Christianity in Public Policy

Why Christianity In Public Policy Is Bad For Christianity

Many Christians feel that the Bible provides a basis for our laws. They use the Bible to support various initiatives. Among them are the death penalty, continued prohibitions of drugs and laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol, a regressive or flat tax, and many other perspectives as well. But what if using Christianity as a guide in public policy is bad for Christians as a whole? It seems obvious, the only basis for law is not a Bible or other religious text. It can only be good law.

One popular issue being discussed recently is prayer in the legislatures[1]; that is, opening with prayer. What the Christians want is to be able to pray to their Christian God but refuse all other religions the right to pray to their gods. But if we don't want others praying to their gods, then the issue shouldn't be introduced at all. The politicians should stick to problems of economic, judicial, and social impact and whatever else it is they do. I don't want them sending prayers to Allah and if they make it so Christians can offer their prayers, then others will follow along in offering prayers to Satan, and it will be perfectly legal. And guess what? Many of our representatives, if they don't view only themselves as being gods, more or less actually do follow Luciferianism. And guess what. Even if 'prayer' is made legal, it is all a farce anyway. It's so crazy now you risk being court-martialed for evangelizing in the name of Christ if you are active duty military. Is this the same government you think is going to start saying prayers in Jesus' if the Supreme Court makes it legal? Guess again. They can say they're praying to the Christian God all they want. If they are praying to the Great Architect, the Great Spirit or any other fancy new-age named god, it is not the God you and I grew up with. They are praying to false gods and the Christian are joining hands with them in prayer to imposters. Stop drinking the Kool Aid and wake up!

What I will do in the next several paragraphs is talk about how Christianity as a guide for public policy is dangerous to the interests of Christians and dangerous to society as a whole.
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AGAINST MARIJUANA BANS
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It's a drug that has been illegal for over 70 years. It's likely that the majority of Christians would like to see it continue to remain illegal. They want naturally to see that the streets are free of drug addicts, bums, drug dealers, and also that their children are free from the risk of exposure to or possible use of it and that society benefits from greater safety. But here, where the Christian perspective is adopted, Christians are doing harm to themselves and society.

I. Drug legalization does not increase drug usage [2].

For most, this is counterintuitive and isn't even considered as being a possibility. But there are good reasons for why this is true. First, if you are someone who is disposed toward drug use or abuse, restrictions on use or opportunities for use will make little difference on the conscience of a young man or woman committed to getting high. If it is available, or if it must be pursued from drug dealers, the person will acquire it and use it.

Second, those who due to upbringing or religion are not at risk of experimentation are no more inclined to use illicit substances where there is a wider availability than when there are prohibitions in place.

And finally, there may be some drawn into the culture motivated by risk-taking who in a state where some legalization has been adopted, they would not be as drawn into such a lifestyle. On the flip side, there may be a few not morally opposed who would be drawn into it because some of the old restrictions were set aside.

II. Kids have greater access to drugs than to alcohol [3]. Kids have this extra access for many reasons. The vast majority who go to public school have on nearly every campus a sub-culture of youths who experiment with drugs, many of whom do not recognize in risk of providing them to your son or daughter or selling them. Kids can find themselves in many settings such as concerts, parties, in the woods across from the campus (that was one for us), where they can meet a peer for drug deals or just to get high. Alcohol on the other hand, there are not really any 21-year-old kids in junior high or high school to buy them beer and unless they come from a liberal environment at home or have a connection to get it for them, asking random people t buy it for them generally wouldn't work as most people have at least some desire to not go to jail, have their licenses suspended, or be charged hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines. Criminalization in this case has resulted in a greater availability of drugs, not less.

III. Prohibition hasn't made us safer but made our society more violent with more deaths, not less [4]. The cartels and gangs have a heavy incentive to engage in the trafficking and sales they're well know for. Drugs cost nothing to produce, the cultivators are paid nearly nothing, and so it is almost all tax-free under the table profit. Necessarily, turf wars, drug deals gone bad, cartel against cartel and much more violence goes along with that. Drug addicts engage in non-violent crime such as theft, burglary, or even robberies to support addictions and consequently the streets are more dangerous and there are more deaths, not less.

