Is America a Christian Nation?

A couple of months ago I emailed a question to Professor Theophilus of TrueU.org. He does a monthly (really bimonthly) column called Office Hours where he answers questions from his readers. I asked the good professor this question: How can anyone call America a Christian Nation? The reason I asked him this is twofold: 1) the professor works for Focus on the Family, and I wanted to hear an informed opinion in support of their position that America is a Christian nation that all good Christians should defend and participate in, and 2) I felt it was not an unfair question (as I was beginning to when I made some challenges on Del Tackett's blog) to ask of a Yale Ph.D. who is a professor in the Government and Philosophy Departments at the University of Texas in Austin. I formulated my question in the following terms: America can only be called a Christian nation in one of three ways (by my estimation). It must either be systemically Christian (that is, a government that is derived from Christian doctrines), have a Christian national identity, or have a predominantly Christian demographic. I gave reasons why none of these are the case. In brief, democracy is inherently agnostic, national identity is as immaterial as it is maleable, and our demographic is so diverse (no matter what name any individual may take) that no homogeneous Christian doctrine could ever arise from it - much less a Christian nation.

Now, the title "Christian nation" is pretty ambiguous. It could mean a lot of different things. We can say "we're mostly Christians here, so we're a Christian nation," and I wouldn't bat an eye (if it were true). It gets hairy when people say that you should defend your country, perhaps even giving your life to do so, with violence because it is a Christian nation. More problematic still is when the "Christianness" of our nation becomes a motivation to expand its hegemony in the world and excuse behaviors that would be unbecoming of a non-Christian nation. This sort of theologizing of American ideas and the American institution is prevalent among the Christian right, and it used to be a more harmless if faulty patriotism, but since the rise of neoconservativism, it has grown horrifyingly potent. This was the context of my question because it is our modern context. So I wrote in to see if it could be justified.

Well, the results came in yesterday, and I suppose you could say I was disappointed, but it really wasn't less than I expected. America as a Christian nation remains an indefensible notion.

Systemically Christian or Agnostic? Theophilus: "Agnosticism means not knowing. If we didn't know anything, we wouldn't know whether religious liberty is good. To believe in religious liberty you have to have a reason to believe in it; you can't get something from nothing." Agnosticism does not mean not knowing anything, of course. It means that we cannot (or do not) know the real contents of the transcendent realm from which presumably arise normativity, ultimate meaning, and all a priori truths that form the narratives into which we live. The expressed purpose of the modern project was to arrive at these a priori truths without faith, religion, or any unfounded authority beyond their reason and empirical evidence - or at least, to justify some our existence through some greater certainty than these can afford. Kant came perhaps the closest of any human being to accomplishing this goal, though ultimately he still failed. The phrase "you can't get something from nothing" could have been their mantra.

Professor Theophilus has added considerable superfluous material to our discussion in his answer.  One need not believe in religious liberty to be American.  In fact, we aren't talking about individuals or their beliefs at all.  We're talking about America's system of government and whether it is derived from Christianity, and the answer is no.  It's derived from fallacious theories of natural justice that posit universal rights for mankind in lieu of any divinely mandated law - a feat of speculation and an impossible theoretical leap.  The language is right there in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."  Evangelicals like to focus on the part about how our Creator has endowed us with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the important part is that these truths are held not to require any support.  They are readily apparent - empirically testable.  They are simply positive facts of human existence alchemically transformed into normative principles to ensure their preservation.  The language of "rights" is entirely absent from the Bible.

The professor's point actually supports a very different premise: you most certainly can't get something from nothing, and this means that the inherent nihilism of our system (for those who missed it, agnosticism, practically employed, functions exactly as nihilism) cannot possibly give rise to justice.  The best it can do is to act temporarily in the interest of Christianity when majority opinion is swayed that way, but the founding fathers installed safeguards against any one viewpoint establishing itself in the system (not that Christianity is a single viewpoint).  Our current version of separation of church and state actually precludes the possibility of justice at all (leaving us with regulations that have no normative weight, and a purpose that creates a sort of postmodern idolatry of the state), and the way it occurred is that the nascent Enlightenment ideology that gave rise to the system in the first place has matured from a state virtue into an individual one (liberal tolerance) whose public practice results in a solid, self-consistent establishment of agnosticism.

Professor Theophilus, it seems, does not want to acknowledge what a monster modernity has created in placing a Christian rationale on an agnostic system of natural justice.  As the professor himself put it, we are a pluralistic system with many opinions, "but ennobled by the understanding that human beings bear the image of God."  Many awful things have been "ennobled" with Christian rationales.  That is no way to do political theology.  You don't ask "what, as a Christian, can I affirm?"  That leads to serious omissions, and as Hannah Arendt made abundantly clear, evil in modernity is banal.  You must either start at the top or at the bottom - from the God of peace or from the nihilistic agon.  You cannot hold God in your pocket and walk on the Devil's highways.

