Graveyard walk and Christian witness

The other day I took a walk through the graveyard. I have often done this at times in my life. It sobers one up; it tends to cause one to think about what matters. I have taken but few such since becoming an anarchist a few years ago.

what I noticed this time was the number of military graves. With crosses. An extraordinary proportion of the graves on the rows I walked were military ones with crosses or other religious indicators.

Now, one cannot tell whether whether one was an actual Christian on the basis of symbols or comments appearing on their grave. Loved ones, who commission headstones tend to want to remember the deceased in the most positive light. There is an instant quasi-“beautification” that happens, a free passing-out of halos. And so, of course G. I. Joe went to heaven when he died.

Measured against John the Baptist’s admonition to soldiers to “do violence to no man” and the Ten Commandments command that “Thou shalt not kill,” there is a certain hollowness to these claims to Christianity. Of course, options in years past were fewer. And the state was not nearly so unmasked as learing murderer as it now is. So yes, it was a different age in which these men lived and fought and “served” and sometimes killed. But I do find myself preferring that the non-violent witness of Christ had been better represented.

Now, with the rapid approach of the dissolution of the empire, one can anticipate a last spasm of more military adventuring, more graves, and claims that the one who died while killing others was a copying the life of Jesus. Unfortunately, this is a misrepresentation of Christ. Christianity is not so malleable that God’s law can be pretzelled into its opposite (not killing to killing).

May God have mercy on the damage to Christian witness that is the result of murdering for the state.

Leapfrog the West

by Michael S. Rozeff

Tunisians, Egyptians, Bahrainians, Omanians, Libyans, Saudi Arabians, Yemenis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and all the other many peoples of the world who are striving for better forms of government that will lead to real improvements in your lives, I wish you well. You are engaged in a difficult enterprise. Many of you are risking much to achieve it. May God be with you.

If I were to sit down with one of you in your country as your guest, after the exchanges and pleasantries of friendship, the conversation might turn to the ways of life that you wish to bring into being. That is my subject.

Your desire to imagine and create new ways of life, to cause to be where nothing was before, is the central human capacity, one that is given by God and one that is shared by all human beings. This creative power is freedom.

To love God I take to be man’s mission and God’s desire. We are in this together. To love God is to love his creation, which includes other people. To love one’s neighbor implies, at a minimum, tolerance of his freedom and the ways of life that he creates. Be slow in judging him. Be slower still in using force to hinder and dominate him. If, in your eyes, his ways are strange or evil, tolerate them. I am not speaking of the crimes such as murder, theft, arson, and rape of which we all know, but of the myriad of other behaviors on which human beings are prone to disagree.

If you desire a good society, you should not pursue it as an abstract goal, nor should you pursue it as a general goal obtained by the State’s uniform laws or by customs dictated to all or enforced on all by social means as supposed ways to make people good. Focus instead on the person, on each and every person. Each person has the highest value, over society and over state. These are not persons. They are merely organizations and tools to achieve other purposes and they are always seriously flawed. The good society is good when its people are able to be persons, which means they are in possession of the unhampered freedom to create.

My advice to you who are now involved in various revolutions and protests is something like the following, in very brief outline.

Leapfrog the West. Learn from the mistakes of the West. Don’t imitate the West blindly in the heat of the moment of attaining new governments. Opportunities like this do not arise often. Make the most of them.

Do not immediately or quickly fasten upon some more or less standard political agenda. They are all deeply flawed. They reflect the sins and mistakes of the West, which the West has not overcome. Seek instead to understand the fundamentals of human life and the human being as a basic guide to social, ethical, and political life.

If your educated class is promoting grandiose social schemes and promising grand results, don’t believe them and don’t approve their agenda. Such promises have been made in the West for several generations. These social engineering and wealth redistribution schemes all are coming to a bad end here. Don’t be enticed into repeating the Western follies.

My view is that the essence of the human being while on this earth is the free human personality. Our being is tied up with freedom at its very root. Every sacrifice of freedom that arises from the pressures, domination, and coercions of family, friends, business, church, society, and state, or from our own personal sacrifice and enslavement by ourselves, destroys a portion of that being or suppresses it, thereby causing a degree of non-being. As I understand the human condition, God created us as free persons. We are free to choose good or evil. Non-being is evil. Being, which presumes freedom and actualizes freedom, is good. The free human personality, as God’s creation, is good. It is a value that is above family, friends, society, organizations, and states. Its worth is above any of these.

