Anathema of Conservative Christianity

I am writing this on the assumption that, if I asked the archetypal conservative Christian which he was more primarily, conservative or Christian, he would without hesitation answer that is he primarily a Christian. That means he’s informed by his Bible (and, if he’s a Catholic or a rare species of Protestant, his Church) before he’s informed by his party. My anathema is a reduction ad absurdum. With this religious primacy as my premise, I want to show that this is exactly what a conservative Christian is not doing – putting his Bible first – and that, in fact, “conservative” and “Christian” are irreconcilable.

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When faced with a choice between X evil and Y evil and X > Y, a conservative would chose Y. This is the utilitarianism behind the conservative justification of torture, the conservative justification of preemptive strikes such as Iraq, the conservative justification for a Democrat administration’s act of nuking two Japanese cities. When you have the choice between committing a small evil and having a large evil happen to you, you chose the small evil. If you need information to prevent a huge terrorist attack, it’s OK to torture your hostage to get that information out of him.

After all, if you’re Jack Aubrey, captain of the H. M. S. Surprise, and your ship is sinking because a man is about to drown, and you will sink if you don’t cut the man off, but then he’ll die – why, you’ve got to chose the lesser of two evils. Cut the man off and save the ship. The greater happiness for the greater number.

In manlier ages, Christians saw through situational ethics.

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In manlier ages, Christians believed in the sovereignty of God. “If there is calamity in a city, has not the LORD done it?” God’s law is perfectly clear. Thou shalt not kill. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is glass with Windex on it. There’s the verse. What’s your problem?

It is the act of a coward to choose the lesser of the two evils. If God wants to stop the terrorist attack, He can. But torturing the terrorist, if it’s against God’s law, is not an option. In ages when we put the primacy on the word Christian rather than the word conservative, we would have believed God was testing our nation. Calamity may befall your nation, or God will prevent it, but going against His law is still not an option.

Jack Aubrey had no tertium quid. You’d expect intelligent, classically-educated homeschooling Christian conservatives to see the false analogy. Jack Aubrey couldn’t have not acted. In not acting, he was choosing the greater evil. But it is the moral duty of a statesman, when faced with X evil and Y evil, and Z, which is inactivity, to choose Z. Here’s a nice example of how you can do the courageous thing and simultaneously not do anything. X and Y are not your affair. They are God’s affair. If you really believe in His sovereignty.

But even that is just a proof that conservative Christians don’t take their Bibles seriously. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. We still don’t believe it. We still think carnal warfare is more effective than worshiping God. No matter how many times we say it, until we change our politics, we don’t really believe that singing Psalms actually makes the same difference – or a bigger difference – that torturing a terrorist would.

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Christians used to believe in just war. Now we believe it’s justified to nuke two civilian cities to stop a war. Even though – and it’s funny how, no matter how many times you bring this up, conservatives still try to justify the most massive murder act the United States has ever committed with utilitarianism – Japan tried twice to negotiate peace with America before the bombs were dropped. (source)

Christians used to believe in just war. Now we believe it’s our moral obligation to attack a country before they attack us. Who’s your god here – Utility or God?

Perhaps we don’t believe in just war anymore. Perhaps we can come up with a better way to reconcile killing people with God’s word. Utilitarianism – the greatest happiness for the greatest number – is not an option.

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In manlier ages, Christians criticized socialism for moral reasons. Now we criticize it because it interferes with “The Free Market”. Who’s your god here – The Market or God? The problem with socialism is that it’s based off theft. Government can steal your money, just as much as Enron or John Doe can. But, Christians don’t argue from morality any more. That’s too relative. Better to argue from efficiency. The Market doesn’t work as well under socialism. We won’t get as much money that way. Better not do it.

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Conservative Christians are oftentimes evangelicals. Oftentimes conservative Catholics. They pride themselves on taking their Bibles seriously, on believing in the inerrancy and infallibility of the Word. They actually believe the Gospel, actually believe the Nicene creed. But they don’t understand the Gospel – that much is obvious. Their liberal, unorthodox friends who believe in Social Gospel, Liberation theology, and a mix of Karl Marx and Karl Barth have things much closer to the mark. At the center of the Gospel is not conservatism. Not the free market. Not national security.

Jesus spends most of his time talking about the poor, the sick, the naked, lauding tax collectors over zealous conserv…er, Pharisees, and helping prostitutes. Just look at the word counts. How does his verbal concern for the poor, sick, naked, and hungry compare with his verbal concern about Roman political corruption? They’re doing a very bad job and using all the wrong methods, but our liberal friends who might not even believe Jesus existed are doing a better job of taking his gospel, his good news, his evangelion, more seriously than us, the Bible-believing conservative Christians. It’s time we decided which god we worship – the GOP or God?

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Post Script. For the record, I am not convinced torture is always against God’s law. My concern here is that its defense on the part of Christians reveals that they’d sooner side with John Stuart Mill than with the Golden Rule.

Post Post Script. I am convinced Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally reprehensible acts, on the same level as the mass murder committed under Stalin, though not as great in magnitude. But I admit to a great ignorance on the subject, and am certainly willing to hear arguments – made only from Christian presuppositions, not from utilitarian presuppositions – that it was somehow justified and was not murder. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t justified and was murder, though.

Posted at 3:55 pm EST on the 16th of August 2009 by John R. Ahern.

Under Essays, Philosophy, Politics, Theology as , , , , , , , , ,

There are 7 replies.
 
  1. P. James McCord says on August 16th, 2009 at 7:14 pm

    Insightful. Most satisfying was your juxtaposition of the dogma of conservatism (lesser of evils), with Christian doctrine of sovereignty.

    To apply it to a modern situation: A (hypothetical) Christian USA, faced with the two evils of 1) suffering repeated terrorist attacks due to military inaction, or 2) taking unjust preemptive military action, would instead opt for 3) inaction. It’s clear, however, that inaction is really just choosing option 1. But even so (according to you), the US perpetrated no positive evil, and therefore option 1 (waiting to be attacked) was the only moral one, and in fact not an evil after all. I guess what I’m saying is that you solve the dichotomy of two evils by denying the evil of one. Similarly, Jack Aubrey should have chosen inaction, and therefore the first evil of letting the ship sink, rather than the second (positive) evil of killing the tangled sailor. The first evil isn’t really evil at all.

    But what if Aubrey’s job description is (as he thought it was) to keep his ship afloat regardless of cost in human life? What if the job description of the US government is to keep its people safe even if other people must die in the process? Can governing and military bodies waive the commandments in war? Your political thrust begs these questions, and though the answers may seem obvious, what about Old Testament biblical precedents of mass slaughter?

    And I’m diggin’ the Truman source. Great read.

  2. E. M. Hansen says on August 16th, 2009 at 8:15 pm

    If conservative Christianity is invalid and liberal Christianity is ‘unorthodox,’ what stance should a Christian take? A golden mean? Or is it impossible for a Christian to have a consistent position on the liberal-conservative spectrum?

  3. L. M. Corinth says on August 17th, 2009 at 1:44 pm

    HEAR HEAR! Very good post, John. You write things that I only hear snatches of, drifting through my mind. I wholeheartedly agree.

  4. Jenny says on August 17th, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    Interesting.

    But God said to care for the poor, the sick, and the naked, and treat them as you would have yourself treated. God did not say, “Force your neighbor to care for the poor.”

    God did not say “Use the government to eliminate poverty and sickness.” He said that we would always have the poor with us.

    God did not say “As Christians, you are obligated to create a Christian nation.” He said, “Give what is Caesar’s to Caesar.”

    There should not be — cannot be — an argument from a Christian perspective that we aren’t responsible for the poor. Neither are we responsible for our neighbor’s conscience. The decision to help the less fortunate, whether through charitable donations, volunteer work, or what have you, is an intensely individual decision and not one we are entitled to make for our countrymen. The conservative argument against the welfare culture has always been that private charities and religious organizations are capable of handling it on their own.

    I think there is a real misunderstanding here of what the Christian response to social ills should be.

  5. John R. Ahern says on August 17th, 2009 at 3:23 pm

    James – well, I’m not in favor of inaction. I’m with George Washington on this one – if we don’t entangle ourselves with other countries, they won’t entangle themselves with us. (I may be wacky, but I actually think the Muslims attacking us have a point. We’ve intervened in their land, their politics, their domestic policy, and their resources for a really long time. Maybe if we stopped, they would stop hating Christians. But that’s a side issue… :P) So, really, not pre-empting could involve some serious foreign policy. (And, even that aside, political inaction amounts to total inaction only in the mind of a secularist.)

    Ella – I was really being naughty in this post…I gave my readers all the problems and didn’t offer any solutions. :-P I don’t think a Golden Mean is appropriate, but rather trying to find Biblical principles and applying them wherever we can. The first is obedience to God’s commandments.

    Lauren – thanks. And hear, I completely agree with you. It’s nice to here you say so. (OK. So maybe that was a little strained. :P)

    Jenny – perhaps I didn’t make this clear. I object to socialism and the Social Gospel movement for the same reasons you do. You can’t coerce people into being charitable. But I don’t think I was implying that government should do any of this. I mean, after all, we both believe in a strong ecclesiology – wouldn’t you agree that simply saying it’s “an intensely individual decision” leaves no room for the One, True Humanitarian Organization, if I may so put it? I made a similar post along similar lines a while back (http://www.pontificationadnauseam.com/?p=595) that might elaborate my position a bit more.

