaders than I can imagine—I’m not doing a stellar job with the conservatives and liberals whose boot I feel, however lightly, on my neck—but I have reason to believe that God will bless me for doing so in ways I cannot understand, just as God blesses me through my enemies today.

If an invading foreign army has a noticeable number of Christians in it, however, my conservative and liberal brethren are going to have to ask the same questions I’m currently asking, so I’m raising the issues here now: if it’s OK for US Christians to inflict collateral damage on Afghans, it’s certainly OK for Chinese Christians to do the same here. And when—not if—they do, we will all be called on to welcome them in our churches, to please them, to build them up, so that with one heart and mouth we can glorify our God and father, and to love them as Jesus has loved us so that all men may know that we are his disciples. Will you do a better job then than I’m doing now?

The perceptive reader will note that the Chinese probably will not get here until after the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, the National Guard, the US Army’s NORTHCOM, and the local militarized police forces have gotten us accustomed to being occupied by Christians. They are already practicing maneuvers in urban areas, and the safe money says that the military will behave here just as it has overseas, which means we can look forward to shock and awe and collateral damage. “Give, and it will be given back to you.”

If you think I’m crazy, think back to the war against the Confederacy. The Union soldiers considered the Southerners their fellow citizens, but they also considered them Untermenschand treated them accordingly, as Sherman’s march through Georgia and Sheridan’s march through the Shenandoah are irrefutable proof. Equip that same attitude with twenty-first century weapons and the misery to be inflicted on anyone who resists the government of Roe v. Wade, OSHA, FEMA, and ObamaCare can scarcely be imagined. And the perpetrators are coming to a church near you.

I’m nowhere near ready for that day. How about you?

1The Roman invasion was in some measure at the invitation of the Jews to settle a civil war, so this last sentence is true inversely to the degree that Jewish Christians welcomed the Romans.

Billy

I knew that Andy, a guy in my Boy Scout troop whose basic decency was lost on the “cool” crowd and us wannabes, had one younger brother. But it was the brother I didn’t know he had who, like the eighth son of Jesse of Bethlehem, has been the member of that family I most remember now. He’s the first person I think of when I need to be reminded that God rewards those who “do not follow the crowd in doing wrong” (Ex 23:2).

Mercer Island, a suburb of Seattle, used to host a day of bicycle races every summer for every category from kids on trikes to adults on expensive imported racing machines. Perhaps the years have collapsed together as my memory ages, but it seems to me that the adult race was won that year by Bruce Gustafson, whose name is enshrined on the wall of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial.

Billy was perhaps a rising third grader that day. If he wasn’t the smallest kid who lined up for the race in his age category, the story is better if he was. At any rate, I heard the guy with the starter’s pistol point up Island Crest Way tell them at least twice, “The race is to the first traffic cone and back,” before firing the gun. I don’t know who rode the fastest that day, but I do know (again, subject to memory modifications) who was slowest: Billy.

You can guess the rest. The hotshots went frantically past the first traffic cone to the second. Meantime, Billy turned around at the first cone and came back, finishing while the pack was making the turn at the second cone. He braked just after crossing the line and looked at the judges as if to say, “Well, here I am. I did what you told me. Now what?”

Now what, indeed. I’m glad I wasn’t one of the judges who had to decide what to do then, especially since Billy’s father was the mayor. What would you do? Would you give Billy the blue ribbon and tell the other kids, “It’s a hard lesson for you, but you should have followed instructions”? Would you rerun the race, or redefine the course as what the faster racers raced and give Billy a special prize?

I don’t remember what they did. But I’ll never forget the expression on Billy’s face when he braked at the finish line: “Here I am. I did what you told me. Now what?”

Billy got it right that day, and I expect he’s made a lifestyle of getting it right, whatever his “it” is. But I’m no Billy, though we share the distinction of going against the crowd. And just as the other boys in that race could ride circles around Billy, the Christians I’m trying to take on in this blog run circles around me when it comes to spiritual disciplines. If I need to see a lost cause apart from God’s grace in Christ, I can always look in the mirror.