Christian National Identity?  This is clear, but the professor made a case against it anyway.  Unfortunately, no case for a Christian heritage can pass the "so what?" test.  He does assert that "The whole point of speaking of the 'identity' of nation, or a person, is to suggest a reality that endures, despite some changes, over time."  That is the point - to suggest it.  The professor has clearly not read Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, in which it is made pretty clear that one may put whatever one pleases into a particular national identity.  You may make all kinds of arguments from our founding, from our tribe, ethnicity, geneology of events - it doesn't matter.  Many people may lay claim to the same nation, and the fact that it changes over time is significant.  It's just naive to say that identity refers to something that endures.  Identity refers to something that is.  Whether it was may be incorporated into what is even in rebellion.  Incidentally, the American Revolution never would have occurred if Prof. Theophilus is right.

Christian Demographics?  The professor says anyone calling themselves a Christian should be counted as one since we can't really know whether they are or not.  Jesus said "by their fruits you shall know them."  It is not for us to judge who is going to Heaven.  It is for us to seek out justice and not let any old opinion slide.  The marketplace of ideas is only as good as it is a rampart against one coerced view.  If we become too enamored of our liberty then it becomes useless.  Liberty is for giving away, and we must give ours to Christ if the term "religious freedom" is to serve any purpose.

---

There are so many dumb ways at getting at the arguments I have laid out, and just to nip one in the bud, I'm not against religious liberty, and I'm not against life or the pursuit of happiness per se.  I'm just deconstructing our system of government and finding that these "rights" have no origin and little usefulness in Christianity.  In truth, all men are free and all men are slaves.  We may all do whatever we like within our means and think whatever we want no matter who oppresses us.  We are also captive to the ideas into which we live and to the means through which our livelihoods are attained.  The only question is what significance we may gain or forfeit in a given action.  This means that "religious liberty" is only properly served in the pursuit of that one true path to the Big Other by which we have been measuring our lives all this time.  To me, though, this term infantilizes religion as if it had no say in governance except that which modernity grants it, as if modernity did not address the same issues.  Agamben has a serious critique of human rights as similarly placing human life within the polis where it does not belong.  It is not that Evangelicals are too separationist to be effective - it is that they are not nearly wary enough to know what it means to be effective.

John Edwards: Promises, Promises, Promises

John Edwards is a guy with lots of good intentions. Here's what he wants to do:

The Poor

End poverty by 2036. This he proposes to do by raising the minimum wage to $9.50, tripling earned income tax credit for adults without children, creating a million stepping stone jobs (out of thin air?), bolstering government support in rural areas, strengthening labor laws, and a host of other things. The ones I have mentioned here, with the exception of minimum wage and adding more complications to the tax code (instead of just doing away with it), are good things to do for real reform. There are an awful lot of social programs listed on his site, many of which certainly seem noble. The question, however, is this: how can the government create jobs? Don't government regulations for the poor disincentivize employers from creating jobs? It is one thing to be against abusive business practices that exploit the poor - enforcing safety regulations, cracking down on exploitative loans, etc. The problem is drawing the line between building barriers against abuse and building barriers against employment. In a totally free market, with all its abusive practices in place, a poor person may have to put up with really low wages for a time, but he is a much easier person to employ. Government programs for the poor and regulations for their "protection" seem too often to make them expensive to businesses - as expensive as someone who is much better qualified - which makes it hard for them to get out of the rut. Many forces, including truly evil private business practices, keep the poor in their poverty, but we must be very careful that the law, which is highly imprecise and often abused, target only the abuses and not the economy itself. Still, there's a place for this, certainly - but I think the best thing we can do to put money in the pockets of the poor is to repair the dollar. Otherwise all this is meaningless.

With all of John Edwards' expanded social programs, one would hope that he is cutting spending somewhere. It's not in foreign aid, which he wants to raise, or welfare, which he wants to expand. He does not want to cut spending, and yet he promises tax breaks to the middle class and the upper class. Now, I've been looking for consistency in each candidate's platform, even if it means coming to some dire conclusions about the ideology driving their political philosophy. John Edwards, it appears, is simply not very coherent economically. He is promising us the moon. If we are going to have a welfare state, then we're going to have to feed the welfare state with our money. There is no such thing as a free service. If we're going to have a socialized economy, then that's what we're going to have - let's not banter about building the middle class when their livelihoods depend on the ability of the market to create and sustain jobs. If we're going to centralize the economy, what is the point of all the programs intended to stimulate the private sector? The more the economy leans on government support, the more it will lean on government support in the future - there is an inertia here that will lead to economic stagnation. If we want to promote the economy, we have to promote competition and entrepreneurship - incentivize people to create jobs, not to apply for them.