  6. M. Falcatus says on August 18th, 2009 at 9:52 am

    Actually, sir, Jack Aubrey did have an apparent tertium quid—he could have tried to save the drowning man and trusted that God would do what is right for his ship; or, conversely, he could have judged the drowning man to be out of his care, done what could be done to save his ship without actively casting him off, and trusted that God would preserve, or destroy, the drowning man and all his comrades as He willed. Neither of these paths is, as I think you to be arguing, the right one, as they collapse, as it were, into the same disasters that Aubrey wished to avoid—provided, of course, no miraculous Divine intervention. So you are right that, barring some contravention of the ordinary laws of nature, Aubrey had to do act, as a failure to act would have been merely a cowardly acceptance, an abetting even, of a greater evil. You assume, however, that the statesman is not in such a position—that Z, that is, inaction, is not in fact going to lead to evils X or Y, or to yet a worse evil, which we may term ?. And they may, of course, not—if torturing is evil (and it may well be) and a lesser evil than the destruction of countless innocents, that does not therefore mean that torturing terrorists will prevent the attacks that their kind carries out. Let us imagine, however, that we knew a particular terrorist to be possessed of accurate knowledge concerning, say, a well-funded and –equipped plot to detonate a nuclear device in downtown Chicago, and moreover to be the kind of man who would talk under relatively mild torture (such as water-boarding, which I understand not to cause permanent physical harm). Would inaction or action be the right response? How advanced in danger do we have to be, and how great does the harm posed by inaction have to be, before we are obligated to perform the lesser of two evils? Or should we always, no matter how clear, pressing, and present the danger is, no matter how strong the vise that holds us, simply absolve ourselves of responsibility and put all in the hands of God, in whose hands all is and all are anyway?

    The weapons of our warfare, that is, of the warfare of the Church Militant, are not indeed carnal; this does not mean, however, that the weapons of a Christian regent are not in part carnal, insofar as he is indeed a governor and ruler on this Earth—else the Christian ruler could not carry the sword, as St. Paul tells us is the right of the Earthly authorities. Yet the use of what weapons may be justified? If it was wrong to use atomic weapons against two Japanese cities, regardless of whether Japan had tried to surrender or not (it seems that the Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender, rather than offering the more-or-less unconditional capitulation that the Allies understandably required), was it also therefore wrong to firebomb so many of the great cities of Japan and of Germany? Surely. Was it, furthermore, therefore wrong to use merely explosive, rather than incendiary, ordinance against those cities? It must be so. And yet how was one going to stop the war-machine of the Axis without first destroying its ability to supply and maintain itself? You see, I presume the dilemma. The means, maybe, were disproportionate to the ends, and I do not say that the use of bombs, of firebombs moreover, and, in particular, of atomic bombs was justified; I wish, what is more, that none of these things had ever been made. Yet did Germany (and I am a German by blood and citizenship!) and Japan, who had wrought unimaginable evils in their conquests, not, as nations, deserve the punishment that fell upon them? “Punish not children for the sins of their father, nor a father for the sins of his children.” Indeed, yet God also brings wrath upon wicked nations, and that not simply by the fires of heaven that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah, but by means of other nations. This does not, however, justify committing atrocities in the name of punishing atrocities.

    One last point, if you will indulge my ramblings just a little further: I do not believe that the Liberal Christians (by which I mean, of course, not the politically leftist or libertarian, but the Theologically heterodox) are taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ more seriously than are their Theologically (and often politically) conservative brethren. For those who refuse to confess, to uphold, to defend the doctrines of the Most Holy and Blessed Trinity and of the Hypostatic Union have denied the Gospel, as they have denied the One about whom, from whom, by whom, through whom, and in whom the Gospel and all salvation is. They uphold, instead, a stunted and self-pleasing form of the Law, which, though they retain the parts of the Law, those pertaining to mercy and almsgiving, most worthy of being retained though all others be rejected, is little more than a new and more pleasing Phariseeism. “Faith without works is dead” indeed, but works without faith is nothing more than the old yoke of bondage in a more pleasing package.

    Thank you for your indulgence, sir.

    M.

  7. M. Falcatus says on August 18th, 2009 at 9:53 am

    Sorry, there should be an “Omega” after the phrase “which we may term.” It did not paste from MS properly, apparently.

    Pardon me, please!

    M.