Taxation is Theft?

The first time I came across this idea, I was reading Left, Right & Christ (Russell Media, 2011), in which a Christian Republican and a Christian Democrat each took chapters to address the pressing political issues of our time. The Christian Republican, D. C. Innes, stated on pages 75-76: “The Christian moral objection to the welfare state is . . . that it violates the eighth commandment [thou shalt not steal]. . . Thieves come in different forms. . . [T]he government’s power to secure property is also the power to take it away. When a mob uses government to pillage its more propertied neighbors, we call it progressive taxation, or redistribution of wealth. Sometimes we call it fairness. But it is theft all the same.”

Taxation as theft.  The government as robber, as thief-- as a criminal.  Strong language, to be sure. And apparently there are more and more Christians who think this way, who identify themselves as libertarian and claim that Christianity essentially teaches the same.  Notice how Innes' quote above identifies this mindset as "the Christian moral objection" to taxes.  Innes appears to limit his objection to taxes that support social programs and "the welfare state," but many proponents of this position appear to believe that any taxation whatsoever is a moral, even a criminal, wrong.

Here's the standard argument, quoted from Godfather Politics:

Taxation involves force. If you don’t pay up, you will be fined, have your assets levied, or imprisoned. If taxation means taking someone’s property and giving it to other people, how is this not a moral issue? The Eighth Commandment is quite clear: “You shall not steal” (Ex. 20:15). There is no “except by majority vote.”

According to this viewpoint, then, "theft" is to be defined in an all-inclusive sense: that there are virtually never any instances in which it is legitimate for a person to be required to give up some of his or her money.

I do wonder how far those who promote this idea are willing to take it. Is it "stealing" if the government forces a parent to pay child support for his or her child? Is a traffic fine "stealing"? What about charging a fee to reimburse a government agency for its costs in giving driving tests?

Perhaps it's ok with these Christians to require payment in these circumstances.  After all, libertarians do believe people should be held responsible for their own actions and should pay for what they get, right?

But the problem I'm having is this.  Other than direct fees for specific services, taxes are how governments function.  To make a blanket statement that all taxation is theft is essentially to render all government illegitimate: it's saying government really ought not to exist at all.

And that means that police officers, fire fighters, judges, lawmakers, all would have to be for-profit, private organizations.*  If the police came to your house to catch a thief, they'd have to charge you a fee.  If you couldn't pay, they wouldn't come to your house next time.  Maybe some people, out of the goodness of their hearts, would choose to help others by paying more than just what it costs to protect their own property-- but would it be enough to protect everyone?

And what about roads and bridges? We all benefit from them. Even those without driver's licenses go to the grocery store and buy food delivered across those roads and bridges. If we made road maintenance taxes voluntary, what would happen?  Would all the roads continue to be maintained, or only those with enough traffic that private owners could make a profit charging tolls?  What would happen if you couldn't afford to pay someone to maintain the road to your own house?

Is a world with no government really what we want?  And since this is the implication of the "taxation is theft" mindset, what is it that makes this anti-government stance so very Christian?

The New Testament never treats taxation as theft, but as the legitimate "due" of government:

For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing. 7 Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor. (Romans 13:6-7, NASB, emphasis added.)

In Matthew 7:24-27, tax collectors ask Peter whether Jesus pays the temple tax.  When Peter asks Jesus, Jesus acknowledges that the "kings of the earth" collect taxes, and says nothing whatsoever to contradict their right to do so.  He only indicates that, since this tax is for the Temple, he (as the Son of the God whose Temple it is, presumably) should be exempt--but then he agrees to pay it anyway.

In my three-part blog post on "The Bible and Human Authority," (which can be read here, here and here, I note that the Bible in general treats human governments as necessary, and that God's plan for the earth includes them.  Though many passages appear to support limitation of human governmental power, the attitude that government should not exist at all, or that taxation in and of itself, absent any abuses, is evil or criminal, is simply absent from the Scriptures.

As I said earlier, some versions of this viewpoint don't consider taxation itself to be theft, but only taxation which redistributes resources from the haves to the have-nots.  In Left, Right and Christ, D.C. Innes declares that the Bible limits the role of government to one thing: “The task of government is simple and limited: punish those who do evil and praise those who do good. . . God appoints government for our benefit, but it is not to provide every good. It is only to prevent bad conduct with creditable threat and punish it. . . .” (pages 58-60).  However, as I explained in an earlier post, the verses Innes uses to support this claim were never intended to give a comprehensive theory of government; they do not, expressly or implicitly, limit government to only the functions those passages highlight.