There will always be poor people. If there is a method of eliminating poverty, it is, as Edwards ironically seems to know, in work - self-sustaining work. I think there pretty clearly must be programs to help the poor get into good jobs if we're going to eliminate poverty (or start an asymptotal approach to it). Programs for the poor must be patient, compassionate, firm, and holistic - as there is no one symptom or cause of poverty, and a poor person always deals with much more than just a lack of money in his or her pocket. In short, they must be local. My question is this: why can't these programs come from the private sector? Why can't churches be the ones helping the poor? Why must government intervene to the point that constitutional oversight of compassion prohibits religious motivations (which is by far the greatest motivating factor behind this concern)? The expansion of the public sector into the private economic sector becomes less and less ideologically neutral the more specific it is no matter what level of income we're talking about - but in this realm in particular, the contrast is very stark. If a man who loves Christ and seeks to do His will for the poor (a much more prevalent practice than war-hawking for Jesus, but much quieter) is suddenly told he must not help the poor in Jesus' name, he is discouraged from doing so at all. The case of prohibiting Catholic adoptions is absurd, atrocious, and damnable. This will only continue the more government gets involved with the private sector. Any monolithic force with coercive power necessarily enforces its central ideology wherever it exercises that power. It's one good reason why the collectivist approach is incompatible with modern economics.

The War

John Edwards wants to scale back our presence in Iraq. Then he wants to train Iraq's security forces and basically apply the above principles of government intervention to a foreign country. Thus, the same critique applies - if Iraq is going to stand on its own two feet, there isn't a whole lot we can do to help it, even with unlimited funds, which, emphatically, we do not have. It doesn't really matter how guilty we feel about killing millions of innocents in a patriotic rage at this point - we are just making it worse. He also wants to engage in direct talks with the other countries in the region. I'm not really sure what he'll say, though. "Yeah, that last guy was a jerk. Sorry about that. We won't let it happen again. We also won't remove our military bases from your region, we won't stop meddling in your governments, and we won't promise not to attack you. Carrot, anyone?" I really wish they would stop saying that. "Carrots and sticks." Is that not just a little bit insulting? Can we at least be subtle about how our empire rides the rest of the world like our work horse? I want us not to have an empire. It does us no good whatsoever. Protecting our sovereignty means respecting the sovereignty of others, and the global economy only works with diverse roles and many players, just as our domestic economy only works that way. We don't have to cheat and we don't have to be winning to be prosperous and secure. In fact, it's beginning to look like the other way around.

Mitt Romney: The Politics of Hair

A script from Mitt Romney's ad, as seen on his website:

"It's an election like no other. An enemy lurks, waiting to strike. Our mainstreet economy is competing with mainland China. Legal versus illegal doesn't seem to matter. Basic values like marriage are suddenly open to debate. For these challenges, ordinary isn't good enough. We need the leader who gets the big stuff done. Take charge, demand results, no excuses. Mitt Romney: the right experience, the right values, the right time."

This election is like no other because the "enemy" is "lurking." Enemies didn't used to lurk. Every other time we've elected a President in a time of war (always, as Ron Paul points out, to end it), the enemy has been more forthcoming. Nation-states don't lurk. Terrorist lurk. They lurk in nation-states, so we have to knock them over anyway. It's a dumb word to mask an aggressive, dangerous policy. But it also masks a much more dangerous rationale, which is made more explicit in this statement: "Legal and illegal no longer seem to matter." He is, of course, talking about immigration. We must keep in mind that we are not talking about illegal actions. We are talking about illegal people. You, sir or ma'am, are either legal or illegal. You are either American, or you are not American. You either have the inalienable rights or you don't. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men..." That language is pretty clearly universal, as it must be in order to justify our laws. So why doesn't Mitt Romney think that illegal aliens are given the right to life (health care, livelihood), liberty (education, driver's licenses), or the pursuit of happiness (the reason they are here)? Because Mitt Romney justifies his policies not by the purpose of American government, but on the preservation of the institution called America.

What we are seeing here is a symptom of the descent of a free society into fascism (as we can see from other similar descents through history and the analysis of Foucault, Agamben, and Arendt). Instead of appealing to a definition and pursuit of progress towards our nation's telos, which is the rule of just law, this is an appeal to national identity. A nation that sacrifices the purpose of its existence for the sake of its existence risks losing both. Should we not seek to secure our borders and control immigration? We most certainly should - but not at the expense of civil liberties, justice, or the humane treatment of human life. Our country was founded on the idea that we could promote the rule of law through these means, not through any means for the preservation of emasculated principles. These things become secondary through a false "necessity" that is derived from the elevation of the nation as the nation (America as America) over the telos of that nation and the principles upon which it was founded. This is the same rationale (and the center of the neoconservative political philosophy) that is used to justify extreme and invasive measures against terrorism, expansionist war efforts, economic oppression and domination over other countries, and a host of other evils that will inevitably arise as this unapologetic, otherizing self-definition plays itself out. It is inherently conflictual, tribalistic, and irrational, and it dupes Christians fairly easily because it appeals to religious traditions as making up the supposed content of this national identity that must be preserved at all costs.

