Conservative And Liberal Christians And The Golden Rule

All Christians know about what is called the Golden Rule, "Do to others as you would have them do to you", but how liberal and conservative Christians end up reading it so differently, and how that translates both theologically and politically is quite significant in meaning.

Both believe in the general principal of treating others the way you want to be treated.  That much isn't missed by either.  The difference is how each seem to interpret the context of the rule's application.

Conservatives, I believe, see the rule is largely practical.  Following it will generally result in others treating you better than if you didn't follow it.  It's what some would call a win-win.  If you treat others well they will tend to return the favor, not always, but often enough for it to just make good sense as a regular practice.

Liberals  on the other hand believe the rule is largely moral.  You treat others the way you want yourself to be treated because it's the right thing to do.  There's no guarantee or even likelihood the favor will be returned, but good people just do it.

How these two different perspectives of the Golden Rule plays out is then perhaps counter-intuitive, but very much logical.

The Counter-intuitive Outcome

The Conservative follows the Golden Rule reflexively without thinking, while the Liberal follows it with greater hesitation.  Since the conservative believes there's a personal benefit to following it there is seldom if ever a question about following it, but since the Liberal believes it's pretty much a moral decision they think about it as a test of their character and so it's conceivable they may not follow it in a certain instance, but when they do they tend to pat themselves on the back or say, "I was good".

Now before my fellow conservatives jump to the conclusion our perspective is superior since we will be "good" almost without hesitation, consider what the liberal perspective on this difference is.  Liberals could claim their heart is more sincere and selfless in this since they have no expectation of reward for being "good".  They also will insist they're the more rational and realistic.

How This Tends To Translate Into Politics

Liberal Christians distrust human nature more than conservative Christians so much that they're inclined to favor government control over individual liberty, while Conservatives are so confident that people left to their own devices will tend to do good because it benefits them, that they have a hard time accepting government controls as justified.

Liberals tend to see the decision to do good as the result of high personal character and enlightenment, and conservatives tend to see it as a rational response to an environment where people being good to each other tend to prosper.  These different ways of seeing "good" and its consequences leads to very different politics.

If you believe good behavior derives from enlightenment then you're open to government enforced good behavior.  After all, the average person cannot be expected to have the kind of superior moral character and/or spiritual enlightenment necessary to make these decisions on their own.  And further, if someone compelled to do good becomes so enlightened they should have no problem with having been forced, since it would have been their decision anyway if they knew then what they know now.

If on the other hand you believe most people tend to act rationally and rational people will see enough personal benefit to good behavior that they will tend to do what is good, then you will also tend to see government enforced good behavior as generally unnecessary, demeaning, oppressive, and arrogant.  And further, seeing it as unnecessary, you will see the potential harm of government possibly getting things wrong as outweighing the likely possible good.

Conclusion

I summarize this thought exercise as follows -- the reader should keep in mind I am a conservative --.  The modern American conservative sees all things in life as connected and that means to be rational one must have the humility to not look down on anybody, and perhaps more importantly one must see doing good as having a practical reward.  

Humility and balanced rationality are what separates conservatives from liberals.  

The left tend to see those who disagree with them as inferior in some way, most commonly in the area of enlightenment.  The modern American liberal sees a disconnect between the way things ought to be and the way they would naturally trend without the the intervention of the enlightened.  They see no need for balance in their reasoning since they see themselves as fixing a broken world.

A Call To Action For Christians (The Church Universal)

Now it's not that conservative Christians fail to see the world as fallen, it's that they have the humility to accept that it is Christ and not them who will fix it.  

The liberal Christian may argue that we are Christ in this world and we should thus share in His purpose to redeem it, and the conservative view is little more than an excuse not to act.  The liberal argument however reveals its own shortsightedness.  It does this in three areas primarily.

1. Christ calls us to do many things in His name, but hubris isn't one of them.  If human effort, even that aided by Christ's inspirational enlightenment, was capable of redeeming this world He would not have had to die on the cross.  