Certain passages instead seem actually to support required redistribution of wealth as a form of equitable justice. As I said in the same post:

[W]e can glean certain basic principles from the Law regarding how a civil society should govern the treatment of one another. God, working with the people of that time and place, simply did not promote economy liberty over basic equity and fair-dealing. In economic dealings, as in other areas of life, the Law restrained the people from fully exercising their liberty, recognizing that the natural human bent towards selfishness and greed needed to be curbed.
The gleaning law in Leviticus 23:22 amounted to a tax on all landowners of a portion of their income, for the benefit of the poor. The Year of Jubilee in Leviticus 25:13 amounted to a redistribution of wealth every 50 years, so that each family could return to its own land and possessions—and so that the concentration of all the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few could never take place. One of the most foundational principles of the Bible is that all of humanity is sinful, and therefore cannot be trusted to simply do the right thing as long as you leave it alone. The Law included certain regulatory provisions to make sure that everyone in the society did the duty of the society to the poor among them. Though free-will giving was encouraged, it was not left up to free will alone.

One argument I recently heard raised against this was that it was ok for God to take people's money away from them, because He's God and it all belongs to Him anyway-- but it's wrong for human governments to do any such thing!  However, these passages are not about God requiring money to be given to Him, but to be given to the poor or to those who had lost their ancestral land through financial hardships.  These passages really don't say, "I'm God and all your resources came from Me, so I want you to give some of it back to Me."  There are passages in the Law pertaining to religious offerings that do exactly that-- but that's not what these passages are about.  These passages are about achieving a more equitable society through required redistribution of wealth.

Of course, in our various modern Western societies, most taxation is not even something imposed by "the kings of the earth" upon us as helpless subjects.  Democratic representative government means that our elected officials are sent by us to create tax codes on our behalf, and if we don't like what they're doing, we can protest, we can write or call them, or we can vote against them. Representative government means the government is us, not a monarch or an emperor.  If we through our elected representatives decide on certain taxes, then the requirement to pay is our own requirement, imposed on ourselves as a people.  Taxation with representation has always been an underlying principle of American concepts of freedom. Taxation with representation is not stealing, but a decision by the people, for the people, to pool our money and use it for the common good.

It's true that there will always be those who don't agree with laws passed by our elected officials, but we don't expect to be released from other laws just because we don't agree with them or didn't vote for the representative who helped pass them.  We don't equate other laws with criminal activity just because we are required to obey them.  We don't say, "the officials who installed that stop sign are thugs, forcing me to stop when I don't want to."

Steve Kangas, a Christian liberal, is living proof that "taxation is theft" is certainly not the Christian position on this issue.  He says:

Taxes are part of a social contract, an agreement between voters and government to exchange money for the government's goods and services. . . Arguments like "taxation is theft" are . . . the equivalent of saying "Everything I make is by my own effort" -- a patently false statement in an interdependent, specialized economy where the free market is supported by public goods and services.

Kangas also points out:

No one truly makes 100 percent of his money by himself. Individuals depend on a wide array of government services to support the very free market in which they earn their money. Without these supports, there would be no free market in the first place.

He then gives a long list of social supports and physical infrastructure provided by government that enables citizens to prosper and make wealth.   It hardly seems to me to be a definitively Christian viewpoint that looks on each individual as a sort of island, independent of the community structures that are largely responsible for our financial well-being.

Even many libertarians object to the "taxation is theft" mantra.  Washington DC writer and policy analyst Julian Sanchez, who is himself a libertarian, says:

[A]lmost nobody residing in any actually-existing state can justify their present holdings by reference to an appropriately untainted provenance running back to the State of Nature. 

Serious theorists tend to acknowledge this at least in passing, but it’s one of those elephants in the room. . . If there’s a libertarian theorist who’s grappled with this at the length it merits, I haven’t seen it. I would love to be able to point to a few serious book-length efforts, but the Year Zero approach that just takes current holdings as given and proposes Entitlement Theory Starting Tomorrow have always struck me as the sort of ad hoccery that makes caricatures of libertarianism as an elaborate rationalization for privilege more plausible than they ought to be. So an independent reason to shy away from “taxation is theft” as a slogan is that it can be interpreted as an unreflective endorsement of distributional patterns riddled with profound historical injustices.

As a middle-class white American, the assets I came into the world having (because my parents had them and used them to support me) had a lot to do with exclusionary practices that kept other, non-white, non-middle class people from being able to acquire what I took for granted.  My father went to college on the GI Bill, but if he had had black skin, the GI Bill would not have helped him no matter how long he served in the military.  He also bought land and built a house using a Veterans Housing loan that a person of color could not obtain.

My own ability to earn wealth, similarly, only partially came from my own merit or my own efforts-- a lot of it came from opportunities afforded me due to my social and economic status.  Other opportunities have eluded me at least partly because I am female in a society where women still bear the greatest burden of the care of the young, and where jobs traditionally held by women pay less than jobs traditionally held by men.

