Covetousness as national policy

It dismays me how often I hear Christians appealing to covetousness as a basis for laws and regulations. How often have you gotten email forwards appealing to you to try to punish gasoline companies for high prices? Usually these emails propose some kind of boycotting scheme which honestly is not rooted in rational economic thought -- the proposed plan would usually alter but not diminish demand for gasoline, and so prices would not be affected. Or how often do you hear people, often Christians, complaining about Wal-Mart or other large companies, basically for having too much money, for being too successful?

All of these appeals have their base in covetousness -- wanting that which is not ours, and being upset that somebody has something which we do not. With these attitudes, we are prey for politicians who want to expand government power in our name, at the expense of the economic prosperity of our nation, our neighbors, and ourselves, and as well as at the expense of doing what is right and Godly.

God's word couldn't be more clear about covetousness. "Thou shalt not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor" (Exodus 20:17). "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, and you shall not desire anything that belongs to your neighbor" (Deuteronomy 5:21). "I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he should be covetous" (I Corinthians 5:11 -- wow!). "Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth: covetousness, which is idolatry" (Colossians 3:5). I encourage you to go look for the word "covetousness" in your New Testament yourself, because there are some other very shocking and damning things God has to say about it.

In the Old Testament, covetousness was not to be used as the basis of policy, or as the basis for the decisions of the judges. We're encouraged today to try to use the sword of the government as a weapon to make those who have (we're led to believe that they have because they stole ... this may sometimes be the case, but usually if they did steal it was government doing the stealing for them) share with those who have not (often they have not because government stole from them, too ... or because government stole from those who would've employed them, or made laws against trading with them). While we are supposed to be compassionate to the poor with our own money, we are not to violate the principles of justice and private property to do it. "You shall not follow a multitude in doing evil, nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after a multitude in order to pervert justice; nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his dispute." (Exodus 23:2-3) God anticipated this urge to favor the poor and steal from the rich to "help." This is prohibited. If you want to help the poor, do so with what God has given you and use the power of the Gospel to preach that others should do the same.

Finally, check out Acts 5:4. This is the case of somebody who had property that could've been used to help the poor. Acts 5:4 teaches us God's inviolable principle of private property: "While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control?" You'll want to read the context of this yourself in order to fully understand the story. The church didn't get to vote on making members sell property and give to the poor. The church didn't get to use the government to get around this restriction, either.

Do Christians have the right to govern?

God states in Romans 13 that all governments which exist have been established by Him. He did not say that He established only democracies, or only monarchies, or only good governments, or only those that are established on the principles of His word. In fact, He says this about the Roman empire -- a government which practiced nearly every form of depravity and oppression imaginable.

Clearly when God says He established governments, He was not saying that He sanctions all of their actions. Instead, God declares throughout Scripture that He uses governments, just as He uses the actions of all men, good and evil, to bring about His will. The Lord causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him, to those who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). God raised up Pharaoh of the hard heart and established him as an oppressive ruler of His own people in order to display His glory and majesty (Exodus 9:13-17). God used arrogant Nebuchadnezzar to discipline His people, Judah. (In fact, even though He tried desperately in the book of Daniel to call Nebuchadnezzar unto Himself, He also declared in Isaiah 14 that He would punish Babylon for this sin of rising up against His people. The action was wicked. The result was used by God for good. But those who took the wicked action bore their guilt.) God used Judas to betray the Lamb of God for crucifixion.

So God commands Christians to submit to government, and declares that He uses government and has established it Himself, but does not sanction everything governments do or declare them to be perfect.

Are Christians permitted to govern other people?

To ask this is to ask the question: are Christians permitted to engage in the actions that governments engage in?

We have already seen that Christians may not engage in taxation because Christians are not permitted to take what does not belong to them.

God has placed a sword in the hand of government in order to punish evil (Romans 13:4). May Christians punish those who practice evil?

What is a Christian supposed to do to someone who practices evil in the church? The most famous passage about this is found in Matthew 18:14-20: Christians are to reprove other Christians when they practice evil, first privately, then with witnesses, with the intent of restoring the wayward Christian so that he will not be lost. Ultimately if a Christian will not repent of practicing evil, he is to be put out of the church. This practice may also be seen in I Corinthians 5 and I Timothy 1:20, where it is referred to as "delivering a person to Satan," and again in these passages the idea is that the person is put out of the church, back into the world tormented by Satan, with the hope that he will repent after such a consequence and be restored to fellowship. (You might also see I John 5:16-17.)

What about a person outside of the church? Christians are absolutely forbidden to judge those outside of the church. I Corinthians 5:9-13 declares: "I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters; for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he should be an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler-- not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges." Persons outside of the church cannot be "delivered to Satan" (put out of the church), because they are already in the grasp of Satan.

So, for those inside of the church, the maximum penalty that Christians may oppose is to put them out of the church, and for those out of the church, no penalty may be imposed.

Therefore, it is wrong for Christians to take upon themselves the role of government, to attempt to punish evildoers. Within the church, Christians are under the government of God, the kingship of Jesus, and the administration that He has set up (with accountability to fellow Christians, to elders, etc.). Outside of the church, I Corinthians 5:13 states, people are judged not by us, but by God. One means God uses to judge people and punish evil is government, as we have seen from Romans 13. So, if God is judging them and we are not, then government is clearly not our domain.