What Christianity has done is to put on a false exterior of being a more moral society or a society more concerned with pleasing God but instead they have built a society that stands above the kings of the earth as the great whore, an abomination, and a laughing stock. America is probably the most drugged up nation on earth, what with the millions of illegal drug users, millions on prescription narcotics and benzodiazepines, and even millions of parents in this country having their kids drugged with amphetamines. So we're not an exception country, unless we mean exceptionally arrogant, ignorant, high, and depraved.

Christians in their pursuit of utopia have managed to help in this country being destroyed.

If we made drugs legal for adults and sold them in pharmacies or establishments specially designed to sales it, much of the crime would be eliminated, tax revenue would be generated, addicts would find it easier to admit they have a problem and seek help for their substance abuse, cartels and gangs would be severely crippled in their business efforts, and children would grow up no more glamorizing drug use than they do tobacco use, which decades of health initiatives have helped to make one of the most hated habits in all of America. Here, it's not Christianity that helps to bring about a better society, but liberal democracy.
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AGAINST ALCOHOL BANS
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This is an issue that has been in the news in Texas a lot recently. Many counties and towns have had bans on alcohol sales for generations and as of the last few years, in my region of Texas, many towns and counties have sought to make alcohol sales legal. But there has been very serious organized opposition against the passage of these laws from the churches, non-denominationals and baptists in particular. But rather than make city streets safer, they have participated in making them more dangerous and sought to ensure that more people die, not less.

The facts: Dry counties have higher drunk driving rates [5] and higher drunk driving related deaths [6].

Longer drive times to pick up alcohol, where drivers must cross the county line or into the next town over allow for more opportunities for intoxicated drivers on the road. Where there are bars or clubs, it happens that drunks leave in many cases to go home but kill someone on the way back. In counties where alcohol sales are legal, citizens have no reason whatsoever to drive drunk. They go down to the corner market, pick up their drinks, go home and get drunk and don't go out for the rest of the night.

Christians in order to put off an outward, superficial image of morality, have done so at the costs of more dangerous roads, more dangerous for drivers and pedestrians, drinkers and abstainers alike, and also at the cost of more lives. Here we see that in their pursuit of utopia, necessarily innocent people, sometimes even children, get caught up in the mix and lose their lives, so Christians can advertise their communities as being 'family-friendly', 'conservative', based on 'family values', when they are actually destroying families and people's lives.
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AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY
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Death penalty is certainly something that the theonomists were concerned about and I will get to theonomy in the next division of this article. I just realized, I'm not sure how Christians pass the smell test in claiming that the Law is obsolete and that we are in an age of grace and at the same time advocate so strenuously for the death penalty for many of society's most hated criminals.

I am for the death penalty. What I am not for is men who are prone to error, who have in fact in the administration of their duties as judges, jurors, and executioners HAVE IN FACT seen to it that not only many guilty men receive the lethal injection, but that many innocent men AS WELL. One is too many. If that means we take a few thousand of the most murderous evil bastards off the death row to save one life, I cannot imagine how as a Christian I could make any argument whatsoever that we should sacrifice that one man just to kill the other three thousand. But Christians don't see it that way. They overlook that innocent people are convicted everyday. Innocent people sometimes serve decades behind bars before some non-profit happens to pick his case to go over and finds one critical piece of evidence that was ignored that would have allowed the man to live the majority of his adult life in freedom and pursuing life, rather than sitting for thirty years behind bars. These organizations are all too familiar of how untold thousands sit in prison EVERY DAY who are innocent. But there is such a dearth of time and resources, that sadly, most of them will serve out their sentences or die behind bars.

