Like many on the left, I am often dumbfounded listening to conservatives. What seems obvious to them seems like lunacy to me. I groan audibly and yell at the television or radio, “Do we live on the same planet?” It disturbs me to think that conservatives feel the same way when they listen to progressives. Oscar Wilde summarized the situation crisply, “In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.”
If progressives are going to contend effectively with right wing rhetoric, we must begin by understanding right wing worldviews at a deeper level, excavating their foundations. How have so many of the poor and middle class been indoctrinated into worldviews that do not serve their interests? What Jedi mind-tricks have been employed? To that end, I offer this diary reflecting on the strange way that the right conflates Martin Luther (of the Protestant Reformation) and Ayn Rand. I argue that conservatives employ Luther’s concept of grace to separate belief from action and Rand’s concept of virtue to glorify self-interest. This unholy but powerful combination of doctrines effectively frees mankind from all social responsibility.
A caveat: obviously the nuanced views held by individual conservatives cannot be captured in the broad strokes that follow. Individuals rarely hold ideologically pure and consistent views about everything and their actions usually do not accord 100% with their views, no matter the content. Obviously when a group takes action together, the combined results cannot be fairly ascribed to the views or actions of any one person. Nevertheless, it is possible to attribute responsibility and motives to the group as a whole. Also I want to clearly state at the outset that what follows does not intend to describe the views of liberal, left leaning or progressive Christians. These I think have a different view of Luther and generally reject Rand's focus on selfishness entirely.
Let’s start with Luther. Many progressives I have met wonder about how conservative thinking can square with Christianity. Most conservatives are Christians. Yet many core conservative political ideas seem to contradict the gospel. Some examples:
· Jesus says we should love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us and turn the other cheek. Conservatives seem to think that we should kill, or at least seriously injure and threaten enemies. They also seem to advocate striking back when attacked. Conservatives would have Jesus say something like, “Terrify your enemies and kill them if necessary to protect yourself.”
· Jesus says we should give away all our property and serve God. Conservatives seem to believe in pursuing personal wealth.
· Jesus went about caring for the sick, feeding the hungry and forgiving sinners. The gospels contain not one example of Jesus inflicting punishment. The only possible exception would be throwing the money changers out the temple (suggesting Jesus’ feelings about bankers?!). Conservatives want everyone to fend for themselves and seem to believe in strict punishments rather than simple forgiveness.
· Jesus travelled around the country living off the surplus of the people around him. He didn’t have any kind of visible productive employment. He didn’t seem to own anything. If Jesus is a role model for conservative values, shouldn’t he have at least founded a productive multi-national enterprise to fund his own mission work? But Jesus did not worry about productivity: “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?” In contrast, conservatives seem to suggest that the only moral way to live is through hard productive work in which you reap only what you sow and also successfully hoard it. Conservatives tend to glorify the great hoarders of our time, seeming to perceive great wealth as evidence of righteousness.
· When asked about paying taxes, Jesus replied, “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.” Conservatives seem to equate taxes with theft.
So what gives? How do we square conservative ideology with Christianity? We only need a single word: grace.
What is grace? Grace is the concept that our salvation to eternal life cannot require any effort on our part. God gives us faith (this too is a gift) and forgives our sins. Thus we are saved and enjoy eternal life. This happens because through his suffering, death and resurrection Jesus has made a complete atonement for all of our rottenness and imperfections. We humans are so woefully pathetic that there is nothing we could do to participate in our own salvation (not even believe in Jesus, because he gives us faith also).
To followers of Luther (all of evangelical Protestantism), grace is the most important gift. Grace makes the life of someone who has had a miserable existence equal in value to someone who lives like an emperor. As long as they each have grace, they will be equal in heaven. And what happens in heaven is what really matters. Once a person has grace, the remainder of this earthly life can be written off. The central purpose of human life is to acquire grace. So according to the doctrine of grace, one could be a mass-murderer, but if one has acquired grace, all is forgiven. Since God can save the most evil, despicable sinner through grace, then of course, a rich man who spends his life in selfish pleasures can get there too. Grace is the equalizer of all sin. How all this works is not for humans to fret about. Through God, all things are possible. Conservatives see grace as having infinite redemptive power.
For a complete theology, the concept of grace seems require supplementation with other teachings of Jesus (e.g., whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers that you do unto me, etc.). But conservatives don’t pay too much attention to this other material, choosing to focus instead on key lines from the letters of St. Paul. But we are not here to debate theology, just to fathom its conservative interpretation.
Grace is a mighty cleaver that effectively separates belief from necessary action. Only what we believe in our hearts counts, not what we do. We are sinners who will never be worthy of salvation no matter what we do. So it is best to just recognize this and gleefully rely on God’s grace. I can drive my Lincoln Navigator to church past the starving beggars because we are all sinners and will all go to heaven anyway, as long as we think the right thoughts. If our heads contain the right theological ideas (i.e., Jesus is our savior), it does not matter if one has an empty belly and another a full one. It does not matter if one dies in the street and another within a sprawling mansion. We are made equal before God through grace once we get to heaven.