Most importantly, however, it is banal. This slide into a new, coldly regulatory, exclusive America occurs silently, relying on existing values and practices that are quietly stripped of their point and held up as doctrine - as points in and of themselves - and bolstered with new, ferocious means. Do not be surprised when "I would double the size of Guantanamo Bay" becomes a cheering line. America exists because we value justice, order, peace, and because our forefathers believed in liberty as a means to these goals. Christianity exists because God so loved the world that He sent His son to die that we might live and love others in that same denial of self that they might live. Marriage exists for a form of good and of unity that reflects Christ's love of the Church. All of these things are always up for debate because they are ideas and models formed to reach real human goods - even if we believe in them with real faith, we must not forget why we believe them and what purpose they serve. As soon as we shut down this debate, we proclaim them to be finished. They are complete works, and now we must fight for their integrity. The point then slowly dies, and being American simply means being American, being a Christian just means being a Christian, and being married just means being married, and all three become capable of things that fundamentally contradict their purpose.

He's Mitt Romney, and he approves that message.

But he does have really good hair.

Capitalism, Socialism, and Christ

This will be brief, as this is a subject too large to address here, but I want to highlight what I believe is a fairly central issue for anyone voting in America today. The criticisms I have heard of capitalism seem to revolve around ignoring the poor and the unjust distribution of wealth. The criticisms I have heard of socialism seem to involve inefficiency and the repression of civil liberties. All of these are valid concerns, but they hit just wide of the center, which is this question: What is the role of government? Now, as a Christian, I really believe in justice and the promotion of real justice in any sovereign nation. As a citizen of the modern world, however, I see that sovereignty is now defined by an arbitrary power, not, as was once the case, as a gift from Almighty God. In a sense, sovereignty is simply a more singular, elevated version of Hobbes' state of nature. We are still engaged in a war of all against all, but now the individual players are monolithic nation-states with ultimate coercive power within their borders. They may control their population through authoritarian means or through economic incentives that create the illusion of freedom (a.k.a. freedom of opportunity), but the end result is the same. We are all under control whether or not we are striving.

Control is not a bad thing. Order is certainly not a bad thing. Self-determination may indeed be a preferable means of creating order as voluntary internal movements make for a happier majority of citizens. But we must realize that this is the context of the debate between capitalism and socialism. The question of justice on both sides gets lost because our context is a regulatory one, not a normative one. The most interesting difference between capitalism and socialism (and, I believe, the one that makes the biggest impact on a given country) is that the former throws the question of justice back to the private sector, simply keeping the peace without a specific mandate, but the latter by its very nature must engage moral questions because the specificity of its control brings it into contact with the decisions of individuals much more frequently, giving it the responsibility to make a decision.

Socialism, therefore, has a vested interest in discovering principled moral absolutes. It may not let the individual decide without retracting its control. Any time it does not decide for you, it has reduced itself to the capitalist solution in that area. The unwillingness of socialist thinkers to seriously engage (or even admit) this problem has led to the manifest stupidity of liberal tolerance, which creates a theoretical distance between government and individual while maintaining the most intimate control. It affirms pluralism through a falsely beneficent otherizing of any and every ideology that is not nihilistic at its core, pushing their practices to the most constricted possible singularities and calling everything beyond the inward thoughts of individuals "public" and the realm of government. This amounts to a Hobbesean totalitarianism that has managed to defeat its own self-contradiction by calling mandated practical agnosticism the freedom of thought. Freedom is not freedom of thought alone. This weird virtue is tantamount to forcing someone to act at gunpoint, while saying, "Don't worry, you can think whatever you want." As long as the motivations of the gunman aren't religious, this is deemed satisfactory.

The whole idea of a free society is a pluralism of ideas, practices, messages, and rationales - and the role of government is to allow these things to flourish and to intervene only to keep the peace. Tracing the boundaries of limited government is a continual process of evaluating the rights of individuals (which are not endowed by our Creator, but are a useful concept for navigating conflicts). Now, capitalism presents some powerful challenges too. Not everyone is averse to amassing the greatest possible amounts of wealth for themselves in lieu of some coercive obstacle to stop them. And this sort of greed does lead to massive inequalities among people. The solution to this problem, however, in no way must be one of governmental regulation, or even free market incentives. If we really live in a free society, private citizens ought to have a say in what is just, and there is no reason to think that the propagation of ideas about justice, truth, and the proper use of wealth cannot penetrate the upper echelons of western society. The story of Zaccheus is a profound one, because the change of his heart led to a change in his practice towards real justice and reconciliation. The early church saw example after example of rich men coming to Christ and giving up their greed for the sake of the poor and for Christ. I think it is distinctly unChristlike to mandate action without a change of heart.

Now there is the question of the truly hardened, selfish elite - the bourgeois: those whose very context leads them to believe their extravagant lifestyle to be normal and just, requiring no reform. Many of these, ironically (if understandably), are Christians, and there is no form of cognitive dissonance so frequent in my generation of the church as the realization of one's true global socioeconomic status. This leads to many frantic development and foreign aid programs, to the villification of the free market, to the left-leanings of many who don't quite understand all the absurdities to which they must subscribe in order to advocate the way they do. Not only are these usually ill-fated attempts to bring the rest of the world up to an American middle-class standard of living (a goal that planet Earth cannot support with all her resources), but they miss the point entirely. It is not the freedom to act as we wish that has led us to act as we do. It is the context within which we act that has led us to wrong assumptions, and thus, wrong motivations. The context is the aforementioned debate over control at the expense of justice, and when we believe in justice but admit that there will be no modern Christendom, we find ourselves in a position to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God as the Church alone and not with the aid of government - and this is so of necessity. This is, incidentally, what I think we should have been doing all along. Private justice - that is, justice detached from the coercive peacekeeping mandate of government - is possible only in the Christian religion, whose peace is total and ontologically originary to our existence. It is a peace that transcends the government's leave to promote it and a narrative that pre-exists human life. There is no law against the fruits of Christ's Spirit, though there have always been laws against the preaching of it. I think a free society provides us with the opportunity to write these truths on the tablets of human hearts instead of beating them into submission with law (a distinction that was central to Jesus' coming), and while I am no promoter of unregulated capitalism, I am also no promoter of unprincipled regulation.