So when those who benefit most from these inequitable systems claim some absolute moral right to hold onto what they have, they are ignoring the fact that some people were to all intents and purposes denied a chance to even try for those things.  This article from By Their Strange Fruit details some of the built-in advantages of being white that we did not earn, that have resulted in our simply having more to call our own.  In what sense is this just?

The active undoing of unfairly weighted systems is not injustice, even if it may seem for a time to be "unjust" to the group in power. But when something starts off out of balance, you have to balance it by throwing weight on the other side.  Taxation for programs to help right old wrongs is hardly theft. What it amounts to instead is restitution.
Another libertarian, Loren Lomasky, protests the "taxation is theft" mantra in terms of the radical nature of its criminalizing language:

[I]f it is then taken in its straightforward sense, that pronouncement denies the legitimacy of the social order and announces that I regard myself as authorized unilaterally to override its dictates as I would the depredations of a thief. It says to my neighbors that I regard them as, if not themselves thieves, then confederates or willing accomplices to thievery. Is it pusillanimous to suggest that declaring war, even cold war, against the other 99 percent of the population is imprudent? [Emphasis added.]

Words like "taxation is theft," as Lomasky points out, are "fightin' words."  To say this is to set yourself against the social order, to declare yourself a rebel against the system.  As Christians, is this what we should be fighting against?  To declare our governments illegitimate and criminal-- to fight to hold onto our own stuff against all comers-- neither of these seem like particularly worthy Christian endeavors to my mind.

Taxation is not theft.  And we're not helping anybody when we say it is.


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*I don't mention the armed forces because most of the time Christians concede to them, at least, as being an exception.

Abraham, Revisionism and "Privilege Distress"

I've been reading an amazing book:  Abraham by Bruce Feiler.  As the book jacket describes it, "Abraham stands as the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians and Muslims. . . Bruce Feiler set out on a personal quest to better understand our common patriarch."  The book explores how each of these three related world faiths views its father Abraham-- where they are similar, where different, what parts of his life they stress, and why.  Feiler is Jewish, but he treats each of the three faiths with fairness and insight, uncovering commonalities and revealing along the way the shared humanity of three kinds of believers in one God.

The biggest eyeopener in this book, for me, was a trend Feiler uncovered in each of the three faiths: Abraham lived prior to Judaism, Christianity or Islam, but each group, at certain points in history, has done what it could to claim him for its own, to the exclusion of the other two.  Jewish interpreters  painted him as knowing and observing Torah long before it was even written.  Muslim interpreters claimed that Ishmael was actually the favored son and Isaac a mere interloper.  Christian interpreters claimed that Abraham knew by special revelation the gospel of Christ.  As Feiler puts it:

Abraham has been transformed so wildly by his own self-proclaimed descendants that he bears little resemblance to the portrait now left to fade in the Bible.  The biblical story itself. . . manages to convey a more general message of God's grace than. . . the portraits Abraham's supposed spiritual inheritors were busily creating. p. 154-155.

Revisionism. We humans are prone to it.  We look at history, a piece of writing or a set of facts, and we ignore what we don't want to see and overemphasize what we do want to see, in order to make our viewpoint stronger and opposing ones weaker.  Bruce Feiler interviewed Rev. Petra Heldt, head of the Ecumenical Theological Research Fraternity in Jerusalem, and came to this understanding:

"If you look at history," she told me, "each religion, at different times, for different reasons, tried to establish itself as the dominant religion.  Claiming Abraham for yourself is just one way to establish your authority." This power grab usually occurs at historical turning points, she noted.  For Jews it was after the Second Temple was destroyed and they had to buttress their sagging identity.  For Christians it was after the fall of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, when they lost their political protection.  "It's a psychological need triggered by political circumstances.  You use your culture to establish your triumphalism because your political power may be waning.  You want to show that you've always been there.  Abraham is a great way to prove that." p. 156.

This idea rang a bell.  I immediately thought of a similar pattern that's occurring here in the United States today:  the insistence by the Christian Right that America was founded as a Christian nation. The Shades of Grace website has good examples of this argument, providing selected quotes from the Founding Fathers intended to prove that the United States has belonged to Christians and Christianity from its inception.  But a quote such as this one from John Adams:

The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.

-- should be balanced by what he wrote in the Treaty of Tripoli when he was President:

As the government of the United States of America is not on any sense founded on the Christian Religion, - as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of of Musselmen (Muslims), - and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

(quoted on Democratic Underground.com)

It seems to me, when these two quotes are taken together (along with many others), that many of the Founding Fathers believed Christian principles lay behind the founding of the United States, but they did not consider the Christian religion to be America's national religion.  In fact, there has always been a tension in my country of birth between its ideal of providing a haven to people of all faiths, and its historical tendency to privilege Christianity (this due largely, I think, to the dominance of European whites in its leadership from its inception).  As David Lose put it in The Huffington Post:

[T]he United States has always been home to a multitude of faith traditions and, indeed, was imagined from the beginning to be a religious haven. . . [But] those who support the notion of a "Christian America" can convincingly argue that the de facto stance of this country has been to privilege the belief of, if not simply Christianity, at least what's often called "the Judeo-Christian tradition" because of its central place in this nation's evolution.