Therefore, nurture freedom of the person. Nurture freedom of conscience. Nurture freedom of creativity. Nurture freedom of thought, expression, speech, and action. Nurture all of these at the level of each single person. Do not nurture domination by society, religion, state, family, business, or any other institutions. That which is good is the free spirit in each person.

Make no attempt whatsoever to create the “good life” or happiness or welfare of citizens (or subjects or individuals or voters) by means of the state or any institution or association that dominates and suppresses the person. That approach is godless and wrong. It invariably leads to a confusion of means and ends. The state uses violence as a means. If you allow the state to use violent means in the hope of achieving the ends of happiness or general welfare, you will destroy the freedom of the person. But freedom of the person is the good. It is what God brought into being.

Do away with notions of sovereignty by any person or group or institution. The U.S. Constitution is deeply flawed from the outset in its assumption that We the People are sovereign. Sovereignty is a godless concept. It is entirely at odds with the idea of a free person. God is not sovereign over human beings either. He does not determine what we do with our freedom. Even being sovereign over oneself distorts the idea of a free and creative spirit. In the same vein, the libertarian notion of “owning oneself,” although consistent with and correctly emphasizing the idea of freedom, is essentially a cold and bloodless view of a human being. The human being has a more fiery, passionate, hotter, and loving core in its free and creative spirit. The attempt to justify freedom by beginning with a natural right or self-ownership derives from an agnostic or atheistic view of human life. It doesn’t ground freedom in God and his creation. It treats the human being as matter or as a socially-derived institution of property. It doesn’t make us all brothers and children of God. It isolates the personality and thrusts the human being toward egoistic individualism. This is not an entirely false depiction of fallen human nature, of course. And yet the human spirit naturally reaches out to other similar spirits and to God. It reaches backward to creation and forward to the last days and the Kingdom of God. Purely rationalistic concepts of the human being that were born in the Enlightenment and have carried through in different forms to modern day democratic, social-democratic, socialist, and communist governments are insufficient to understand human nature and insufficient to move firmly away from the many varieties of slavery, overt and covert, and toward freedom. These old Western ideas have resulted in Western governments that suffocate and suppress persons. They culminate in efforts to spread the same kind of governments worldwide and to have one worldwide government.

The U.S. Constitution gets off on the wrong foot by making the general welfare an end. This leads only to the sacrifice of the person. Utilitarianism, which is the philosophy that sets happiness as the ultimate human value, is deeply flawed. It is basically another godless concept and one that leads to the adoption of violent means to create the end of happiness, thereby sacrificing the free person, which is the actual value.

Do not attempt to eliminate the everyday human failings and limitations by using force or the powers of society and state. Human beings must be free to choose between good and evil things. They must be free to make mistakes. Human beings cannot be moral beings without making choices for and by themselves. They cannot share in God’s grace without such freedom. Do not be legislating personal morals. Do not be imposing societal sanctions on beliefs, speech, clothing, art, sexual behavior, and discovery. Do not be attempting with such broad powers to create earthly utopias. This is not only impossible, but attempts to accomplish this go directly against the free and creative human personality, which is God’s creation.

Don’t bother catching up to the flawed Western ideas of politics. Surpass these ideas. They are not rooted in God, despite the rhetoric to that effect that attempts to fuse God, country, nation, and State. As such, the Western ideas lead to godless behavior. This was evident early on in America and is becoming increasingly marked over time.

Do not create theocratic states, however. They too are inimical to human freedom of thought, conscience and action. Power over the human person cannot be turned over to priests, clerics, and ayatollahs any more than to secular politicians. The combination of a powerful church and a powerful state is a recipe for suppression of the person.

Separation of church and state is a good idea. In practice, however, the State makes itself the new God. It tries to surround its immoral activities with an aura of high morality. In the U.S., there are many religious denominations. Somehow, though, the churches either make very little noise about the welfare-warfare State or else support it outright. The State has managed to get organized religion on its side, by and large.

Revolutions usually go about constructing a new State that is in no essential way much different from the old one. Avoid this at all costs. Otherwise, the people are doomed to another 50 or 60 years until the next revolution breaks out.

You simply must understand the nature of the State if you are to leapfrog the Western political structures. If you understand it thoroughly, then you will wish to minimize the State.

The State is the sword, that is, power. Its essence is power: holding power, increasing power, and administering power. This has been evident for several thousand years if one examines the rise and fall of empires throughout the entire world as well as their conquests, wars, and legalities. The state has no central interest in justice, righteousness, rights, or the freedom of people, its own or others. It would just as soon enslave everyone if people did not resist. It would make war continually against others or against its own citizens if it could. It makes war to prevent peaceful secessions. It claims territory through war and dictate, through ruse and stratagem, through conquest, blood and violence. It claims all within its boundaries.

The totalitarian states of the twentieth century provide clear examples of the demonic nature of the State. The worst of them under Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot butchered untold millions of persons. They sought meticulous control over economy, press, thought, money, and travel. The Western social democracies are not far behind in these respects, and they are already past masters at making war. Reject them as a model of government. Jesus rejected “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.” Follow his example.

If it were not for man’s craving for a universal kingdom, his craving for power, his fears and desire for security, and his susceptibility to the hypnotic temptations that the State generates, this evil institution would not exist. It exists now only to be overcome and bypassed by humanity. Do your part in this endeavor.

The State promises order. Its order is a superficial pastiche of arbitrary laws and measures that typically discriminate unjustly while also imposing uniformity on those affected. The State promises to remedy chaos, but it creates chaos and non-being by suppressing the creative spirit of persons.

The idea of the State as a thing to win is an incentive to warfare and chaos. When a state loses control over the people, warfare often erupts among groups that cannot tolerate one another as all strive to gain control over a new state and impose their agenda on everyone.

One of the worst features of the State is that whatever is immoral for a person is made out to be moral for the State. The State uses its people to kill and maim, to torture and spy, to inform and rat on others, and to assault and destroy, and all of this is approved of and applauded as if nothing were wrong. Brutality becomes something that wins medals and is glorified in motion pictures. The most corrupt and lying politicians gain the most respect.

Putting in place a Western-style democracy is not going to create prosperity. It only introduces a source of friction at the heart of a society. It will be an institution that endangers property rights, seeks greater power, won’t allow secession, won’t tolerate any serious challenge, manipulates the public, caters to special interests, wastes resources, taxes onerously, corrupts the money, and takes every opportunity to control the people.

Taking foreign aid from the West is one of the worst things you can possibly do. You will simply doom yourself to being a satellite of the West and part of its machinations. You may well end up at the mercy of its bankers.

Rather than thinking about a new government, think instead about how to build a vibrant society in which persons can exercise their creative spirits freely, for that is the basis of a good society. Think about generating tolerance. Think about generating trust. Think about well-defined property rights. Think about free markets. Think about incorruptible money. Think about a variety of institutions of justice and defense. Think about justice itself.

The West is strangling in its own debt, its own corruption, its web of lies and deceits, its fearful peoples, and its overly large governments. Why look to the West? Why go backwards when you have a chance to go forwards? In short, leapfrog the West.

March 11, 2011

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Regarding ‘Step Up for Your Country’–Letter from father to son

Dear son,
I read the article that you forwarded to me, “Step Up For Your country,” by General McChrystal. I am pleased that you are experiencing a desire to serve. I want to offer you a different perspective. As a Christian person, how do you pursue this desire to serve? Please listen. See what you think.

I noticed that McChrystal’s article is littered with numerous keywords (“service,” 30 times, “responsibility” 13, “obligation,” 4, relentless “we,” language–more than 30 times throughout). Sacrifice appears repeatedly, too. It sounds noble!

But why serve the nation-state? Do you really have responsibility and obligation to serve it? Is the nation-state you and your neighbors, friends, and relatives? And, from a Christian standpoint, is this biblical?

Let’s start by getting one thing clear: you are to serve God. He is your King. You have chosen fealty to Him. Your choice was voluntary. The second thing, is that you cannot serve two masters without corrupting your character. It just does not work. You may be able to serve one master with undivided loyalty and then interact thoughtfully with other agents, but you cannot successfully serve two masters.

Thirdly, it needs to be remembered that the nation-state is not God’s agent. It is not neutral toward God. It stands in direct opposition to Him.

When, in the time of Jesus and the apostles they were persecuted by the nation-state and then released, the prayer went up after:

“Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, ‘Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Anointed’ for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” (Acts 4:24-27).

This arrangement of “church and state” was foretold in Psalm two. Human rulers set themselves up as kings and oppose their Maker. God says He will destroy them and their kingdoms–completely.

