One difference between liberal Christians and conservative Christians is how much weight each places on the violence inherent in government action. While authorized for “the good,” according to St. Paul in Romans 13, the magistrate nonetheless “bears the sword.” While God-ordained, Paul paints us a realist picture of the human basis for the magistrate’s power: It is violence or, more usually, the threat of violence.
As Christians think about social obligations—obligations to others—I think this distinction between the means by which the church operates and the means by which the magistrate operates matters. This doesn’t mean that the government should never transfer wealth. But it does mean that the conditions under which the government transfers wealth are different than the conditions under which the church transfers wealth.
I accept the preferential option for the poor (consistent with the biblical admonition not to be “partial to a poor man in his dispute”). But I worry about the church inviting a multiplication of state-sanctioned violence against others when it is the church’s failure to live up to her mission that prompts a good part of the need for that violence. Let me explain.
The New Testament instructs Christians to use our resources to take care of our pastors and to take care of the needy. But the average Protestant donates a paltry estimated 2.5 percent of after-tax income, and Catholics less than that.
Of this 2.5 percent for Protestants, I’d guess that the largest proportion of those funds go to support services provided to the congregation itself—to the meeting of the congregations’ own needs rather than the charitable assistance of those outside it. First, there is pastoral support. St. Paul, again always the realist, notes that pastors must make their living from the Gospel. Most pastors are undercompensated relative to the important responsibilities they bear. Then there are mortgages, building upkeep, and the like. (Not that I’m opposed to beautiful church buildings.) That leaves a small residual of the 2.5 percent to go to the needy.
In such a case, how could anyone object to churches asking the state to step in and help the poor? What if the numbers of poor are so great that even a generous church could not take care of them all?
The problem is that when church officials petition the government for increased government assistance to the needy, the claim implicit in these petitions is that, because the Christian laity is, on average, so miserly, the government needs to step into to provide for the poor whom the church neglects. Rather than a lecture on social justice from church officials aimed at government officials, I’d prefer to hear a humble acknowledgement of sin and failure for the lamentable aggregate level of the church’s charitable work. We’re asking the civil government to increase its efforts because the church cannot or will not.
That said, I see few problems with church leaders going to a city council, or state legislature, or even Congress, and testifying that that the needs of the poor are so great that the government needs to do something to help. Yet it is at least an embarrassment for church leaders to petition political power—even in the name of “social justice”—when the Christian house is in such dismal shape.
While it is a shame, the move to soliciting political authority is understandable. Church leaders and concerned Christians face time and resource constraints as do the rest of us. “Rent seeking” is not limited to corporations seeking to make a profit through government largesse rather than through making a better product. For churches, it is easier and more effective to aid the poor by asking the government to coerce money out of one’s congregants (and non-Christians as well) than it is to inspire lay folk to embrace the new humanity that Jesus Christ has created in us.
But consider: Holding current church expenditures constant, increasing contributions from church members to eight percent or even ten percent of income would generate huge sums that could be devoted to the needy.
Ginning up donations, however, is the hard road. Given the imperative that the needy should be fed, how much easier it is to step around the church and the power of the Gospel, and instead to make a friend of violence. It’s all in service of a good cause, after all. With the magisterial sword, no need to change hearts and actions. We only need to threaten. What a temptation it is to call on magisterial violence to accomplish God’s work. I am not a pacifist, and therefore do not object to the sword in principle. But as with war, I think that use of the magisterial sword needs justification.
There is also the impact on the church. Once the move is made to the domain of the civil sword, it’s difficult for the church to go back. If the church has ceded responsibility for the needy to the state, then what’s the point of increasing contributions to the church? To be sure, there will always be interstices in government welfare, but filling in the cracks of the welfare state is hardly a stirring call.
There are other ventures—like international missions and other domestic ministries—to which a generous church in a welfare state could attend. But our practices shape our thinking. Once we get used to having civil authority take the lead in responsibility for an issue, then we start to think of it as the natural state of affairs. The cost for the church is that the ease with which civil authority gets results becomes a temptation, and so we look to the state’s coercion for the answers rather than to the Gospel. And that impoverishes the church, as well as society more generally.
I do not at all suggest no role for the civil authority. In noting that the magistrate carries the sword, Paul does not run away from its role in providing for “the good.” But understanding the role of the state to be filling in the interstices left by a generous church is quite different than what we have today. Even more so, because the civil authority necessarily uses violence, or its implicit threat, to implement its goals, I would suggest that there is a different threshold for state action relative to ecclesiastical action. In particular, the church needs to be concerned about her witness when she advocates coercing non-Christians to achieve her distinctively Christian vision of the good that can be reasonably obtained in this world.