In fact, the more pluralistic the United States now becomes, and the more it gives a voice and a place to religious and non-religious minorities, the louder the voices seem to grow that want to make it clear that Christianity is the dominant religion in America-- the one that has "always been there," just as Feiler's book describes in the Middle East's struggles over ownership of Abraham.  "This is a Christian nation" is a way of saying, "We Christians are America; it has always belonged to us, and we can take it back."

What is the proper response to this?  Do we mock and ridicule those who want to shore up their power and influence in this way?  Does an us-against-them mentality (even in response to that mentality in others) do any good? Is just saying "they're wrong"-- even if they factually are-- helping the situation?  Bruce Feiler, exploring the roots of Abraham in the turbulent Middle East, sees another way.

I needed to believe that loving God, that being prepared to sacrifice for that belief, and that [also] believing in peace had not somehow become incomprehensible. . . We can, like Abraham, leave behind our native places-- our comfortable, even doctrinaire traditions-- and set out for an unknown location, whose dimensions may be known only to God but whose mandate is to be a place where God's blessing is promised to all. p. 215-216.  Emphasis added.

I was very interested to read this article on the "Weekly Sift" blog called The Distress of the Privileged.  It largely echoes the historical principle Rev. Heldt found in the conflict over Abraham: when a group's political power is waning-- even if as a result of a call to fairness in sharing power with other groups-- the group experiences that as a painful loss which it must try to remedy.  Ignoring the pain of others-- even of the privileged-- is unfair in itself, and counterproductive:

As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens...

Confronting this distress is tricky, because neither acceptance nor rejection is quite right. The distress is usually very real, so rejecting it outright just marks you as closed-minded and unsympathetic. It never works to ask others for empathy without offering it back to them.

Doug Muder, the blog author, offers a different alternative to the scorn and contempt which is the most common response to the Christian Right by those it is challenging.  He says:

Ultimately, the privileged need to be won over. Their sense of justice needs to be engaged rather than beaten down. The ones who still want to be good people need to be offered hope that such an outcome is possible in this new world.

I used to be part of the Christian Right.  Many of my friends and fellow-church members still are.  And they are good people who believe in love-your-neighbor, and who do have valid things to say to and about the American political process. I don't think the answer is to shame them or treat them as the enemy, which they certainly are not.  These are people who help me when I'm in distress, who hug me when we meet, who laugh and cry and pray with me.  The answer is to do unto them as I would want done unto me-- to listen, to hear their real distress, and then to appeal to their sense of justice and their principles of Christian love.  It is possible, as Muder points out, for a privileged person like me to do this (I know, because I've been trying to do it):

[S]he could learn to be a good guy by the lights of this new society. It would be hard. [S]he’d have to give up some of [her] privileges. [S]he’d have to examine [her] habits to see which ones embody assumptions of supremacy. [S]he’d have to learn how to see the world through the eyes of others, rather than just assume that they will play their designated social roles.

Bruce Feiler ends his study of Abraham this way:

At the start of the twenty-first century, the idea that one religion was going to extinguish the others was deader than it had been in two thousand years-- and possibly ever. . . A new type of religious interaction was needed, involving not just swords, plowshares and the idea of triumph but conversation, interaction, and the idea of pluralism. . . Fourteen hundred years after the rise of Muhammad, two thousand years after the ascent of Christianity, twenty-five hundred years after the original of Judaism, and four thousand years after the birth of Abraham, the three monotheistic religions were inching towards a posture of open-- and equal-- deliberation.  This state of affairs set up a new question for the faiths to ponder: Can the children of Abraham actually coexist? p. 196, emphasis in original.

Feiler goes on to paint the last picture in the Bible from Abraham's life:

Finally, in Genesis 25, verse 7, Abraham dies . . . At Abraham's burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier.  The text reports their union without comment.  "His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah. . . in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites."  

But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished.  Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims.  They are brothers.  

The fact is that we're all human, and all prone to the weaknesses of humanity.  If some of us revise history in an attempt to strengthen our challenged assumption that our rightful place is in the center of power, this isn't anything that the rest of us aren't capable of doing, or have never done.  Jesus talked about forgiveness, about not judging one another. He talked about doing to others what we would want done to ourselves.  He talked about giving being greater than receiving.  

He talked about seeing one another as brothers and sisters, and that what we do to "the least of these" is what we do to Him. 

I think in the long run, these things will be the answer. 

Thoughts of a Christian Centrist: Is Big Government Really the Big Problem?

As I explained in Part 1, I consider myself a Christian centrist and a questioner. I don’t claim to be an expert on politics, and I don’t plan to do a lot of political posts on this blog-- but one of the questions I have had to ask myself in today’s political climate is whether I agree with the political stance taken by many Christians in the U.S. today—the stance that many non-Christian Americans have come to identify with Christianity: libertarian-style political conservatism. Besides the fact that there are actually many Christians who do identify with centrism or progressivism, it seems inappropriate for Christianity to become so identified with a political party in the first place. But setting that aside for now, the main question I have to ask myself is whether I agree with the stance that big government is our big problem.

The idea seems to be that government is infringing on the rights of businesses and private citizens, who would all be much better off if government stayed out of their business. And this is not just about the national debt and how much government spending we can afford. George Will’s column in my local paper for June 17, 2012 (I’m sure this appeared in newspapers all over the country), said:

“[In] the 1930’s the [US Supreme] Court formally declar[ed] economic rights to be inferior to ‘fundamental’ rights. This begot pernicious . . . tolerance of capricious government abridgements of economic liberty.”

Mr. Will defines “economic liberty” as “private property rights, freedom of contract and freedom from arbitrary government interference with the right to engage in enterprise.”

I wasn’t born in the 1930’s, but I do remember my history. It was the time of the Great Depression. My basic understanding of the economic situation out of which the 1930’s Supreme Court made its declaration, is that “economic liberty,” at that time, included the liberty of banks to gamble with their depositor’s investments, the liberty of corporations to hold wages down below minimum subsistence levels, set 14-hour workdays, and ignore even rudimentary safety standards, and the liberty of landowners to treat migrant workers however they pleased, often subjecting anyone who tried to resist them to violence. The economic liberty of the powerful meant that they could engage the police to uphold and even perpetrate human rights violations against individual workers who merely wanted to earn enough to feed a family. One thing the Great Depression taught the nation was that when economic rights are unrestrained, the strong trample the weak, a certain small segment of society becomes richer and richer, and everyone else suffers.

The question, then, of whether economic liberty is really equal to fundamental, basic human rights like life, dignity, security and personal liberty, is one that I have to ask. And I have to answer that when the economic liberty of one person (I’m mainly speaking about the way a person “engages in enterprise,” as George Will puts it) infringes on the basic human rights of another, economic liberty really must take a back seat. Should government interfere with economic liberty by regulating private enterprise in ways that protect the powerless from the powerful? I have to answer yes.

So here’s what I see as the real problem in my country.

The way I see a lot of people thinking, it is the government alone which can or does oppress people, and it does it through taxation and redistribution (which was equated with theft by a representative conservative voice in my last post) and through regulations that hinder the ability of private businesses to make wealth. But according to passage after passage in the books of the prophets, God faults both the rulers and the private sector for oppression— and especially, as in the verse above, when they conspire together to make laws that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Micah 7:3, one of the prophetic lamentations about the sins of the whole nation of Israel says: “Both hands are skilled in doing evil; the ruler demands gifts, the judge accepts bribes, the powerful dictate what they desire--they all conspire together.” This is what things are looking like in the United States, from where I sit. Powerful business interests are dictating public policy through campaign contributions to our legislators, while the ordinary citizen has little or no voice. What should happen is that government and private enterprise act as checks and balances upon one another. What I see instead is collusion.

The lamentations of prophets like Micah are applicable today in that they identify in a timeless, universal way, what is right and wrong in the way we treat one another, both as communities and as individuals. Of course the actual groups addressed by the prophetic books are not the same as the ones that hold power today. But power is power, and rule is rule. The fact that we have elected officials instead of kings, and high-tech corporations instead of wealthy agricultural land interests, makes very little difference.

Here are some other, similar passages:

Isaiah 1:23 - Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow's case does not come before them.

Isaiah 3:14-15 - The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of His people: ‘It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?’ says the Lord God of hosts.

Isaiah 10:1-2 - Woe to you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!

These passages don’t seem to fit very well with the idea that God is primarily displeased when government interferes with the power of the wealthy to make more wealth. Instead, the prophets’ outcry is against laws created through bribery and undue influence by the powerful on the lawmakers—laws that make things tougher on the poor and the ordinary citizen.

And then there are these passages, which are not clearly aimed at “rulers” at all:

Isaiah 5:8 – Woe to you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land!

Micah 2:2 - They covet fields, and seize them; house, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance.

To join asset to asset until there is room for no one else— this is what big business does today, and the government has aided them by watering down the laws that used to protect citizens against monopolies. And seizing houses and other assets is most recently the province of the big banks, whose subprime mortgage fiasco led to the seizure of millions of homes from ordinary citizens who were duped by unscrupulous financiers into taking out loans they could not afford. Do the citizens bear responsibility for their own actions? Of course—but who is more responsible, the ordinary citizen with little or no training in finance, or the financiers who led them into trouble?

A few more:

Ezekiel 22:6-7, 12 & 29 - See how each of the princes of Israel who are in you uses his power to shed blood. . . in you they have oppressed the alien and mistreated the fatherless and the widow. V. 12 - In you men accept bribes to shed blood; you take usury and excessive interest, and make unjust gain from your neighbors by extortion. And you have forgotten me, declares the Sovereign Lord. V. 29 - The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice.

Amos 5:11-12 - Therefore, because you trample on [another reading is “impose heavy rent on”] the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate.

Malachi 3:5 - Then I will draw near to you for judgment; I will be swift to bear witness against . . . those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear Me, says the Lord of hosts.

It is not just “princes” but “men” in the private sector who are in view in the Ezekiel passage. The other two almost certainly address both. Who are these passages applicable to today? Congressmen and senators who receive campaign finance promises in exchange for promoting laws that profit the donors— often at the expense of the people they were elected to represent. Credit agencies which jack up interest rates. Corporations which pay huge salaries and bonuses to those at the top while their workers suffer wage freezes and layoffs. Real estate management companies which raise rents excessively. Banks and Wall Street moguls using their wealth to influence Congress to make laws which help wealthy investors give one another inside knowledge to avoid weak investments, while average citizens are on their own. And all these things are commonplace.

In 1 Timothy 5:18 Paul cited the Old Testament, “do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” to discuss the principle that a laborer is worthy of his wages. Workers today are working more hours than they have in decades, only to see their real wages—the amount of goods and services that their money will buy—continue to fall. Most people I know have not had a raise in years, but consider themselves lucky to even have jobs. And while wage growth stymies, corporate profits rise. Is this happening because of oppressive government? Only, as far as I can see, in the sense that the government is doing little or nothing to stop this kind of oppression from the private sector.

In order for these things to be stopped, the limitation of powers cannot be one-sided, limiting the government alone. The Lord does not view only government officials as responsible for their use of power. Wealthy private citizens and business interests are also powerful, and also responsible—and only through a balance of power between government and the private sector can the natural greed of humanity be curbed. Campaign finance needs to be regulated. Banking practices need to be regulated. Business and employment practices need to be regulated.

Right now, it seems to me, we are suffering not so much from too-powerful government as we are from too-powerful private interests. Huge corporations that shut down their plants and ship the jobs overseas. Companies that lay off huge numbers of workers, then hire them back as temporary help at half the wages and no benefits. CEOs who take record-size bonuses while the employees on the lines see their wages frozen—for the third year in a row.

I think we need the government to hold accountable the hugely powerful private sector, just as we need the private sector to hold the government accountable. Instead, the wealthy in both are in cahoots with one another to make each other even wealthier. My problem with government right now is not that it is getting too big—it is that it is getting too weak, more and more under the thumb of the private sector through powerful lobbying interests and campaign finance promises, no longer able or willing to do what’s right without an eye to personal profit. There is supposed to be a fine line between campaign finance and bribes—but that line is getting to where only a lobbyist or a politician can actually see it. It all looks like bribery to me.

Good fences make good neighbors, they say, and locked doors keep honest people honest. But people in positions of power and influence, whether public sector or private, do not become virtuous just because they are entrusted with more responsibilities. On the contrary—power corrupts. Where there are no fences and no locked doors, people are going to cross lines. Deregulation and more deregulation of the private sector is not the answer. Neither is lifting the restrictions on how much money a politician can amass, in the name of “free speech.” According to the most basic Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of humanity, power needs to be curbed.

There have been times when too much regulation has been a problem in our nation. But the way it looks to me—that time is not now.

And as for the national debt? I’m concerned about that; I really am. But it seems to me that if more ordinary, working people were allowed to get ahead, rather than working so hard just to enrich their bankers and CEO’s—then we would all be able to both save more and buy more, and we would be paying more taxes on our increased incomes. Increased prosperity would mean that less people needed government services, decreasing spending and increasing revenues at the same time.

And then we wouldn’t be talking about balancing our budget by cutting aid to the most vulnerable in our society. In the long run, that will not help our nation as a whole. In reality, we’re all in this together. When one child who could have become a productive citizen fails to do so because of poverty, it harms our whole economy.

I’d like to see our nation start putting more value on everyone pulling together, and a little less on every man for himself.

Thoughts of a Christian Centrist: On the Role of Government

Part of who I have become over the past 10-15 years has to do with questioning. I used to just follow the conservative Republican ideas that I thought good Christians were supposed to believe. But as I have questioned things, I have moved more and more into the center, and there, in recent years, I have stayed. Not that I’m really into politics—in fact, I’d rather avoid thinking about them much at all. But to keep some kind of intellectual integrity, and because I have responsibilities as a voting citizen (thank you, suffragettes!) I have had to decide where I stand in the polarized political climate we in the U.S. live in today.

Recently I bought and read Left, Right & Christ (Russell Media, 2011), in which a Christian Republican and a Christian Democrat each take chapters to address the pressing political issues of our time. The foundational issue was the role of government. I wasn’t really satisfied with the Christian Democrat’s response— she seemed to me to skirt all around the issue without ever addressing it head-on. But it turned out that the Christian Republican’s response was one I couldn’t agree with at all.

So here are my own thoughts on the role of government, from a Christian centrist’s perspective.

D.C. Innes, the Republican contributor in Left, Right & Christ, defines the role of government using just two short passages from the New Testament. 1 Peter 2:13-15 says that “governors [are] sent by him [the Lord] to punish those who do evil and praise those who do good. And in Romans 13 we read that rulers carry out God’s wrath on wrongdoers and approve those who do good. Innes concludes from this: “The task of government is simple and limited: punish those who do evil and praise those who do good. . . God appoints government for our benefit, but it is not to provide every good. It is only to prevent bad conduct with creditable threat and punish it. . . .” (pages 58-60).

 Based on this, Innes says only private charities should help the poor. As he puts it, “God’s purpose for civil government is that it provide an umbrella of protection for person and property that frees people to go about their business undisturbed, whether by neighbor or by government itself, providing for themselves, their neighbors, their community as a whole, and anyone whom they find in need.” As I read through the book, I realized that by “community as a whole,” Innes is not talking about people voting for local social projects such as homeless shelters or food banks. He was talking about every individual giving to the community as he or she sees fit—but local taxation for the benefit of the poor seemed just as anathema to Innes as federal taxation.

The problem here is that Innes is making these verses do much more than I think Peter or Paul ever intended. Looking at the context of each letter, neither apostle was in any sense writing a comprehensive theory of government. Paul's letter to the Romans is largely devoted to the theology of justification by faith. Chapters 12-15 answer the question, “how should we live in light of this gospel?” with a series of practical-living precepts for the young Christian church. Peter’s first letter is written to scattered believers in Christ living in pagan cities and is largely about how to hang onto the faith through persecution. Both letters advise Christians to be submissive to the governing authorities and mention the power of civil government to punish wrongdoers and give approval to those who do right. But neither of them says, implicitly or explicitly, that government is meant by God to be limited only to those two things. In fact, the New Testament, which focuses on the new creation in Christ and His kingdom, simply is not about rules for civil government in any sense at all. Proof-texting a complete theory of government from a few passages is not good exegesis.

If I as a Christian am going to come up with a theory of government, I will need to base it on principles: the principles of civil justice found in the Old Testament (remembering that we are not encouraged by Christ or the apostles to attempt to establish Moses’ civil law over any other nation), and the basic principles of justice, fair dealing and do-unto-othering found in the teachings of Christ and the apostles.

So what is the proper role of civil government? This question used to be answered by Christians in terms of the divine right of kings to rule. They used the same passages which are today used to declare such complete limits on government, to establish the full authority of the king over all the people in every area of life. But since I believe these passages were not actually intended to comprehensively enumerate governmental powers, what can I say about what makes a properly functioning government?

This is how I’d sum it up:

The proper role of government includes but is not limited to punishing wrongdoers and praising those who do right. In a very real sense (and especially in a modern representative democracy) government is the community as a whole, acting together— and there are things that a united community can accomplish which groups of individuals or businesses never can. Civil government’s power is in carrying out those tasks which private citizens or businesses cannot as successfully or efficiently do on their own.

Now, obviously this leaves a huge scope of areas where individuals or businesses can act more efficiently and successfully than the civil government can. Private enterprise, family life, individual pursuits and hobbies—in general, I would say that interference of civil government in these areas, except where wrongs are being perpetrated by one person or group upon another, often just stifles the creative thought and individual development of a free people.

On the other hand, when wrongs are being perpetrated by one person or group upon another, I do think the government needs to be able to intervene. Workplace safety standards, workers’ compensation laws, wage and hour protections, prohibition of child labor—all these things are important safeguards that prevent powerful employers from ruining the lives of employees for the sake of profit. (This is another whole topic in and of itself, though, and I’ll be writing more about it next week.)

But what about things that cannot be done very successfully or efficiently by private citizens? What about the building of roads, bridges, water and sewer systems to span large areas or even the whole nation so that everyone is equitably served? What about urban planning and development, so that we don’t end up living in cities of hodgepodge and confusion, with streets going every which way and with some people enjoying the benefits of infrastructure and some falling through the cracks? What about policies of justice for minority groups, so that they don’t get trampled on by the majority? What about the preservation of national resources like Yosemite and Yellowstone? And what about a basic social safety net that’s available to all, and not those who just happen to live where a church or non-profit charity happens to be operating?

I am not for a “nanny state.” A civil government that takes care of all of our needs, cradle to grave, will not encourage resourcefulness or the work ethic that Jesus and the apostles approved—and it also, by rendering private acts of charity obsolete, discourages the moral growth of each individual acting in personal love for the needy. But there has to be something in between nanny-statism and survival-of-the-fittest, social-Darwinist capitalism. Neither one, I think, are what the Spirit of Christ would lead us to.

The United States, as a society, has decided that our community values include no one having to live in shanty towns such as exist all over the third world, boxes of cardboard or corrugated metal without running water or adequate sanitation. We have decided that employees should not have to work 14-hour days or seven-day weeks, and that employers should not be allowed to hire children or to abandon employees who have been injured on the job. We have decided that certain of the most beautiful portions of our land should be set aside for the enjoyment of everyone, never to become factory sites or lines of stores and parking lots. All of these, if looked at in terms of economic freedom, restrict some people’s freedom regarding how much money it is possible to make. Should all of these social contracts, these whole-community values set forth in law, be abandoned in the name of economic freedom? Or should the human tendency to self-centeredness be given free reign—that anyone with enough money to do so, can freely do anything he or she wants to make a profit? Are we so afraid of any hint of what we call “the welfare state”?

Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying, “You cannot ultimately help a man by doing for him what he could and should do for himself.” This makes sense to me. Safety nets should not trap people in the net. They should give people who are able to help themselves, the resources and the hand up needed so that they can help themselves. But those who cannot help themselves, as well as those who just need a hand up, need a safety net that extends under the whole nation, not just in those spots where private charities are in operation. This is something that the civil government can do more effectively than the private sector can—although, given the notorious inefficiency and red tape of civil government, balance through overlap with private charity where possible, is a definite plus.

D.C. Innes says on pages 75-76: “The Christian moral objection to the welfare state is . . . that it violates the eighth commandment [thou shalt not steal]. . . Thieves come in different forms. . . [T]he government’s power to secure property is also the power to take it away. When a mob uses government to pillage its more propertied neighbors, we call it progressive taxation, or redistribution of wealth. Sometimes we call it fairness. But it is theft all the same.”
My problem with that is that the principles of civil justice found in the Bible simply do not equate taxation for the benefit of the poor, with theft. In fact, unrestrained economic rights are foreign to the concept of civil government under the Law of Moses.

Of course, as I said earlier, we should not as Christians look at the government set up for Israel in the Pentateuch as a blueprint for all governments for all time. But we can glean certain basic principles from the Law regarding how a civil society should govern the treatment of one another. God, working with the people of that time and place, simply did not promote economy liberty over basic equity and fair-dealing. In economic dealings, as in other areas of life, the Law restrained the people from fully exercising their liberty, recognizing that the natural human bent towards selfishness and greed needed to be curbed.

The gleaning law in Leviticus 23:22 amounted to a tax on all landowners of a portion of their income, for the benefit of the poor. The Year of Jubilee in Leviticus 25:13 amounted to a redistribution of wealth every 50 years, so that each family could return to its own land and possessions—and so that the concentration of all the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few could never take place. One of the most foundational principles of the Bible is that all of humanity is sinful, and therefore cannot be trusted to simply do the right thing as long as you leave it alone. The Law included certain regulatory provisions to make sure that everyone in the society did the duty of the society to the poor among them. Though free-will giving was encouraged, it was not left up to free will alone. Israel was set up very early on (Exodus 18:25) on government by leaders over groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. If a wealthy land-owner denied a poor person the right to glean in his field, the poor person could bring the matter before judges who would enforce the law.

Christian conservatives usually point out at this point that the mandatory giving in the Old Testament was from the well-off directly to the poor, without a government middle man. This is true—and this worked fine for a small, tribal, agriculture-based country in ancient times. But today our wealth is not held in fields for the poor to glean. Land is not held by tribal families so that a Jubilee would result in everyone knowing where to go home to. I don’t think we can get by in our day and age without monetary taxation and a distribution system. In many cases, government contracts with private companies might be the most efficient and best way to get the resources from those who have more than they need, to those who need them. In other cases, it can work better for government agencies to act as the middle man. But as far as I can see, there is nothing inherently evil in a government agency. The evil is in human nature when there is no restraint on power.

However, humans are also made in the image of God and are inexpressibly valuable to Him. When it comes to the value of every human being before God, political theory should not be allowed to override personhood. Jesus said, in Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” He healed on the Sabbath because the individual standing in front of him in pain, mattered more than the perfect application of Sabbath policy. Should we be happy when conservative laws hold sway and government safety nets are eliminated, but the people who don’t manage to find a private charity are starving?

It seems to me to be common sense to say, “Hey, the poor need to be helped, by the best method possible, even if it doesn’t fit into your economic theories.” As a Christian, and as a citizen of a nation which has always had a strong ethic of care for the poor, that’s where I stand.

Even if many of my brothers and sisters think it un-Christian of me.