Grace is what allows conservatives to let go of all concerns about what happens in this world without appearing to let go of their Christianity. This world doesn’t matter. The universe is going to hell in a hand basket anyway. What matters is the NEXT world, not this one.
Now it is true that if our lives are sanctified by grace, we might enjoy the gift of trying (but failing) to be Christ-like, but we do not have the actual ability to attain Christ-like behavior. We are sinners, period! Since we lack the ability to actually be Christ-like, we also lack the responsibility. We need only to throw ourselves on the Lord’s mercy. As Luther said himself:
All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us ... Nothing of this article can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth and everything else falls (Mark 13:31).
Trying too hard to be Christ-like is risky, because it might falsely suggest that we think we can earn salvation. This would be highly immodest. We can’t do anything to help ourselves.
Onward to Ayn Rand. Rand builds smartly on Luther’s departure from social responsibility (in terms of salvation) and turns it into an affirmative virtue. [I don’t mean that Rand intentionally builds on the religious doctrine of grace itself, just that this is the effect when conservatives, mostly Christian, embrace Rand.] According to Rand, not only do we owe nothing to one another, true virtue entails the opposite: to be selfish. And it so happens that our pursuit of selfish ends is good for society as a whole through the market (but that is not a moral justification, just a convenient accident fully described in Smith’s Wealth of Nations).
Of course Rand was an atheist, but conservatives downplay this. Rand argues passionately that society has no legitimate moral claims on its members, no ground to ask them for anything. Notice this fits perfectly with Luther’s premise—no one needs to do anything because Jesus has already done everything. Rand goes further to claim that it is actually immoral for any group to request sacrifices from individuals. When we do this we bleed the life out of our best people, says Rand. Society dries them up, depriving humanity of the trickle-down from their greatness. At the core, Rand believes that the only legitimate purpose for collective action is the enhancement of individual freedom. Rand wrote that “Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” This process must occur through Pareto efficiency whereby an increase in one person’s freedom never occurs at any other’s expense. Of course, Atlas Shrugged is Rand’s epic myth illustrating these ideas.
Wonderful things happen when Rand’s and Luther’s ideas are united. The idea that members of society have any obligation to one another is not only deemed morally deficient; it is also sacrilegious and wasteful! It denigrates the perfect sacrifice that the Lord already made on our behalf. So the ultimate blessing of grace is freedom from everything and everyone. Since God is perfect and needs nothing from man, all we need to do is give thanks and praise. Our interactions with others need only be guided by what will make us happy as individuals. In this utopian view, the market is seen to be a mutually beneficial exchange among saved people simply pursuing personal bliss. The amount of wealth one acquires is the ultimate measure of success in producing bliss for others. Every dollar earned is represents an equal dollar of bliss created. GDP is thus a bliss measuring stick. Rand describes money itself as “the barometer of a society’s virtue.” This is the foundation for the conservative obsession with economic growth to the exclusion of all other values.
We must also recognize that conservative Christians believe that human suffering can only be alleviated through grace. If a person is not saved, he or she does not even count as a person. Those only born once (non Christians) are actually born dead (to see the pervasiveness of this belief among conservative Christians, simply google the phrase “born again, born dead”). Souls must be born again in order to become alive. But once a person’s soul is saved, the rest of his or her human life becomes immaterial. Strangely (some might say conveniently) once a soul is born again, suffering does not matter because the soul has a guaranteed ticket to heaven, and this earthly life is but a flicker of eternity. But suffering is not required to enter heaven, because Jesus already did all the suffering required for atonement. So live it up! No caring required. Nothing you can do. It is really quite a neat little package.
Of course, actual human beings who are conservatives cannot keep it all so tidy. Grappling with millions of years of evolution within groups of primates (hell, even packs of dogs care for each other), all humans (even conservatives) feel bonded (and even feel a sense of obligation) to their children, their neighbors and friends. But the overarching concepts of social justice and equality within present human life have no place within this Luther-Rand ideological landscape. Within this worldview, people think of the Christian community as a special group of living souls awaiting eternal life among a larger population of people whose personhood is yet unrealized because they were “born dead.” They also feel that social justice is not their concern because Rand has explained that the ultimate virtue in this hell on earth that comes before salvation is selfishness itself. Imagine what progressive policies sound like to someone listening from within this mental space, this fertile ground for the redwood forest of right wing rhetoric.
What do to about all this lies beyond the scope of this post, for future development. But before signing off, I will suggest two directions. First is the possibility that progressives might consider a sort of modern counter-reformation. Progressives cannot concede religious moral energy to conservatives as they have. The work of Jim Wallis is certainly in this direction. There is good reason to believe that the modern concept of grace has become as bankrupt within present day Christianity (and as antithetical to the core teachings of Jesus) as the indulgences that were the focus of Luther’s 16th century protests. Second and equally important is the idea that we need a progressive response to Ayn Rand equal in excellence of execution to Atlas Shrugged. This cannot be merely a philosophical, intellectual tract. It has to tell a compelling story and construct a mythology of equal power.
3:10 PM PT: Thanks so much for republishing this on Community Spotlight!