These men did the best they good. The judges and juries had no intention to put innocent people away. But because of the reality that sin and depravity is in the world, fallenness, and not only fallenness of morality but a fallenness of the mind, sometimes the wrong decision is made. This is perfectly in line with Christian teaching. To say God instituted authority so we have to trust the government to be infallible and if innocent people are falsely executed it must have been God's will is naive at best and at worst exposes the true bloodhthirsty murderous ambitions that may not have been fully satisfied after centuries of crusades followed by a much longer period marred by murder of religious dissidents and sectarian violence. Many of you, let me say, would be ones to stone to death the adulteress and many of you would be quick to crucify Christ as well. All the people that I hear Americans calling for the death of, they scarcely know of what they're discussing and who they're discussing and it's all conjecture on their part thinking they even know what actually happened. Look at the Zimmerman case. People trying to threaten him, his parents, brother, and many other innocent people had their lives threatened because some stupid ass like Spike Lee [7] thought it important to publish addresses of INNOCENT PEOPLE without researching it to find out that they were not the addresses of the Zimmermans like he thought. Roseanne Barr similarly posted the address of Zimmerman's parents [8]. What did she hope to accomplish by having Zimmerman's near elderly parents killed and why does she think they should answer for what their son did*? The number must have been at least near a dozen of people who had to flee their homes for their very lives because people in states thousands of miles away thought to inspire death and violence towards people they do not even know.

*Deuteronomy 24:16 "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin."

What it boils down to is this: There are certainly crimes worthy of a death penalty; however, the human race is so corrupted, and clearly over the last several years is getting worse and not better, and necessarily makes the mistake from time to time to send innocent people to their deaths, and therefore the death penalty has to be thrown out.

You can read about former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and his decision to ban the death penalty here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/08/illinois-death-penalty-ab_n_833250.html

If you don't know the story you should read about what happened. But I will quote in part here...

"Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has long supported capital punishment, looked drained moments after signing the historic legislation. Lawmakers sent him the measure back in January, but Quinn went through two months of intense personal deliberation before acting. He called it the most difficult decision he has made as governor.

"'If the system can't be guaranteed, 100-percent error-free, then we shouldn't have the system,' Quinn said. 'It cannot stand.'

"Illinois becomes the 16th state in the nation without a death penalty more than a decade after former Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions out of fear that the justice system could make a deadly mistake.

"Quinn also commuted the sentences of all 15 men remaining on death row. They will now serve life in prison with no hope of parole.

"In his comments, the governor returned often to the fact that 20 people sent to death row had seen their cases overturned after evidence surfaced that they were innocent or had been convicted improperly."

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THEONOMY AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
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We've looked at several topics. I've explained why the Christian answer to how to govern on certain questions is actually harmful overall to Christians and society. Bad policies on drugs, weapons, crime... they result clearly in the deaths of many innocent people. I don't think anyone who I share a faith with actually want people to have greater access to drugs, drunks speeding through the streets their children use to walk to school, or want innocent people being given the lethal injection. What this article has the intention of showing is that the popular Christian thesis on how to solve many of society's greatest problems DO result in these effects. We certainly disagree on policy, but I think all reasonable people agree on the effects. We want improvements in society, but it won't be the Christian consensus that brings us there.

The final article, before I discuss what the solution is, is the article against theonomy.

Theonomy was a small movement beginning in the 1970s that wanted to see government established that was based solely on God's law. It could also be described as Christian Reconstructionism. They were more or less deranged Presbyterians. They advovcated for many absurd ideas. One of the most offensive is that women guilty of sexual activity prior to marriage should be executed. I couldn't find where the theonomists said the men who were present during the sexual misconduct should be executed too. Despite their insistence on the role of God's law, they also claimed that dietary laws were overturned (they weren't) and indicated for convenience' sake they were willing to throw out certain laws. Their system also would provide for stoning of disobedient children and heretics, to be determined by a party of Calvinist overlords and that alone should scare most people, since the Calvinist murderers were not much more forgiving than the Catholic crusaders.

Breathe a sigh of relief to know that Rousas Rushdoony and Greg Bahnsen are dead.

This is the final demonstration that applying Christian revelation to the realm of government is dangerous and harmful, to Christians and to society. Do many people feel comfortable with a Calvinist ruling class determining who should die for this or that doctrine, or a Catholic council, or an Islamic council, etc etc? "God's law" can never be applied because no one can fully understand it.

There are thousands of bills discussed in the United States Congress every single year. How do we know how God would rule on those thousands of cases?

Take THREE, just THREE issues that the Bible devotes a substantial degree of lines of elaboration on. Christians will not even agree as to the answer on three issues. We have 30,000+ denominations catering to every variety of belief that can be dreamed of. No one would have a reason to prefer a dictator of Baptist background as opposed to Episcopalian, Christ Scientist, Branch Davidian, or Discordian. A sane person should say the ideal politician is one who preserves liberty and nothing else. Theonomists are clearly as absorbed in the flesh as any of the most carnal thinkers, to think they could fashion a political system bent on death and killing.