”As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. . . And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold” (Daniel 2:34, 35, 44, 45a).

If These kings/kingdoms/nation-states are actually in rebellion against God, and willfully resist Him, and if He foretells His destruction of them so that no trace of them will remain, and so that the place they occupied is filled with a kingdom encompassing the whole earth–then it is clear that these kingdoms do not represent God. They actually represent rebellion against Him.

But Jesus said to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. It sounds like there is a space there for Caesar, that something dos, in fact, belong to Caesar. And yet, biblically, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He made them and all that is in them (Exodus 20:11). He is the rightful owner of all creation (Psalm 50:11). We can give to Him only that which is already His own, which He has permitted us to borrow (“for all things come from you, and of your own have we given you,” 1 Chronicles 29:14).

Caesar’s kingdom is temporary, and God has scheduled it for destruction. In the time of Ceasar, coins bore the image of the emperor’s likeness; the money was truly considered to be his money. Jesus is only saying, “Go ahead; give him back what is his.”

But, back to the question about the nations: they stand in opposition to God. This is true all the way back. In 1 Samuel 8-12, God warns the Hebrews pointedly how choosing a human king comes with all manor of negatives. He even declares that in doing so, they have rejected Him (God) from being king over them. Very strong stuff, eh? And the testimony of Scripture stays on the same line all the way through the Bible. Looking through God’s Word, passage by passage, text by text, the story is clear: God has nothing good to say about human government. The Bible as a whole is decidedly anti-state.

That said, there is one passage consistently quoted by those who make the Bible justify the nation-state: Romans 13:1-7. Much is claimed for this passage, and doubtless, those who advocate “national service,” if they are Christians, would point to this text for justification of their program. What can we say about it?

First, we look at the whole testimony of Scripture, and as already pointed out, it is recognizably anti-state. Thus, one or two verses that don’t seem to fit, we should anticipate, read with care and researched with caution, should find a harmony with everything else in the Bible.

Second, these seven verses do not stand alone; they are part of a longer section, stretching from 12:1 to 13:14. The thrust of the larger message of these two chapters is, do not be conformed to the world, but be changed and exhibit Christian behavior. The believer is to serve God (Romans 12:11). He is to abhor that which is evil wherever it is found, and endorse the good wherever it is found. More than endorsing good, he is to overcome evil.

The message of 13:1-7 is far from an endorsement of all that a nation-state does, or call to serve it, or to make oneself its agent. We are to serve God first. As far as the nation-state goes, we are to be in subjection to it as far as we can do so ethically. This does not mean unqualified cooperation.

Paul argues that God has ordered the world this way. He has permitted these entities to exist, just as He permits thieves, sexual immorality, and drug lords to exist. But what is permitted is not endorsed, for He has made clear His law: no killing, no stealing, no adultery are permissable. But the nation-state in our day endorses all of these, encouraging poor health practices, licensing sexual immorality (endorsing immoral “marriages” of those who “divorce” their spouse without biblical grounds and who “remarry” (commiting adultery, violating the covenant with the original wife), and taking means and imposing fees by force.

The believer is not called to resist the order that God has permitted, nor is he instructed to cooperate with it. He is to be subject to it. This falls far short of unequivicol endorsement. The rulers are appointed by God to do His will, through them he sometimes takes down or raises up other nation-states. Particularly, they serve as instruments of wrath against those whom God chooses to judge.

But, very often, their behavior goes too far. Was it really God’s will for the nation of Israel to kill Isaiah the prophet? And for Rome to kill Jesus and Paul also–all of whom functioned in direct service to God? The leaders of a nation often bring collateral benefit to the believer, even if it is mostly incidental and unintended on their part.

We are subject to them because it is not God’s purpose for us that we invest our energies in attacking them. He sets up and removes kings, and vengeance is His, not ours. He will deal with them in His time and His way. Our part is to pray for divine intervention so that we may live quiet and peaceful, non-violent lives with as little interaction with the national machinery as possible. Our part is to do good quietly and stay out of their way. We should give Caesar the respect that he requires, but not to the point of crossing over into serving him. We have exacly one Master, God. The human nation is godless and temporary.

Love does no wrong to others. It serves neither self, nor Caesar. We are called to cast off the works of darkness and to live upright lives, and to seek out no excuses for satisfying our baser inclinations.