Justifying the use of governmental power to force people to act in "good" ways by saying it's what Christ would want us to do, well perhaps that's just nonsense, but I'd say it's more like a hubris born of poorly balanced reasoning.  This shows in the very use of the phrase, "we are Christ in the world".  No, Christ is Christ in the world.  We should be His humble followers, not His replacements.  If He needs us to be Him, our religion has a problem much bigger than a lack of active members.

2. The liberal argument is very unkind in its assumption that conservatives believe in sitting around and waiting for Christ to fix everything.  While there are lazy Christians who can't seem to do much more than attend Church and accept the label, their problem isn't theology or philosophy.  They may use a false humility of the sort that says, "who am I that I can make any difference?", but that's not because they're really humble, certainly not because they're theology is conservative.  

There are many lazy ones who also use liberal sounding theological reasons for their laziness as well, like, "the church is full of hypocrites".  

There are even what I call pseudo atheists who are really just people who's core beliefs are Christian but are too lazy to wrestle with the meanings and would rather not face their unfinished intellectual work on a regular basis, so they declare themselves to be atheist.  

There seems to be no theological position of any popularity that isn't used by someone somewhere to justify laziness.  

My point being that we don't need to become little Christ's looking down on the world to serve the real Christ in it, and suggesting that anyone who doesn't must be amongst the lazy is unjustly insulting, and thus not a Christian argument.  We can and should serve Him with humility and respect for other individuals.

3. The logical ends of this "we are Christ in the world" theology is that we stop acting as persuaders and become more like dictators, authoritarians, patronizing.  This is clearly evident in the results, yes even the very results our liberal Christian brothers and sisters are more than happy to point at and claim.  

Government grows and grows to add to and sustain programs designed to be everyone's salvation from misery, and it tells us more and more what we must and must not do for our own sakes and that of others.  Even as we all see how impersonal and dehumanizing many of these programs, laws, and regulations become, even as we see how they undermine individuals seeking even the slightest sort of self-actualization, they see all of this as just acceptable collateral damage.  

The Christian Church as a whole keeps losing more and more ground in a nation, yes in a world, filled more and more with people who want to be treated and seen as individuals, and we lose ground because we have become trapped in the misconception that when Christ told us to take our message to the nations he some how meant we were supposed to convert their governments and their government policies and essentially just skip over the actual individuals who live there, or that they would just come along.  

In a world where more and more people are losing their faith in their rulers, liberal Christians seem to think it good policy to work out the Gospel from the top of government down to the people.  It is little wonder that fewer and fewer people associate themselves with the Christian message.

So am I saying liberal Christian teachings are to blame for our current failure to connect with people?  Not in the sense that they are to blame alone.  

Who amongst us is earnestly reaching out to the individual?  There should be more.  The lonely unreached poor of John Wesley's time are now embodied by the lonely people who sit alone and use web-based media for most of their socialization.  

Who are today's Methodists who are reaching out to these people?  If Paul were walking the Earth today instead of when he did, his dream in Troas would not have been of a Greek, but a geek.  

In today's world, more and more people are waiting for the next Paul the Apostle or John Wesley to bring the gospel to them, and not just in word but in deeds, and to do this the message must be one aimed at individuals, not collectives. You know what I'm talking about, like Christ's message was and is?

I Told You So: Re-post From A Year Ago

One year ago today I was posting in response to the 2012 elections and it's interesting to note how spot on I seem to have been about the consequences.  So spot on that I'm re-posting that blog entry below.

I'll also note that while some nations' people seem to be coming around to the truth about the "straw-man" and those who defy reality, I think my own people are still being quite slow to realize.  They still want to blame the people they keep re-electing instead of the people who do the re-electing.  Some even are so far off as to blame those newly elected recently who are actually trying to do the right thing.

So I ask you to read so you can see what I mean (substitute "last year" for "last week" and it's amazingly relevent if I say so myself).

Post 1 : About The Election

Are We This Stupid?

An amazing thing happened last week in the United States.  In a very low voter turnout the majority of the people said they either don't see a problem with the last four years, or they don't believe anyone can do any better than the current set of leaders we've had the last two years, or they just don't care.  In this election they had the opportunity to express themselves, to put their government in a position to get things done, to at least try to end the paralysis it's been in.  Instead they both re-elected the Democrat president and strengthened the Republicans hold on the House of Representatives while doing nothing to weaken them in the Senate.  One side or the other needed to be significantly weakened or at least in some way sent a clear message to cooperate with the other.  Instead the voters and non-voters conspired to help the two sides dig their trenches all the deeper.  It's as if the majority of the American people decided to give reality the finger, or maybe just refuse to take responsibility for their role in self-governance. 

We've been blaming our leaders for not being able to put aside partisanship to get things done, but when we had a chance to correct that, we essentially allowed our own partisanship to reinforce there's.  We actually seem to have asked our leaders to go right on not getting anything done while our government heads towards fiscal oblivion and our economy has all the symptoms of D.C.S. (dieing civilization syndrome).  Just as President Obama will most certainly no longer be able to justly blame future economic woes on President Bush, the American voters will no longer be able to justly blame the politicians in general for our government's inability to get anything done.

If we cease to be a great nation in the next few years, let future historians know that it wasn't any of our leaders' fault.  It was ours, we the people, or at least the majority of us.

Post 2 : Worldwide Debate Over The Economic Crisis

We Are Not Alone If We Are

If your ideology defies reality you must call reality an ideology, so as to create an illusion of plausibility.

Based on my reading of both domestic and foreign journals on our current economic state, worldwide, and on the results of last week's election, something has dawned on me.  The debates between the Capitalists and the leftists needs to stop.  Unlike any fair and honest debate, it has not served in any way to advance our knowledge or understanding of economics.  Instead it has only served to deceive us.
 
Through it the world has been cruelly deceived into thinking we can defy reality.  It's as if a bunch of adults had taken up the habit of telling every child they see near a precipice they will fly if they jump off.  Only in this case, while the potential consequences are just as horrible, there can be no authorities to tell the real deceivers to leave the gullible alone.  The deceivers I speak of are, to be fair to them, self-deceived, but not all of them are unaware of the disingenuous tactic they've been using to advance their cause.  They just believe the ends can justify the means.

Their disingenuous means is to set themselves against a mythological ideology they call Capitalism.  The reason Capitalism is a myth is because it is an attempt to explain the natural phenomenon of market forces within human civilization by a means other than objective observation and study.  Instead of treating the facts of how market forces operate as the facts that they are, they stuff them into a fabricated ideology called Capitalism, so they can debate reality itself and not look ridiculous.

Like real isms it may have some purely ideological/philosophical elements, but they also make it include things that are factual and thus should be ideologically neutral.  e.g. Quality of goods and services naturally trends upward with higher compensation.  Competition does usually produce more favorable price to quality ratios for consumers.   Centralized decision makers intervening in market decisions tend to make services less sensitive to individual needs.   These are not the facets of an ism or ideology, they are part of reality.

Marxists and other leftists needed to create this label, "capitalism", in order to give their ideas which flew in the face reality the illusion of merit.  Or from their perspective, the delusion of merit.   I should add, as the recent re-election of a leftist president in the United States seems to indicate, this intellectual slight of hand has been very effective. It seems most of the world is now fooled by it.  A world-wide delusion has set in.  One where the above realities about how goods and services best get distributed can be treated as just someone's unenlightened or poorly informed opinions.  They're part of an ideology after all, right?  So the leftists can claim they have no more merit than their ideas that happen to fly in the face of such things.

Of course we cannot dismiss these factual ideas about product distribution by simply attaching them to a made up straw-man-like ideology and then posing another ideology against it, but why do I say contemporary leftist ideologies fly in the face of reality? Because they do.

The most fundamentally flawed of them is the one that laid the foundation for the others.  Marxist economics is based heavily on what has come to be called Marx's Labor Theory of Value.   In fact, according to my reading of Das Kapital, this was the base assumption of the book.   Marx pretty much came right out and said so.  'All value is ultimately derived from labor' would be my paraphrase.  While this is a great place to start if one wishes to argue workers are being unjustly exploited, property owners have no intrinsic right to their property, and all property is ultimately that of the community's, it's none the less a horrible place to start if you want your ideas to withstand any respectable application of critical thinking.

If all value derives from labor, what does that say about ideas that dawn on people while their not working?  What does it say about forests, rivers, mountains, and other natural wonders?  What does it say about talents that only a few people have at certain levels, like leadership, craftsmanship, artistic ability, creativity?  What does it say about human dignity? It's not a matter of having caveats for things in order to save the Marxist assumption about value from being untenable.  Value either derives from labor or it doesn't.  If it doesn't then Marx's Labor Theory is wrong from the very start of its argument.  If value does derive from labor than individual worth and dignity is nonsense and I have some cardboard homes to sell that should catch me a high price.

Obviously value does not ultimately derive from labor.  Labor is just another part of the set of goods and services that we human beings endeavor to distribute between ourselves and benefit from.  This isn't capitalism.  This is just how things work.

Marx may have been attempting through this base assumption to give individuals more dignity, but he actually did the opposite by equating their whole value to their ability to work, and even worse for the plausibility of Marxism, he forced it to stand on a foundation of dehumanization.  If your ideology's base assumption quickly falls apart, or even worse becomes monstrous, when confronted with both reason and reality, then your ideology is implausible.

It is this implausibility that made it necessary for the straw-man called "capitalism" to be created, so that the facts and realities that make Marxism implausible could be dismissed as just being part of its rival ideology, Capitalism.

The other major contemporary leftist ideologies, Progressivism and socialism, don't escape the same implausibility of Marxism.  It's not that they necessarily can't escape it, but they simply don't try.   It's too convenient for their causes to reject reality and pretend that anyone who tells them free market forces will ultimately maximize the effectiveness of the distribution of goods and services is simply part of a rival ism, "capitalism", and thus it's actually possible for them to know a better way.   As if someone may know a better way of dealing with gravity than assuming you'll fall if you jump off a bridge.

It's a titanic slight of hand and it's worked.  Now it seems most voters in the United States believe reality is just a nasty ideology they need not agree with.   My advice to the rest of the world is to stop depending on us.  Whether you agree with the leftists in this country or not doesn't matter.  Reality is not an ideology you can argue with.   If you defy it, as the left will insist on doing, everyone who depends on you will lose.

My advice to my fellow travelers in the struggle for individual liberty is to lean on one of our surest allies, reality.  She can be a harsh mistress, as the saying goes, but we gave it one really good try this election cycle to help our fellow citizens see what the left is doing and most of them chose not to see it, so now they have to deal with that harsh mistress.  There is much suffering ahead and I for one will not be shy to say, "I told you so".

As for all the people about to lose your jobs, we so called "heartless conservatives" will be doing whatever we can to help you, within reason of course.  Look to churches, synagogs, and other volunteer organizations if you have need.  We are all going through very rough times and we all will get through them the best if we come together and help each other. 

I just wish so many of us hadn't bought into and played along with that "capitalism" trick the left used.  Will these be the last words of a great nation to warn others who come along after us, "reality isn't an ideology!"?

Jesus Isn't About Social Justice : Good Thing Too

There's a popular story about some folks who took a copy of the Bible and cut out every part that spoke of social justice.  The claim is that there wasn't much left of it after that.

I have a hard time believing the story though.  They actually sell Bible's like that, ones where everything that supports of social justice isn't there.  You can go to almost any bookstore in the western world and find one for sale.  In fact I own not only one but several.  One's even a parallel version with four different translations side by side.  I actually like this version of the Bible a lot.

Is it because I like editing out the stuff I don't like in the Bible?  No, it's because every translation of the Bible I know of is like that.  There is no support for social justice in the Bible.

To read more specifically about social justice I recommend reading this,  Christian Brothers And Sisters, Social Justice Must Go.