But one place I’m willing to take the risk of going it alone is in the area of neighborliness: if God calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to do for others what we would have them do for us, then politics—some people extorting others’ wealth and using it for purposes the producers consider repugnant—is wrong, and Christians have no business being part of the process, if for no other reason than that it makes us unwelcome when we go to share the good news of Christ with our political opponents.

So if you want to talk about my sins, that’s fine. I’ve got plenty to keep the discussion going long into the night. But eventually we need to talk about why the church that was so influential and did so much good in the early days of the European settlement of this continent has become irrelevant at best today. I would suggest that the answer is her replacement of biblical neighborliness with Progressive politics.

Bruce Gustafson was a hero to me during my short bicycle racing career. I wish he had pulled a Billy when his contemporaries, to no one’s benefit, followed Uncle Sam to their deaths in Vietnam. I doubly wish today’s evangelicals were not so eager to have their children follow the pack to the second traffic cone in Afghanistan and the war on liberty that is the War on Drugs.

Connecting Some Dots

There’s a rumor on the blogosphere that President Obama has a litmus test for military officers. He’s supposedly asking them if they would be willing to fire on US citizens and dismissing those who would not. Rumor has it that Snopes.com considers this just another tinfoil hat conspiracy theory—I can’t find it on Snopes—and they might be right. It could be that the President has not issued such an order and even that the question is not being asked in an official capacity. So, as Romans 13 says, if we’ve done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear from the government, correct?

Ummm, not so fast.

Was God watching when President Obama took the oath of office last month? Did he care what went on? Specifically, did he notice that the Bible used in the swearing-in had belonged to Abraham Lincoln?

What is Mr. Obama’s relationship to God? Does he believe that he is a sinner who deserves eternal separation from God because of his sins and that the only way for him to escape that condemnation is to surrender his life to Jesus? Or is it more likely that to him (as to his predecessor) “God says: ‘What right have you to recite my laws or take my covenant on your lips?’” (Ps 50:16)?

If the evangelical church in the US is going to offer its children to the military service of a man who misuses the Bible, can they not expect him to treat them as Abraham Lincoln treated his enemies? Mr. Lincoln was best known, and is indeed celebrated, for sending the military to fire on those he considered his fellow citizens. In the name of the Constitution, he violated the Constitution, suspending habeas corpus and jailing journalists and magistrates in the Union who expressed their putative First Amendment rights by disagreeing with him. Can we, the church of Jesus Christ, expect anything else from a man who openly and proudly follows in his footsteps?

Does Mr. Obama consider the Constitution the law of the land in anything other than name? (For that matter, do evangelicals who support the War on Drugs or Social Security or the extrajudicial killing of US citizens consider the Constitution the law of the land in anything other than name?) If the funds extorted from those who oppose abortion to pay for abortion through the Affordable Health Care Act are a “tax” (according to Bush appointee John Roberts) and taxes are necessary to fund the government that is essential to human life, what right do we have to protest having to pay it? Ah, silly me—we don’t have the right to protest, except in the free speech zones invented by Mr. Bush.

What reason do we have to fear that those free speech zones will be moved to the FEMA camps that are now being used to pasture goats? Can we expect that the guards being recruited and trained to staff those camps would actually get to put their training to use? And can’t those billion and a half hollow-point bullets have been procured for some other purpose than providing those who don’t want to go to camp with an alternative?

You reap what you sow. Mr. Bush declared that the invasion of Iraq was designed to provide Iraqis with the same freedoms Americans have at home. He gave them those freedoms courtesy of “shock and awe” and “collateral damage,” to the cheers of the evangelical church in the US. Though the mission was accomplished, at least according to the fanfare and photo op, I would certainly forgive Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Libyan, and Palestinian Christians (to say nothing of Muslims) for praying that US evangelicals have the privilege of living under the conditions they bless the rest of the world with.

So even if Snopes is right, I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon have the opportunity to enjoy the freedom the Iraqis and Afghans had under occupation by the US military.