My friend and Hog’s Head colleague Dave Jones is blogging away at Nowhere on the Ohio River (which now has a place on the blogroll, by the way), and he’s ventured into the realm of politics. He writes:
Both “Republican” and “Democrat” have come to be just pejorative words to me. “Liberal” and “Conservative” are even worse — they have become smears that label an opponent as an evil “other.” “Libertarian” has become an amorphous term that seems to designate everyone from Ron Paul to Alex Jones. One is a serious politician that many of my acquaintances found at least interesting last year. The other is a nutjob who thinks the world is run by an unseen “elite” cabal Illuminati.
On the whole, I’m very much in agreement with Dave’s sentiment – though I’m quite skeptical that any term or label can maintain any significant meaning for a long period of time these days. I tend to be more of a term-rescuer than a term-abandoner. So I’ll call myself a “conservative” or a “feminist,” watch as people recoil, and then try to explain what I really mean by the term. (Yes, I get a special pleasure out of telling my conservative Christian friends that I’m a “feminist.”) I use worn-out terms for the shock value, in order to open up a conversation; I don’t use them as badges of honor and pride.
“Libertarian” really is one of the best of the terms I’m using right now, because there are so many nutters out there. “Libertarian” conjures up images of pot-smokers and 9/11-Truth-ers that most people aren’t comfortable with. Well, maybe the pot-smoking.
But I can sympathize with Dave’s term-frustration. As I’ve chosen libertarian, he’s chosen “Independent,” which led me down an interesting and contradictory train of thought. I’ve always balked at “independent,” primarily because my political idea is a paradox which would, voluntarily, not let me be all that independent.
Libertarianism, aside from anarchy, is the political ideology that most champions individualism and personal freedoms. I’m a libertarian for that reason, but it’s only one reason among many, and it’s not the primary one. The primary reason I’m a libertarian is that it’s the only political system that will leave the Shire alone and let it just be the Shire.
The paradox is here: I think rampant individualism is bad news. I don’t, as a Christian, think libertarianism is God’s ideal government – that the renewed earth will be governed by a hands-off approach on the part of its Maker. As a Christian with a strong belief in the institution of the church (I actually belong to a group on Facebook called “The Most Important Thing is to Have an Institutional Relationship with God”), I think interdependence is fundamental to the Christian experience – and to the human one. So I want the church to have all the freedom it needs not to be libertarian in its government of its people.
That’s important, because there’s precisely the error that conservative, God-and-country Christians make: they equate the Bill of Rights with God’s ideal government. A thoroughly libertarian government still needs to be met with a counter-cultural stance on the part of the Church.
I simply don’t trust fallen people to create genuine community from the State level – even Christian ones. It’s an ugly history of church and state marriage. So libertarianism is the ideal set-up not only for the ardent, bootstrap-pulling individualist, but for the communitarian who thinks the picture of the early church selling all its possessions and voluntarily giving to the poor is a beautiful thing, because it gets the intrusive government out of the way and lets each local community take care of itself. It also makes room for moral choice; there’s no expectation that the government will fix it. It’s up to us. It’s up to the Church, and it’s a matter of grace and mercy, not compulsion and obligation.
Mordor has no business messing with the Shire. But neither does Gondor. Much of what drives my urban ministry hopes has nothing to do with getting the government to get involved in the Beechwood area (even the local government), but to get the church so involved that Beechwood doesn’t need the government. One of the innumerable problems with the government providing all the help with entitlement programs is that the church absorbs the culture of dependency and gives up its responsibility. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the church in America has plenty of freaking money. There’s a lot we could do.
But we’re not counter-cultural, we’ve swallowed the American Dream whole, married it to Jesus, and we think we’ve got God’s pleasure when we’re “safe and white” in the suburbs. That, of course, is the pitfall to the traditional, libertarian-type individualist thinking.
But that potential pitfall is the lesser of two evils, in my view. I’d rather the church wake up from its slumber and find that it has the freedom it needs to transform a hurting community than have it wake up from its slumber and have to file 314 pages of paperwork to make sure that what it’s doing to help the poor is legal.
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My favorite thing in this post? I’m your friend. There. That’s as bromantic as I can get. Thanks, brother.
This also echoes some of my concerns, rendered out of a reading of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword some years ago. His narrative is engaging and, at times, heartbreaking. His take on his visit to Auschwitz, and that of Abelard, literally brought me to tears. It’s a tome that traces his take, as a former Paulist priest, on the relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews. His essential thesis is that, at key moments, the Church made decisions it didn’t have to make regarding the Judaism, and it often made them for political reasons rather than ecumenical ones. The results speak for themselves.
Large chunks of that book also cover the rather tumultuous relationship between government and religion. He argues that such a relationship tends to bastardize both. They distort each other to serve purposes worthy of neither.