How odd it would be for Paul to begin his argument by asking us not to conform to the world (and by extension, the nations of the present order), and yet, to turn around and suddenly call us to conform to them! On the contrary, John the Baptist told soldiers to refuse to commit acts of violence, and God time and again breaks His followers out of prisons and intended executions–against the express wishes of the authorities, religious and national.

But what about these assertions that we have responsibilities, obligations, owe service and even sacrifice to the nation? It is always interesting to go back, and look again at the Ten Commandments and see which things God says actually are transcendant. What do we find there?

As far as obligation and responsibility goes, the story looks like this.

First Commandment: Our primary obligation is to God; all other obligations are secondary.
Second Commandment: We must worship God and avoid the worship of all idols and secondary commitments.
Third Commandment: God says that we may not empty the worship of God of meaning.
Fourth Commandment: God has made a day of worship for us to spend with Him; we must keep it. We must not cause others to work on this day.
Fifth commandment: God says that we have an obligation to our immediate family.
Sixth Commandment: God says that we have a commitment to our fellow men not to kill them.
Seventh Commandment: God says that we have a definite commitment to our spouse and to other married couples.
Eighth Commandment: God says that we have an obligation to respect the property rights of others.
Ninth Commandment: God says that we have an obligation to deal with other people truthfully and to guard their reputations.
Tenth Commandment: God says that we are not to desire the spouses or possessions of others.

And so, a look at the Ten Commandments reveals three circles of commitments:
(1) To God first.
(2) To our spouse and other couples, and to our immediate familiy.
(3) To our fellow man, in not killing him, telling untruths about him, stealing from him, or causing him to work on Sabbath.

Commitment to national units is nowhere to be found: not in the Ten Commandments; not in the teachings of Jesus; not in the teachings of Paul, or anywhere else in the New Testament.

Very simply, these are good values (responsibility, fulfilling true obligations, service). But anyone asking that you engage in them on behalf of their favorite nation-state, or any nation-state, is pressing upon you obligations not found in the Word of God.

Consider my words, my son, and avoid lying Generals.
Your Father.

A Case for Christian Anarchy, pt. 7

Davies argues that Christians actively support the institution of government and therefore Christian anarchism is not really fairly described as anarchist. It must be admitted that many Christians do support the state, and that, often somewhat blindly. But is this really a surprise? The vast majority of non-Christians also support the state. The Christian, at least, has a basis for opposing the state from the context of his belief system.

The Christian understands that men have a distorted, dangerous nature because of the Fall of the race in the garden of Eden. Just as this nature makes it impossible to rule men, so it also makes it impossible for him safely to rule. Secular views have no comparable problem native to the race.

What’s more, Christianity is a canon-based religion, with a set of holy writings. These writings overwhelmingly present what is in essence the endorsement of an anarchic pattern, from beginning to end. The few texts which historically have been presented as teaching the support of the state have to be interpreted in a manner that throws them sharply out of harmony with the broader testimony of the Bible in order to make such a case. The larger thrust of scripture is decidedly weighted in the support of the anarchic approach.

What’s more, this same book prophesies and condemns an illicit union of church and state (Revelation chs. 13, 17, 18 cf. Daniel chs. 1-6).

(For a review of the question concerning Romans chs. 12 and 13, see our part 3 of this series.)

But we ought to remember also that historically, there have been many examples from within Christianity of those who resisted the state. Anabaptists, Mennonites, and others have long been in direct opposition to the state. Many of these who were killed for their faith, historically, were killed, not by religious authorities, but by state authorities because they refused to take up the sword to fight for the state. Just about any 16 pages from the book Martyr’s Mirror will make this clear. These Christians, and many other groups, see the blending of Christianity with Constantine in the forth century in the most negative light.

When it comes to individual Christians, there are the unambiguously anarchist theologians like Jacques Ellul and Vernard Eller, and in recent time, Greg Boyd.

Leading anarchist theorists coming from the economic angle of anarcho-capitalism, including Lew Rockwell Thomas Woods, and others, are Christian. Other less well known names are found too. In even more recent time, there is a steadily growing contemporary interest in Christian anarchism.

It is simply wrong to see Christianity as a united force massed on the side of the state. It is embarrassing how many have supported the state, but it is heartening that many do not.

Next: part 8: Our concluding summary of our response to Jim Davies, Christianity and Anarchism: Oxymoron? and a look to the future.