Rudy Giuliani and the Politics of Hyperbole

Giuliani has an ad on the front page of his site that goes, verbatim, like this:

"America.  A land of opportunity, a people of possibilities, and the last, best hope of man on Earth.  It took 230 years to get us here.  On the way we abolished slavery, endured the depression, fought two great wars, and brought the world in from the cold.  Today, America remains that shining city on a hill, but there are those who live to extinguish that light.  Who plot and pray/prey [sic] in darkness, and wait and watch for weakness.  We can ignore their threat, hope it goes away, or meet it with strength and greet it with purpose.  At this time and in this place, America is looking for real strength and tested leadership.  America is looking for a leader who will cut taxes, a fighter who is ready to take on the Washington big spenders, and someone who will finally secure our borders, and above all, America is looking for a leader who will keep us safe; who will stand up to tyrants, terrorists, and bullies - because that's what he's done all his life.  America wants strength.  America deserves leadership.  And America needs Rudy Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani: tested, ready, now."

So let's deal with a few of the assertions made here.  First, America as "the last, best hope of man on Earth."  Earth, apparently, is in grave danger, and its only hope is us.  This means we should go and export our way of life to the rest of the world no matter how vehemently they may disagree with this assessment of our status in it - it's for their own good.  We are, apparently, a "city on a hill," which, of course, are the words of Jesus in reference to the Church.  This is not the first time someone has drawn this parallel, and it is just as obscene now as before.  To equate America with Christianity is to equate modern nihilism with the Truth of the transcendent God, and to make Jesus out to be the protector of the tyrannical multinational corporate colonization of the developing world, the violent international military police actions since WWII, and all the untold atrocities done in the name of this unjust nation-state.

There are those who would extinguish that light - which, as it happens, emanates not from our glowing righteousness, but from our foreign policy setting their houses on fire.  Can we really blame them for doing whatever they can with their extremely limited resources to throw water on it, or to set some fires of their own?  Apparently, according to this ad, we can - because it appears that they don't like abolition, economic growth, or fighting evil, of which our "light" consists.  Those bad men.  So they wait and pray (because they're irrational fundamentalist nutcases - like Pat Robertson), and apparently they live in the UK, as they do all this without sunlight.  Like orcs, you might say.  A shadow is brewing in the east that will cover all the land in darkness, you might say.  The exaggeration continues unabated, helpfully narrowing our options to 1) not doing anything, 2) not doing anything, or 3) doing something.  Which one do you pick?  Let's meet those mean orcs with strength and purpose!  Otherwise they'll kill us because they hate good things.  It's not like they have a reason to hate us.  It's not like they're human beings with the exact same tendency to retributive violence that we exhibited in our invasion of Afghanistan.  It's not like they recruit using the manifold oppressive violent actions we supported in their region since they were kids.  No, to assert such a thing is unpatriotic and ridiculous (at least, according to Rudy Giuliani's response to Ron Paul making that exact assertion from the CIA's report on international blowback).  Are you saying the American people caused 9/11?  How dare you!  They're just fascists who build irrational hatred for the Other with propagandistic media.

So we're going to stop them by building a huge wall around America, issuing ID cards to hispanic people, and funding massive military operations, including invasions of more innocent countries whose compliance with the UN in 2003 doesn't mean they're not bad orc-muslim-shadow-creatures.  And then, we're going to cut taxes.  It's okay, we'll borrow the money from China and spend even more than the 3 TRILLION dollars this war has already cost us.  It's a good thing we've got Rudy Giuliani, who courageously sat around while four private construction companies and thousands of private citizens cleaned up 9/11 under the direction of someone who just took charge because nobody else was (American Ground, Langeweische).  But it is, of course, his leadership during that September - a helpfully abstract characteristic, considering - and his strength - which must refer to his mental fortitude, or maybe his authoritarian political tendencies - which qualify him for this position.  We need him to stand up to countries with a fraction of our GDP, who will stop at nothing to destroy us.  Those "bullies."  Why don't they pick on someone their own size?  Someone a little more manageable.

Vote Giuliani, or die.

A Really Good Point That I Didn't Make

This is from ronpaulrevolution.blogspot.com:

Ron Paul and Corporations
The most consistent counterpoint I hear to Ron Paul as president is that libertarians, if they took the executive branch, would let corporations "run wild".