James R. Rogers is department head and associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He leads the “New Man” prison ministry at the Hamilton Unit in Bryan, Texas, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Texas District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
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Comments:
And as for the idea that the churches could raise a significant amount of money as proposed, that seems equally naive. The Catholic schools in this country used to educate 10% of all students but now they are rapidly closing. Why? Because the state is a jealous institution that brooks no competition. If catholic schools threaten the state monopoly, give them no aid and lavish support on the public schools. And so back in the 1840s, Catholic pleas for the same kind of aid Protestant schools were receiving were met not with aid but with Horace Mann's public school movement. Later pleas were met with "Blaine Amendments" being adopted throughout the states. Later pleas were met by that bigot Justice Hugo Black's uncompromising "No." And so, the Catholic schools have been starved and competed against to the point where they are disappearing.
And other charitable endeavors would be treated in equally vicious fashion. Look at what the Democrats are now trying to do to Itemized Deductions. Rich people who could contribute a decent amount to charities would be discouraged from doing that by proposals to limit the deduction's effect to a 28% tax saving even if a person is in the 39.6% bracket that Obama would reinstitute.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, the seizure of the monasteries by Henry VIII (and the little seizure by Elizabeth of the few reconstituted monasteries sponsored by her half-sister), destroyed the long-standing charitable efforts of Christ's Church that antedated the formation of the Post 1066 English Kingdom. That seizure has been replicated throughout the Western World by the Scandinavian Kings, the German princelings, the Hohenzollern Seizure of the Teutonic Knights lands, the French Revolution's seizure of the property of the French Church, etc. the idea that the Violent State would allow a significant church accunulation of property to occur without the state getting the lion's bulk of the property is again just naive.
It doesn't have to be Christian giving. It can be other religions as well, and the secular humanists are always asserting how they are just as kind and giving as us religious types (the numbers don't support that, but let's put that aside for a moment), so it would be time for them to put up or shut up.
Prof Rogers may want to go back to the 1970s and review the particularly Catholic issue with Liberation Theology in Latin America. Theologians and priests (Gutierrez, in particular) were able to come to the conclusion that the Marxist parties in South America were the true Christians because their social programs were aimed at creating heaven on earth. Overthrow of the non-Marxist governments was necessary in order for the churches and the Marxists to create this new social order!
By the way, you may recall that the ‘option for the poor’ was the motto of Fr. Pedro Arrupe’, the Superior General of the Jesuit Order (Catholic priests) in the 1960s and 70s. This motto was adapted by the liberation movement and ironically survives to this day.
St Bartholomew's Hospital, in the City of London was actually confiscated twice over.
Founded as part of the Priory in 1123, it was confiscated by Henry VIII during the Second Dissolution of 1539. Such was the reaction of Londoners, it was re- founded in 1547 as the "House of the Poore in West Smithfield in the suburbs of the City of London of Henry VIII's Foundation," attached to the former priory, now the parish church of St Bartholomew-the-Less .
Under the National Health Service Act 1946, the corporation was dissolved and its endowments vested in the Minister of Health on the "appointed day" (5 July 1948)
Similar fates befell many schools and hospitals
The Catholic Church is one of the most explicit sects in its understanding of the state as the organization which has legitimately monopolized violence. “ We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal." In the Unam Sanctum, Pope Boniae establishes that the state is a sword, using the same language as Romans 13. I don't know how you use a sword, but most people use it to conquer.
The religious question is, I think, a more fundamental one of what, if any, are the legitimate uses of state power. That question carries with it ones of the proper role of the church in carrying out non-state functions, the realms of authority of the church and state and of the relationship between those realms. To what extent may the church even rely on the protection of the state?
– John Adams
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
– Benjamin Franklin
If we love our neighbor as ourselves as Christ commanded, then our neighbor won't need much government assistance and we won't need much government regulation. The government the Founders instituted, by their own admission, was made for a basically virtuous, moral people. It doesn't really work otherwise.
Property is inherently violent. The state saying it will imprison anyone who takes your money is no more or less violent than the state saying it will imprison you for not giving away your money. Any way you look at it, the state is going to define property relationships and then use the threat of violence to enforce those relationships. It's not a question of picking a violent or non-violent property regime, it is a question of picking a just property regime. If you actually want a non-violent property regime, you want an ultra-minimalist state. Like, beyond what Rawls advocated minimalist. Rawls, after all, was acutely aware that even a libertarian state uses the threat of violence to enforce the free market,and worked hard to justify that threat of violence.
