Zeal For Truth

This gem of an article definitely sounded familiar to me. The author goes through how the concept of anarchism seemed utterly foreign, radical even “evil.” But as he gradually wrestled with the ideals and principles, he came to some realisations that radically changed his worldview:

As a child I acquired a deep respect for authority and a horror of chaos. In my case the two things were blended by the uncertainty of my existence after my parents divorced and I bounced from one home to another for several years, often living with strangers. A stable authority was something I yearned for.  Meanwhile, my public-school education imbued me with the sort of patriotism encouraged in all children in those days. I grew up feeling that if there was one thing I could trust and rely on, it was my government… You love your country as you love your mother – simply because it is yours, not because of its superiority to others, particularly superiority of power.

Growing up, I was also that kid. I was the one who supported authority and order. I remember being in an eighth-grade “graduation” ceremony, and someone blew up a condom and the kids began to bat it around the gymnasium while the principle was talking about us. I was so upset by the disorder of it all, that when it came near me, I grabbed it and gave it to one fo the adults who was desperately trying to get it from the kids. I didn’t do it for their approval or to kiss-up - but it bothered me, deep in my soul, that people weren’t respecting authority and being unified around this ceremony.

I became a philosophical conservative, with a strong libertarian streak. I believed in government, but it had to be “limited” government – confined to a few legitimate purposes, such as defense abroad and policing at home.

Again, I also grabbed Rand and other conservative authors and began to connect the philosophical dots. But even whilst being a “libertarian”  - I supported the police, the military, cultural unity and a religious state and a strong “daddy state” which could preserve and protect those values.

Somewhere, at the rainbow’s end, America would return to her founding principles. The Federal Government would be shrunk, laws would be few, taxes minimal. That was what I thought. Hoped, anyway… In a way I had transferred my patriotism from America as it then was to America as it had been when it still honored the Constitution. And when had it crossed the line? At first I thought the great corruption had occurred when Franklin Roosevelt subverted the Federal judiciary; later I came to see that the decisive event had been the Civil War, which had effectively destroyed the right of the states to secede from the Union.

Yes, even while beginning to deplore state abuses of power, I refused to question the structure of power. The ideology of America had become perverted but there was some nugget of truth, of goodness. Like the author, my search for this “goodness” kept going back. First to World War II and the greatest generation, then to the Industrial Revolution, then the Civil War. But each time, it became clear that the accounts I had been told of these events were heavily saturated with he morality of authority and power - and even here, were great abuses of hard ethical and moral principles.

But again, the constitution, that “greatest of documents” surely was the pure point where values, government and order could congeal to form that ideal “limited government” of ideological conservatism and minarchism?

Hans [Hoppe] argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution “meant,” steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power. This was true a priori, and American history bore it out.

Again, like the author, it was Hans Hoppe who finally convinced me that even a government severely limited by a constitution or a contract was still prone to abuses and a gradual erosion of those limits. And this wasn’t just because of the people in charge, but the system itself was flawed. After all, an entity which claims to protect private property by violating property rights (through force) is a contradiction.

But even still - how can anarchism be consistent with Christianity? I had never heard of Christian Anarchists - except ultra-left wing “social justice” types who held a theological view of God and his kingdom which I see as too secular. The author dealt with this as well:

My fellow Christians have argued that the state’s authority is divinely given. They cite Christ’s injunction “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and St. Paul’s words “The powers that be are ordained of God.” But Christ didn’t say which things – if any – belong to Caesar; his ambiguous words are far from a command to give Caesar whatever he claims. And it’s notable that Christ never told his disciples either to establish a state or to engage in politics. They were to preach the Gospel and, if rejected, to move on. He seems never to have imagined the state as something they could or should enlist on their side.

At first sight, St. Paul seems to be more positive in affirming the authority of the state. But he himself, like the other martyrs, died for defying the state, and we honor him for it; to which we may add that he was on one occasion a jailbreaker as well. Evidently the passage in Romans has been misread. It was probably written during the reign of Nero, not the most edifying of rulers; but then Paul also counseled slaves to obey their masters, and nobody construes this as an endorsement of slavery. He may have meant that the state and slavery were here for the foreseeable future, and that Christians must abide them for the sake of peace. Never does he say that either is here forever.

The state is something that exists, and we suffer under it. As Christians, it is not our job to be revolutionary anarchists. But as long as the state exists, then we are to endure it unless God, in his grace, removes it from us.