I'm honestly not sure what this means.

If a true small-government candidate like Ron Paul took office, corporations and big business would have far less influence into our lives. Currently, big business is totally in bed with big government to the point that you can even interchange the names of top government people and top business executives and it's all the same. Right now, the whole system is out of wack and running wild.

If businesses like Coca-Cola, Walmart, Budweiser, Haliburton, etc. have no lobbying power, how can they control or affect our lives as citizens?

Realize that under Ron Paul we would have a very small federal government but leave some things up to states and local governments.

People say there would be nobody to "stand up" to the corporations. What exactly does this mean? Right now they not only don't stand up to big business, but the government actually gives them corporate welfare and uses favortism, things that Ron Paul is completely against!

You Know You're A Presidential Contender When...

... you get irrelevant criticism to assassinate your character.

... pundits say the phrase "front-runner" 100 million times in a given news night.

... you're an evangelical.

... you get your own stupid catchphrase that involves your name: "Huckaboom" (c) Sean Hannity 2007.

... "the polls," which tell people both what America already thinks and what America ought to think, suddenly begin to favor you. Groupthink anyone?

...you get pictures like this...









http://www.nytimes.com/
...not like this...














news.monstersandcritics.com

Barack Obama

I have changed my mind about Barack Obama with regard to religion in politics due to this speech.  I suppose in reading his position that religious people should translate their ideas into principles that are acceptable to the general public that I assumed he had not thought very long and hard about the topic, but he clearly has.  He has not answered the fundamental question of where you get morals or values without reference to a specific tradition of transcendental truth, but I suppose that would be quite a lot to expect of a politician.  Watching Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins in their various debates, one would think that it's really quite easy to gain absolute morality without God, as they ceaselessly condemn religious doctrines, practices, and acts as the most heinous moral offenses without really giving any apparatus by which to do so (and frankly, I'd rather not speculate, even for the sake of ridicule).  Policy in the public square at least has something solid to go on - the Constitution - as well as a rich philosophy of the tenets of a free society, no matter how bogus the rationales (things like the state of nature and self-evident truths) may be.  I think, given the original assumption that people must work together in their society for a common good of some kind, the promotion of a generic form of justice is important, if not final or ultimately binding.  Obama's use of the Abraham and Isaac example (which I suspect originated with Kierkegaard, but don't quote me on that) is very apt.  I am for no theocracy of any kind.  Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world."  If there is to be a theocracy, let God instate it - as He has promised He will someday do - but to let justice flow like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, as we are commanded to do in Amos above and beyond legalism and worship, is to do so with whatever means are available to us.  How we are to do that is entirely beyond me right now, but I am working my way towards it as hard as I know how to do.

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee is my prediction for the Republican nomination, mostly because Giuliani and Romney hold ridiculous views on how to deal with immigration (A card? Seriously? How about a star?), they're totally in favor of the war (which means they can't beat Hillary), they are not pro-life/pro-marriage, they aren't evangelicals, and their economic policies are manifest empty promises in light of the expanded government control they advocate. He should definitely capitalize on this last one if he is going to defend his previous tax hikes, though he will have a tough time of it, as he has already promised not to raise taxes.

So who is this guy, if he's going to be the nominee, and should you vote for him? Here is my take on it:

Mike Huckabee thinks "faith" should have a place in the public square, but not in government. "The First Amendment requires that expressions of faith be neither prohibited nor preferred." (mikehuckabee.com) Good point. "Real faith makes us more humble and mindful, not of the faults of others, but of our own. It makes us less judgmental, as we see others with the same frailties we have. " (same page) Not such a good point. Maybe Mike's faith does that - but Pat Robertson's faith and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's faith do not. They endure a lot of flack for their intolerance (and oppression), and I don't think it's reasonable to say that every judgmental person has an ulterior motive. Reality seems to indicate that it's more often the other way around (which isn't to say that being judgmental can't be lucrative - just look at Nancy Grace, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly). He continues: "Our nation was birthed in a spirit of faith - not a prescriptive faith telling us how or whether to believe, but acknowledging a providence that pervades our world." (Ibid.) That, I'm afraid, is a very weak argument, but it is also the view of the Supreme Court at the moment. Thankfully, he is not explicitly saying we're a Christian nation, but in light of his previous uses of the word "faith," he might as well. I'm afraid I find this "spirit of faith," along with Justice O'Connor's "ceremonial deism" to be simply empty excuses to allow what were once explicitly Christian practices in government to become historical relics for the unstated reason that they are harmless - like our evolutionary remnant, the appendix (but of course, Huckabee wouldn't go for that analogy). America was undeniably Christian at its outset. The gradual "secularization" as many conservatives call it is really very simple to explain - the whole idea of modern politics is Justice without an absolute spiritual foundation. If you found a nation on those principles (which are translated into practice over time), it will always turn into a secular regime, every time - no matter how many formal references you make to God in your writings. So Huckabee is both right and wrong - we were not founded in a "spirit" of non-prescriptive "faith." We were founded on an unreconciled dualism of Christian religion and modernity, but only the latter was given teeth. The first amendment, in my view, is the only redeeming concession of this particular system in terms of real justice.

Huckabee's website also says this: "We should not banish religion from the public square, but should guarantee access to all voices and views. We should share and debate our faith, but never seek to impose it." Now Mike, how is it the public square if what we're arguing about has no effect? You don't have to instate coercive conversions to mandate principles of Christian justice. This goes back to my point about public and private tolerance (see "Ron Paul and the Separation of State and Tolerance"). That is most emphatically the private sphere - the one that is benevolently overseen by our republic under the auspices of nothing whatsoever (which is to say, we enforce nothing justice with great zeal).

That's my pet issue. Now on to the rest of his platform.

Mike Huckabee is for a Constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion. That means he's for the imposition of Christian ideals on the rest of the country at a federal level. (sorry, I know I said I was done) This is absolutely the right course of action. Unfortunately, I find it unattainable. I would like to know whether he would support the overturning of Roe v. Wade without a constitutional amendment, which would throw the issue back to the state level, but wouldn't mandate in the opposite direction for the entire country. That I would call substantive progress - and if he's concerned about preserving life, he would go for it while working for his other goal. If he's all-or-nothing about it, he's just manipulating evangelicals with their issues.

Mike Huckabee wants to expand government support of veterans. Good idea. Don't promise medical care to the elderly and not follow through. That's very bad.

Mike Huckabee believes in state-controlled benchmarks for public education. A step in the right direction from the ridiculous "No Child Left Behind," but not enough. Benchmarks do nothing but make sure that No Child Pulls Ahead, which leaves teacher to tear their hair out over an education system mired in mediocrity. It's the principle itself that's the problem, not where the lines are drawn or by whom. Why not let the market take care of it a little more? Why not provide more vouchers for private schools and let the competition of different schools drive quality up? That way we don't have non-educators guessing at what makes for better quality education. And we can send our kids to schools that teach Intelligent Design as science if we want. Of course, those schools might get naturally selected...

Mike Huckabee is for shutting down the IRS (just like Ron Paul), and instating the FairTax. The FairTax is "a simple tax based on wealth." It does away with all taxes on income and has taxes based on sales, so that we are taxed on what we buy, not what we earn. That is a fantastic idea, especially because it takes a swipe at American consumerism, which will reduce waste. It seems to me that it will result in much less revenue for the federal government, though he calls it "revenue neutral," but he has a good response to this concern: "I believe that our massive deficit is not due to Americans' being under-taxed, but due to the federal government's over-spending." Good point. So why this:

Mike Huckabee wants to spend all our money on paranoid national security concerns. "I support the $3 billion the Senate has voted for border security. This money will train and deploy 23,000 more agents, add four drone planes, build 700 miles of fence and 300 miles of vehicle barriers, and put up 105 radar and camera towers. This money will turn "catch and release" into "catch and detain" of those entering illegally, and crack down on those who overstay their visas. " Three billion dollars. "In this age of terror, immigration is not only an economic issue, but also a national security issue." American politicians are responsible for this being an "age of terror." There was terrorism before, there will be terrorism later. It's just that now we are using it to justify the authoritarian removal of our civil liberties and the expansion of American empire. I refuse to accept biopolitical justifications of government policy. It is dangerous, it is wrong, and it is the definition of terrorism: From Dictionary.com: "terrorism - (n.) 1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes. 2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization. 3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government." But it continues in his foreign policy.

"Iraq is a battle in our generational, ideological war on terror. " Just like Vietnam was a battle in our ideological war on communism, and we could also say that supporting Israel is a battle in our ideological war on terror (or, as it is perceived over there, on Islam) just as our support of South Africa was a battle in our ideological war on communism. "General Petraeus and our troops are giving their all to provide a window of opportunity for the Iraq government to succeed, while the Democrats are running for the exit doors." Define "success" please. And "victory," for that matter. Is it the point at which bombs stop blowing up? That will never happen because of a little thing I like to call the endless cycle of retributive violence - see aforementioned Palestinian conflict for details. This is an unwinnable war precisely because it is ideological. We did not win the war on communism - as any devout capitalist will tell you. Communism defeated itself - that's why it's called the Cold War. When has it ever been the role of a free society to be the world's thought police? Is that not completely contrary to everything America claims to be?

"During the Cold War, we had hawks and doves, but this new war requires us to be a phoenix, rising reborn to meet each new challenge and seize each new opportunity. " A more apt analogy is that we are a vulture, exploiting every opportunity to use fear-based politics to gain an edge in the global economy. The real ideological war is going on in our political arena - are we going to allow our politicians manipulate us by using every violent act that reaches us in the media as policy rationales (even when violence has been plastered all over our consciousness ever since there has been a mass media)? Are we going to continue to presume our blamelessness in the global arena ("I will never apologize for America," say many politicians... verbatim) when we are the biggest arms dealer, the most aggressive country, and the largest economy in the world? Are we going to continue to heap all the blame for terrorism solely on an ideology - Muslim fundamentalism - that supposedly brainwashes people into doing evil when even the Muslim fundamentalists justify their attacks by citing substantive grievances against America? We aren't fighting the Orcs of Mordor - we're fighting impoverished human beings, many of whom see our decadence and believe us to be the orcs. It is a very, very complicated world, and it always has been. We mustn't yield to all terrorist demands. We also mustn't ignore them. We also mustn't continue our McCarthian blanketing of all opponents of American actions with the term "terrorist."

So what's the verdict? Mike Huckabee has good domestic policies for the most part. When he's being rational, he seems to have a good head on his shoulders and some creative solutions to our economic problems. Unfortunately, he has bought the stupid neoconservative terror rhetoric hook, line, and sinker, and unless he changes his line, I don't think I can vote for him. There's too much at stake in the rest of the world for us to paint with such broad strokes.

Rebuilding the Church

A Story from www.SamaritansPurse.org

The congregation of Mongo Church in southern Sudan has endured decades of violence and oppression at the hands of militias sponsored by the Muslim government in the north.Their suffering began a half-century ago when two church leaders were ambushed by government soldiers and taken inside the church building. They were tied to poles, and the sanctuary was set on fire. Both men were killed, and the church was completely destroyed. Everyone in the village fled for their lives that night.Though there was a brief period of peace in the 1970s, the people of Mongo continued to live in fear of persecution. In the early ‘80s the government ramped up the violence once again. Mongo’s Christians were forced to flee into the bush or to refugee camps in neighboring countries.Many children grew up without a proper education, and disease and hunger affected every family. However, their suffering did not keep the Christians from Mongo from worshipping the Lord.“During the war our faith was strong,” said one church member. “This is the reason the Church is still alive in Sudan.”A comprehensive peace deal finally was signed in 2005, and believers returned to Mongo. To their despair, they found only the remains of the brick church they had attempted to build a decade earlier. However, their anguish turned to joy when they learned that Samaritan’s Purse would help them rebuild their sanctuary. Today, the new church is home to some 300 members, and the congregation has seen a resurgence of hope.“We thought that we were suffering alone during the war,” the village chief said. “We didn’t know that we had brothers in America who would help us. We want to say thanks to the people who have partnered with Mongo Parish. Many generations will pray in our new church.”

The African church is perhaps the most challenging thing in the world today to the Christian church in America. They live by faith in the face of persecution reminiscent of ancient Rome, but today's Roman empire is full of Christians, and the persecutors are backwater warlords. I do not believe in the warfare of the modern world, but if there is any justice, it must be justice for these, not for the petty issues raised in our politics. We have the power to wipe these disgusting janjaweed from existence with hardly a thought, and it is a great challenge to me to balance this obvious justice - the protection of the weak - with the means of Jesus, which is peace. One platoon from the U. S. Marines could stop a band of marauders cold before they ever saw the village they meant to rape. Sudan is a wide open space, and U. S. air power is so supreme in modern warfare that if we so wished, we could keep a raid from happening anywhere in south Sudan ever again. But the means of Christ is peace, and when the peace of Christ is compromised, it fuels hatred of Christians. I have to wonder how much animosity towards Christianity comes from American hegemony in the world - however complacent it is in the defense of Christians, and however great its departure from true Christianity may be. We are called a Christian Nation by the rest of the world, and we are called a Christian Nation by conservative evangelicals - but the two mean very different things, even if they reinforce one another in our political rhetoric. The former refers to the predominant religion of our citizenry, and the origin of our moral codes (which is now lost, 200 years into the modern devolution of morality). The latter refers to an originary ideal - a forced synthesis of democracy, capitalism and Christianity.

In the American evangelical church, we are constantly reminded to be thankful for the freedom to believe in Christ, then told that freedom comes with a price, and then told that we owe it our lives. By Jesus' reckoning, we are to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's, and my life is God's, no matter what Caesar has provided for me. The notion that the practice of Christianity somehow occurs at the behest of the state is an illusion of modern politics. God freed his people from the Egyptians so that they might worship Him, and He fights on the behalf of his people. Darius allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland, but that did not mean they owed any allegiance to the Persians. Rome took Israel handily with its unparalleled might, and the zealots took to the streets under the leadership of the Macabees, but when Peter cut off the ear of a soldier who sought to arrest his Lord, Jesus rebuked him with by the unending cycle of retributive violence - "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword" - but He did not stop there. He placed the ear back on the soldier's head and healed him.

What can the American church learn from the African church? We can learn that the freedom to serve God always exists as long as there is freedom of the will. We can learn that the ways of Christians are different from the ways of the world. We can learn that to live by faith means something drastically more than to consent to the unproven - it means to live out the contents of our faith in love. I believe that the state carries the sword to enforce justice. I believe that if there is any time or place to end injustice, it is the injustice against the Christian church in Africa at the hands of muslim warlords. I do not know how the Lord would have us live without the sword while using the sword to end injustice, for democracy erases the distinction between authority and subject. For now, the only clear way forward is to rebuild that which was lost and to pray for our enemies - not that they may be destroyed, but that they might see Jesus, and perhaps that we in America might see Him too.