Taking
Stock:
Christianity and the State
by
Ryan McMaken
The
great libertarian activist and writer Frank Chodorov once wrote
that while he could see how a libertarian might not be a Christian,
he did not see how a Christian could not be a libertarian. Chodorov,
the son of a Jewish immigrant, saw in Christianity the greatest
and most lasting opponent to the power of the state. Lord Acton
had said as much a century earlier when he noted that "liberty
has not subsisted outside of Christianity." Chodorov and Acton
were not alone, of course. For centuries, scholars have noted the
close relationship between Christianity and liberty. But why should
this relationship exist? Murray Rothbard saw great value in the
work of the scholastics and other scholars of Thomist thought who
forwarded the idea that there is a natural law and order that we
can know through reason, and which transcends man, society, and
government, and is answerable only to God.
It
is easy to see why those who worship the state would be so opposed
to faith in such religious propositions. Marx declared religion
to be the opiate of the masses because he saw religion, and specifically
Christianity as an obstacle to his own messianic dreams of the proletarian
revolution. In spite of the failure of Marxism in all its variations,
governments everywhere in the modern world continue to condemn Christianity
for its insistence that God is above government, and worse yet,
that God’s law remains eternal no matter what governments may want
to say about it. For in the Christian (and especially Catholic)
tradition, no government can compel man to act against the laws
of God and still remain a legitimate government.
Such
a proposition becomes very inconvenient to states when engaging
in their greatest tool of expansion and despotism: war. It was the
Christians who invented just war theory, and it is that yoke from
under which states are still trying to wriggle while they provide
tortured explanations of why their latest and greatest war is in
compliance with the basic rules of morality that Christianity has
given us. Even in this mostly post-Christian age, the residue of
Christian morality, and its independence from the state, remains
a threat to modern governments everywhere. We see it under attack
in every corner of the globe. We see it being explicitly condemned
in places like China where men and women are put on trial for importing
bibles into the country, but we also see it here in America where
the judicial system does everything in its power to stamp out the
free exercise of religion while Congress and the President do nothing.
For everywhere that Christianity is stamped out, the cult of the
state grows in its stead, unbound by adherence to natural law.
Such
things are not lost on those who defend liberty, reason, and human
dignity. Increasingly, we see scholarship pouring forth from libertarian
publications illustrating the presence of Christian philosophy in
virtually all opposition to the state. Such writings have warranted
their own archive
here at LewRockwell.com, while the recent Austrian Scholars Conference
at the Mises Institute produced much
original scholarship on the matter as well. These are not signs
of a passing fad in the scholarship of liberty. The connection between
liberty and Christianity has long been recognized, and thus, the
state despises true Christianity everywhere.
In
the first century, Jesus of Nazareth said an astonishing thing.
While he did not prohibit Christians from giving to Caesar what
is Caesar’s, he did make one thing abundantly clear: God and Caesar
are two very different things. God, who created the heavens and
the earth, is the eternal ruler of an ordered and knowable universe.
Caesar, on the other hand, is a temporary and arbitrary ruler, properly
bound not by his own law, but by the immutable laws of nature as
established by God. We may take such notions for granted now, but
they are solely a product of Christian civilization, and without
them, the state cannot be challenged, and then, liberty will surely
die.
April
1, 2002
Ryan
McMaken [send him mail]
is editor of the Western
Mercury.
Copyright
2002 LewRockwell.com
Ryan
McMaken Archives
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