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LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
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One of my strongest beliefs is their should be no tearing down and criticizing if one is not prepared to offer an alternative. I want to offer that alternative and hopefully get a fairly good definition of what God's intent was.

The government God wanted us to have most was the American government! But not the American government today. Our government today is like late 1930s Germany. The America I'm discussing is a time from the 1700s on into the early part of the 1900s. And specifically what was special about that time was it was devoted to serving liberty. Government had clearly defined bounds as to what it could and could not do. No one question the right of the unborn child. No one thought it was unjust to not allow gays to marry. People farmed hemp, they smoked natural tobacco, they had children, they had jobs and they had faith. A man's home was his castle. Sheriffs ruled their counties and a man ruled his home. There were only a fraction of the laws that we have today. Businesses were able to form, grow, and hire many employees without being crushed by regulations from tax authorities. Many modern people don't think so but they knew how to read. There were colleges for the bright ones and anything from farming to manufacturing for the average young men and women.

A few men tried to outline what governments were in the business of, what was in their domain or not.

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

Frederic Bastiat, the 19th century French economist, in his pamphlet The Law asks, "Can the law -- which necessarily requires the use of force -- rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? I defy anyone to extend it beyond this purpose without perverting it and, consequently, turning might against right."

The role of government for Bastiat is "contained in these simple words: Law is organized justice."

 John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

John Stuart Mill had a similar perspective in advocating the harm principle. "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." [9]

For classical liberal political philosophers, the government's primary purpose was to preserve liberty and nothing else.

I feel God blessed this country so strongly and brought us to being the greatest power and richest nation was because for many years our government executed righteousness by preserving liberty. Men made their decisions on how to best provide for themselves and families. And criminals were prosecuted. Politicians took oaths ON THE BIBLE and swore to defend THE CONSTITUTION, the great constitution ever known to man I consider as being a document only a degree less inspired than the Bible itself, and they meant it. God blessed this nation because it pleased Him and we were His people. We cannot say that any more.

The lesson here today is America has lost its way. The hopeful encouragements from pastors reciting 2 Chronicles 7:14 is a farce, a fantasy. This nation is coming under the judgment of God and there is no turning back. The politicians have taken us on this course, aided by the marginally literate morons who help elect them continually. There will be no repentance for this country.

*If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

Religion has no place in politics. And the government should stay out of religion which we know they do not do. They shouldn't mix. Politicians rarely have any faith and they try to coopt religions for their benefit. Religionists who have sought power through history generally thought about nothing other than killing and riches. I think people are so tired of governments like I am that the next logical step is anarchy. Enough of governments. They make war, kill, and empty coffers. Morality should be inculcated on our own terms, not inspired by government.

I want to conclude with the words of Voltaire, from his Lettres Philosophiques, subtitle On Mr. Locke.

"It is not Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Bayle, nor Spinoza, nor Hobbes, nor Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr. Collins, nor Mr. Toland, and so on, who have carried the torch of discord in their native country; it is theologians, for the most part, who having first had the ambition of being leaders of their sect, have soon afterward desired to be heads of parties. Why, all the books of the modern philosophers will never make as much noise in the world as once was made just by the dispute of the Cordeliers* over the shape of their sleeve and hood."

*Greyfriars, Franciscans

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footnotes
1. http://ncronline.org/news/politics/house-members-file-supreme-court-brief-legislative-prayer-case
2. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/07/global-report-decriminalization-does-not-increase-rates-of-drug-use/
3. http://blog.norml.org/2009/08/28/study-says-its-easier-for-teens-to-buy-marijuana-than-beer/
4. http://reason.com/archives/2003/01/29/prohibition-violence
5. http://thetimestribune.com/local/x1511619555/Dry-counties-show-higher-rates-of-DUI-related-crashes
6. http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/InTheNews/DrinkingAndDriving/20060517124659.html
7. http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/03/spike-lee-didnt-do-the-right-thing/
8. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/roseanne-barr-zimmerman-tweets-893416
9. On Liberty, quoted from www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle