Go Thou and Vote Likewise (part 3)

You can't discharge your Christian responsibilities to the poor by voting. That's as simple as I can state my my second objection to the notion that voting for leftish social policies is the Christian thing to do.

Let's start with the observation that the U.S. tax code is pretty progressive. That doesn't mean it's cool or fashion forward. It means that the higher your income, the greater percentage of it you are to pay in taxes. In 2006, the top 1% of income earners paid 40% of income taxes, the top 5% paid 60%, the top 10% 70% and the top 25% paid 86% of all income taxes. What this means is that if you vote in the expectation that taxes will go up and be used to give to poor people, you are very unlikely to be the one footing the bill. This is why "tax the rich" is such a popular campaign slogan - it's someone else's money.

Put it this way: is it charity to give your assent to taking from Peter to pay Paul? Is that love? Is this what Jesus was calling Christians to? I say no - charity and sacrifice have to be coterminous. That's a fancy way of saying the person loving and the person giving have to be the same person. You can't ask someone else (in this case the anonymous rich taxpayer) to fulfill the command Christ gave you.

From another perspective, raising taxes in order to increase transfer payments does not increase a nation's "net virtue." Here's why: governments can't make people love each other. They can take resources away by force (i.e. tax people), but they can't change anyone's heart. Our acts of charity toward the poor are not only about alleviating suffering - they are also about changing our hearts. Voting to raise someone else's taxes does not change our hearts. In fact, it can lead to a dangerous complacency* (witness Europe's very, very low rate of charitable giving. "I gave at the office...the tax office").

* Or worse. The next step after appealing to Christian virtue to raise taxes is to appeal to greed and envy. "I'll raise that rich guy's taxes and give you the goodies."

Go Thou and Vote Likewise (part 2)

Some Christians want to link Christ's command to help the poor to the left's social welfare ambitions. What is the reasoning here? It's always dangerous to analyze one's opponents' unstated reasoning, but I'll try to be fair*:

If we have an obligation to help the less fortunate, then we should avail ourselves of every opportunity to do so. Private charity is great, but it just doesn't have the reach that our Federal Government does. We could accomplish so much more if the entire nation pitched in and helped.

I believe the nub of this argument is utilitarian in nature. By utilitarian I mean that it compares the outcomes of two approaches and measures the utility (happiness, relief of suffering, however you want to define it) each generates. In this case, harnessing the national government to the task results in more alleviation of poverty than private efforts alone. Therefore, we as Christians had better do all in our power to make it happen. Ergo vote Dem.

The interesting thing about a utilitarian justification is that the favored solution had better deliver the goods. It isn't enough to have good intentions**, the proposal has to work.

So does increased social spending work? Debatable. So debatable, in fact, that many hectares of our arborial friends have been pulped to print the controversy. I say no, for many reasons (moral hazard, generational poverty, harm to marriage, and on and on). But you don't have to believe me - our country recently participated in a gigantic experiement, called Welfare Reform, in which social spending was significantly restricted, with salutary results.

So if it doesn't work, or we can't agree whether it works, why should I, as a Christian, be obligated to support it? It seems the burden of proof should be on those who think this will help, not me.

To sum my first argument: if increased social spending doesn't help the poor, then I don't have to support it. In fact, I might be on the hook as a Christian to oppose it, but that's an argument for another time.

As I stated before, I think my first argument is the weakest of the three, partly because it's hard to get agreement on the efficacy of government social spending, partly because it's not really a Biblical argument. Tomorrow, I will present a much stronger case.

* I'm also going to try to reduce my level of snark in this discussion. This is a serious topic and people on the other side deserve respectful consideration and response.

** Many, especially on the left, would disagree. If the intention is good, the policy result doesn't matter. If that's the case, I'll just gin up some really good intentions as I vote (R).

Go Thou and Vote Likewise (part 1)

During and after the 2004 election, one could detect rumblings of dissatisfaction on the left over the "God gap" between the two parties. This was not only a response to a loss of votes. The self-righteousness that animates much of the left is jealous of any rival claim to virtue.

At first the response was purely negative: religion mixed with politics is bad. And not just a garden variety sort of badness. They meant a constitution-threatening sort of badness*. But this could never be the stopping point. Smart leftists realized how much they could profit from coopting a religious approach to politics. There is tacky marketing side of this ("What Would Jesus Drive", PETA's claim that Christ was a vegetarian, Jesus was a community organizer, etc.). But there is also a more serious and growing effort to insist that Christian teaching is really more consistent with the Democrat's public policy platform. The obvious contradiction between their first reaction and their second has not seemed to trouble anyone on the left, at least that I have been able to find.

The big three policy disputes in which the left thinks it has a spiritual advantage are war, the environment, and poverty. I think their most powerful and compelling argument concerns the last one, poverty and its alleviation. Led by Christians like Jim Wallis, many have pointed to the concern for the poor that is woven through the entire Bible. If Christians think the government should do something about abortion, why should poverty be any different?

It's an excellent question and one I have thought a lot about. I face somewhat of a conflict here for a couple of reasons. First, by temperment and conviction, I am a free-marketeer. I passionately believe that market economies benefit everyone, not just me, or rich people, or owners of capital.** On the other hand, I have submitted my will to Christ's will, so I have to make sure all my thoughts, commitments, and passions are in alignment with his. Second, my attitudes and acts of mercy (few as they are) toward the poor do not measure up to Christ's commands. I have to be careful that my response to the religious left's challenge is not defensive self-justification.

I have distilled my thinking in this area into three ideas. This week, I will be sharing these bullet points, in reverse order of how I estimate their force and importance.

* I meant to link to a bunch of the books I could find written in this vein but when I did a search on Amazon, there were so many I just gave up. Search terms would be "religious right threat."

** When the left charges the right with selfishness, it drives me to distraction, because my opposition to their proposals has nothing to do with my own self-interest.

Rest of series here, here, and here.

Hanna on Huck

Hanna Rosin is an editor at the Atlatntic. She wrote a piece for Slate on the "secret" Huckabee Sermon Tapes. There's not much there except for speculation, but she does manage to get her hands on one sermon (from Ebay). Here she excerpts Huck the pastor:

"How many times do we find ourselves on the surgery table of the Almighty God, who is trying to work His surgery to make us more like Christ, and we say 'God, let me out of here! Lord, don't touch me!' " he thunders towards the end. "It's not that we can't be Christians. The sad fact is most of us don't want to be enough to try our faith to the point of patience and perseverance."

Here is her reaction, which ends her essay:

It's one thing to know a presidential candidate was a pastor; that sounds worthy and leaderlike. But it's quite another to actually hear him work himself up into a lather about committing to Christ and not back it up with a joke.

Which Law for Christians?

Great series of posts at Pulpit Magazine concerning the Christian's relationship to Mosaic law (HT Christian Mind). So far, it's consonant with my relatively recent understanding of this difficult subject.

For me, an interest in the topic started when my mother told me tatooes were verboten because of a passage in Leviticus proscribing them. It piqued my curiosity and I spent a fair bit of time a few years back researching the issue (law - not tatooes).

Being Frank

As I have been immersing myself in the life and work of Francis Schaeffer lately, his son Frank's memoir Crazy for God came to my attention in early November. From my extensive search for book reviews, I understood the book to accomplish two things: A) an unexpurgated revelation of the elder Schaeffer's flaws B) a venting of Frank's spleen toward all things Evangelical. My initial reaction, before I'd read the first page, was revulsion. But a curious thing happened during my trip through the book. The revulsion remained (and was even reinforced), but a certain amount of understanding, agreement, and sympathy arose. In the end I think it a poor book, and needlessly damaging to many, but I can't dismiss it completely.

There were three things in this book that resonated with me. The first was Frank's reaction against the lack of openness about and acknowledgement of human weakness in much of American Christian life. He rejects disgust at phony piety, hidden sins (that are not even that well hidden), and the masks worn to impress and intimidate. I loathe the same things in others, but even more in myself. The second is the way Christian groups use social control to enforce an oppressive conformity to Pharisaical rules made by men. I'm with Frank in resenting those who would bind our conscience on their own authority. The last was the temptation to pride that haunts those who think theology is important. Here is Frank commenting on his parents' involvement in the endless denominational splintering Presbyterians have engaged in over the past century:

A church split builds self-righteousness into the fabric of every new spliter group, whose only reason for existence is that they decide that they are more moral and pure than their brethren. This explains my childhood, and perhaps a lot about America, too.

I believe there is some truth there, but Frank neglects to explain how conflicted his father was over the rancor and ill-will all this splitting caused, and how much it informed his approach to ministry.

On the other hand, his portrait of his parents spares no detail, no matter how degrading to their dignity. He expresses some respect, admiration, and affection for his father, which puts the negative anecdotes in some context. It is his mother Edith, who really suffers at her son's hands. He portrays her as vain, conceited, extremely spiritually prideful, condescending, mildly devious, impressed by wealth and social position (a "respecter of persons" sums it up), and much given to using spiritual language on any and every occasion. In the end she comes across as slightly mad (which I don't think is an exaggeration given he labels her "a nut" more than once, and the book's title). I was forced to credit these extreme assertions by the evidence he presents, including a sample of one of her letters to him.

But assuming the truth of all this, there is something missing here, which brings me to the first criticism. Frank does not tell us what about his parents that brought thousands and thousands of people over forty years to a difficult-to-reach Swiss village to sit and listen to an intellectual defense of Christianity. There is no glimpse into what people really saw in Francis and Edith, their attraction, their magnetism. From my reading and study, I know it wasn't just his Father's brilliance. Edith was popular in her own right, both as an author and as worker at L'Abri. Aside from a throw-away line about his mother working late scrubbling floors, we get no idea of the passion, the empathy, the charisma this woman and her husband must have exuded. From this standpoint, the book is extremely unfair. But setting aside the unfairness, he had no business publishing these details to begin with. I understood Francis was imperfect before I read this book (for instance, his father's temper was no secret and is acknowledged even by his most ardent admirers). Frank justifies it with a lame appeal to artistic truthfulness, which is worth a couple of blog posts in itself. In a way, all these backfired with me and in some ways had the opposite of their intended effect. Francis Schaeffer was a depressive (even suicidal), introverted, bad-tempered man who woke every morning determined to place himself at the service of strangers in an effort to advance the Gospel. And I'm supposed to admire him less?

There is something else entirely missing from this book, and the cover curiously hints at it. It shows a picture of a child on his father's shoulders. But it's not Frank. It's his sister. And I believe this highlights how unaware and unsympathetic Frank is to his parents as parents of a self-admitted jackass. He shows no empathy at all for their position as his parents, the father and mother of a very, very difficult child. He doesn't seem at all curious about his father's state of mind after discovering his son in flagrante with a female L'Abri guest, just relief that he wasn't hassled. Frank self-importantly attributes his father's involvement in right-wing politics to his own persuasion. Can't he see at least the possibility that his father might have been encouraging a wayward son to particpate in something worthwhile? This seems to me, is a blindspot on Frank's part, though he is hard on himself in numerous other respects.

I approached the book with the idea that Frank was trying to get back at his parents for subjecting him to an unconventional and difficult childhood. After getting about half way through it, I realized that all the gossip was included for a different reason. This is a hateful book, and the hate is directed at Evangelical Christians, and tarnishing a couple of Evangelical heroes is just another way Frank can stick it in the eye of right-wing Christian America. There are many, many pages just oozing baleful condescension toward everything about conservative Protestant Christianity in America - the way they look, talk, walk, pray, worship, believe, write, sing, and on and on. The book contains a lot of profanity, but most of it comes at the end, when he's discussing his involvement with the Evangelical political movement in the early '80's. It's as if he can't restrain himself any longer, and his bile boils over. It is also during this second part of the book when the editing process broke down under his tirades:

And I learned that if you talk "too fast," all those huntin', fishin', shootin', lifetime-NRA-member types, the ones that worry about the United Nations, have their eyes too close together, and have wives caked with about forty pounds of makeup per square inch, start to look at you funny.

This really hurt:

I learned that the worst audiences, like talking to a roomful of pickled fish wearing down parkas, were in Minnesota.

His hatred of Evangelicals puts Frank in a bit of a bind, but it's hard for him to reconcile his respect for his father with his father's theological commitments. Frank's solution is to claim his father was not as committed as he seemed, and that he was sort of tragic figure - trapped by his own success in a cul-de-sac of fundamentalist dogma. Frank claims over and over that his father was not really happy in the role he found himself in and would have been better off as an art historian or philosopher. I find this the least persuasive part of the book and attribute it to wishful thinking on the son's part.

The saddest and most unintentially poignant part of the book comes at the end, when it becomes evident that Frank has learned nothing important from his father. Here he is at a museum, and he remarks about the exhibits:

and many of those artifacts - from Syrian gods to Italian Virgin-and-Childs - reflect the fact that we humans take hope in the irrational.

It's hard to think of a statement more at odds with Francis Schaeffer's legacy.