Anyways, that leaves the question of justice. The bible does not clearly teach "however much money people manage to get their hands on is THEIRS" as a principle of justice. It urges us to be aware of the fact that money is made by the state and is of this world, and to realize that even the more tangible things we possess are the Lord's and should be treated as such. I don't know if that is an argument for or against the welfare state. I suspect it is neither. Either way, "We should be wary of a regime that uses the threat of violence to redistribute our wealth because we abhor violence. Instead we should endorse a regime that uses the threat of violence to preserve our wealth" is a bad argument.
Unless you actually were advocating for anarchy?
The temporal sword is not for conquering but for the establishment of Justice.
The final cause of the State is Justice, per Aristotle.
That State is just violence is a libertarianism that has got prevalent in America.
The libertarians believe that justice is private thus they are willing to do away with the State.
But they are wrong. Justice by its nature can not be private. I can not serve justice to a thief that has robbed me. I can only act in self-defense but I have no right to break into his house and get my things back.
This is what i get for trying to argue over the internet during an all nighter. If all three of these posts clear the moderator, it's going to be an interesting chronicle of my journey into sleep deprivation.
As Rousseau says, ““Each man alienates, I admit, by the social compact, only such part of his powers, goods and liberty as it is important for the community to control; but it must also be granted that the Sovereign [the People] is sole judge of what is important.”
His conclusion is well known, “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; [« ce qui ne signifie autre chose sinon qu'on le forcera d'ętre libre »] for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence.”
But in those countries the Church has been forced by the government, in some cases through actual violence, to the fringes of the culture. That hasn't happened in the United States completely, at least not yet.
"Whether the tax plate or the collection plate, it all comes from the same pocket, and takes care of problems too large for any single individual to deal with."
Is charity from a religious entity really the same as welfare from the government? Does man actually live by bread alone?
"“The state” is nothing more than the general will of the people: the consummated result of their own organized wishes. "
The general will of the people is a vast abstraction, but along the way, a large amount of non-general will finds its way into the recipe for the state. In truth, the state more often than not represents the will of the faction controlling the government rather than the general will of the people.
There is nothing wrong with a democratic society deciding through democratic processes that there will be a basic floor to the amount of economic suffering that the poor will have to endure. You can argue about how high the floor should be, how specific policies may have unintended consequences or promote bad behaviors, or otherwise disagree with the nature and scope of the benefits transferred. But does anyone seriously believe that, for example, if there is a child who is homeless and starving that there shouldn't be some government resources available to sustain that child?
All this talk about "violence" over property rights cracks me up. Talk about a theoretical abstraction. My government commits all kinds of actual - not metaphorical - violence on an hourly basis. And they do it with my money. The police in my town just settled a lawsuit for beating a helpless man to death at a convenience store a few years ago.
There are many things that my government does with my money that I object to. But providing some basic resources for the poor is not one of them.
I will add this petition to my regular prayers (along with renewing my prayer that my national government will formally acknowledge policies that have contributed to extreme poverty, such as preferential rules of origin in free trade agreements and support for the overthrow of legitimately elected governments).
I do not share the author's view on the nature of government, but I really appreciate the point that our religious leaders are inconsistent, at best. In proclaiming that the government is not doing enough but remaining silent on our failure in our personal responsibility to care for others through charitable giving and other direct efforts, they are promoting self-righteousness rather than conversion of heart.
You asked: "Unless you actually were advocating for anarchy?"
To which I would counter, why is it that everyone seems to see only a dichotomy of choices, i.e., a choice between the state and anarchy? Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his book Democracy: The God That Failed most assuredly does not advocate anarchy in the sense of having no governance, but rather the replacement of much of what we deem the venue of the nation/state with market-based solutions. Of course, this would likely require us to have smaller "nations," probably something more along the lines of the medieval city-states. But would that necessarily be a bad thing?
I can envision American society working much better if the sole functions of the Federal government were managing our relations with other "nations" and providing for defense of this nation against foreign aggression, while leaving most other matters for resolution at the state, or even city/county level.
But, whether you agree or disagree with that last suggestion there are not solely three choices, unless we constrain ourselves to view the world as limited and inherently dichotomous.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