Remember this the next time someone tells you that Christians need to vote on a measure outlawing sin.

Funding controversial causes

Is it right to take tax money and use it to fund abortions? Of course not. Of course, we know that the abortions are wrong, but unfortunately about half of society disagrees. But thankfully we can sometimes come to the agreement (though not often enough) that it is wrong to take "other people's tax money" and use it to fund causes that they find reprehensible and immoral.

In our society, a significant number of people oppose the war in Iraq. Is it right to take the money of these people and use it to fund the war? I submit that it is not. These people are being forced to fund an act that they find immoral and reprehensible. Sadly, people of faith are often at the forefront of justifying this coercive funding, which I demonstrated to be stealing in an earlier post.

Now I'm not saying everybody ought to agree with the opinion of the war protestors. I am personally a Christian pacifist, but I have to confess that a) the war against Iraq sounded pretty rational to me, as long as you accept the idea that we may use force to defend ourselves, which most people accept, and b) the people trying to make a case against the Iraq war honestly have yet to make a case that sounds rational to me. (And I've honestly tried to look. I even checked to see what Pat Buchanan said, because I assumed an honored Republican who opposed the war had to have some good reasons. But he couldn't get away from the same "Bush lied" nonsense I hear from complete non-thinkers. I was disappointed.)

But what I am saying is that we do not have the right to force our opinions on other people. Not in any way, and certainly not through forcing people to fund our causes. It would be wrong to forcibly take the money of other people to teach Christianity, to teach evolution, to fund abortions, to fund charities, to fund peace activists, or to fund wars, assuming the victims -- I mean taxpayers -- didn't agree with the cause and/or were not willing for their money to be spent in this way.

Here's a little fact that seems to be a big surprise to many on the Left and the Right: embryonic stem-cell research is not illegal in America. What is prohibited by George W. Bush's decision of 2001 is the use of federal funds for this research. The main reason is the justification I'm using in this essay: it is wrong to take money from people to use it for something that they are not sure is right, or are certain is not right. Private (and even state) funding of this research is still allowed.

So sometimes we recognize this principle. But violations occur all the time. The public school system might be the biggest example: we take money from "all of society" in order to educate "all of society" the way "all of society" wants. This means that our democratic institutions get to vote as to exactly what shall be taught: we can vote to teach evolution, or creationism; we can vote to teach homosexuality as abomination, or as alternate lifestyle. We can vote to teach history as leading inexorably toward liberty, toward democracy, or toward Marxism. We can vote to teach sexual abstinence and chastity, or fund contraceptives for children. Possibly every single identifiable group in society has their money stolen from them and used against them in our school system.

Want a more principled way to accomplish your goals? Do it with your own money. Honor what God said: "Thou shalt not steal." If you want something to succeed, donate your own time, money, and resources, and attempt to persuade others to do the same. If you do not have the resources to accomplish it, perhaps God does not want it done, or wants you working on something else. Concerned about underprivileged, uneducated children? Start a charitable work to help. Concerned about the lack some people have of health care? Start a charitable work to help. Concerned that some children who are existing with inadequate supervision (basically emancipated by default, which turns them into adults in my mind) don't have birth control and need it? Use your own money to provide it, not mine. (And stay away from my kids, while you're at it. They are not grown up yet, and I'm not turning them loose until they are.)

In so doing, you'll manage to accomplish whatever God wants to permit you to accomplish without committing the sin of stealing. You'll have a society where nobody is forced to fund something that they object to on principle. Moreover, you'll also eliminate the economic waste that taxation and socialism accomplishes: when we socialize an aspect of our existence, when we fund it collectively and coercively, we find that we always, always misallocate resources: some issues are overaddressed (meaning we spent too much to accomplish something that could've been accomplished for less), while other issues are underaddressed (meaning something we want done doesn't get funded). A collective, centralized system where decisions are made for everybody as a whole (rather than individually, as decentralized individuals pursuing the ends we believe in, independently) cannot possibly accurately calculate the relative worth of the needs that need to be addressed. But when we allow ourselves to function as God's ordained free market, we function as a gigantic distributed supercomputer that can and does do so, that outperforms any collectivists wildest utopian fantasy.

Are you worried that this won't work? Then let me ask you to do something: please support banning and terminating these annoying Susan Komen breast cancer marathons. Obviously private funding to cure cancer will never work, and these things are a major annoyance and inconvenience to me.

Obviously the Susan Komen foundation believes that something worthwhile can be achieved through voluntary funding. And since God commanded that we not steal, commanded that we respect private property even if we think we might be able to use it to do good like helping the poor (Acts 5:4), and promised to make sure that we always had an abundance (not that we could always obtain an abundance by taking what doesn't belong to us) in order to be able to perform every good deed He wants us to do (II Corinthians 9:6-12), God obviously believes this as well. Christians should never support funding "good works" of any sort through taxation.

But didn't God command us to pay our taxes? Of course He did. Pay them. Just don't tax other people. And once the money is taken, recognize it as Caesar's, not yours. Caesar was not one of God's people, and he certainly didn't use the money that he took from God's people for God's purposes. In fact, he used it to oppress God's people and fund immorality such as drunken orgies and idol worship. If somebody wants to take what is yours, do not resist them. But never pretend that God has authorized you to do the same.