As those who read me find out pretty quickly I'm an individualist and so it should come as no surprise that I might direct you to the story of Zacchaeus.  This is one of the clearest individualist moments in the Gospels.

Luke 19:1-10
New International Version (NIV)

19 Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; . 

Note that "he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy" i.e. Zacchaeus was the worst sort of rich man who made his money by cheating and abuse of government.  Sound like a familiar story to what happens far too often today?

3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

This is a big moment within the moment.  "He wanted to see who Jesus was".  In spite all that the local people could justly see as bad about Zacchaeus he wanted to know "who Jesus was".  That's the beginning of wisdom cubed.  Not only did he admit there was something he didn't know worth knowing but that something was Jesus Christ.

5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

Jesus addresses Zacchaeus individually and demands something of him, a place to stay the day.  It's interesting that it was a demand and not a request.  Jesus clearly knew something about this situation the rest of didn't or still to this day don't.  But the huge thing from Zacchaeus's point of view is that he welcomed Jesus gladly.  I suspect at this point he was saved, though of course this could just be Zacchaeus being hospitable to a guest and not the more momentous acceptance of Jesus Christ as his lord and savior.  So let's read on.

7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

The people are of course shocked at what they just saw happen between Jesus and this man.  Not only has Jesus "gone to be the guest of a sinner" but one of the very worst in their eyes.  I would add, in my eyes as well.  He abused government power to enrich himself and the oppression of government is bad enough without people exploiting it.  So unfortunately I could easily see myself in this crowd.

8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Here Zacchaeus seems to be painfully aware of what the crowd is thinking and doesn't want them to think his bad past has somehow been justified, so he offers a penance.

9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Jesus's words here are where a huge lesson manages to hide from many of us.

"Today salvation has come to this house".  Why?  Because of Zacchaeus's offer to do penance?  No of course not, not if we truly understand how Christ's gift of salvation works.

Jesus goes onto say, "because this man, too, is a son of Abraham."  So is Jesus saying Zacchaeus is saved because he's a Jew?  Is he saying he stopped being a Jew but became one again due to his penance?  Once again not according to the nature of Christ's gift of salvation or what the Bible says about being a Jew for that matter.

Especially considering Jesus then follows the sentence with, "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost."  And who are the lost?  Jesus told a few parables about "lost" things, sheep, coins, and each of them had two important things in common.  One was that having the nine out of ten whatever they were was never good enough reason not to make finding the one that was missing a priority.  And the second key thing was that whatever was lost, there was just one of.  It was never the lost group but always the lost one.  So when Jesus said, "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost", I'm pretty sure He meant the individual.  That is the lost message for many of us in the story of Zacchaeus.

What Jesus said about him being a son of Abraham was contextual, though not without great meaning itself.  He was saying Zacchaeus was just as important to Him as any of them.  But what the story of Zacchaeus should tell us is that Jesus came to save the individual and so much so that He risked the ire of groups of people in order to do it.

Jesus didn't die for your group.  He died for you.  His ministry, His mercy, His loving compassion is for individuals.  Anyone who attempts to help groups at the expense of individuals is clearly not being as they may claim, "Jesus in the world".

Christ's love is not compatible with social justice.  He calls me, He calls you, He calls individuals to reach out to individuals in need.  And it should go without saying but it doesn't, if we attempt to reach out as a collective to groups we do something bad.  And what that bad thing is, we separate ourselves from His ministry.

Each of us must try to see the individuals like Zacchaeus as He does.  Not in terms of socio-econonics like wealth distribution or in terms of one group of people being more or less worthy than others.  No group is getting saved.  If that was His goal He would only have come once and we'd all live in the Kingdom of Israel.  Individuals are who the son of man came for.  He came to save the lost, the ones.

If you're not certain I know what I'm talking about, read those parables, read the prophets for that matter.  Even in the prophets where Israel was being condemned God had a message to the individual that was faithful. He was going to save them.  Read about the times when God would warn someone of imminent destruction for some nation or city and that person would attempt to negotiate with God.  Always it would come down to saving the one, sparing the one.

Jesus Christ came to save Zacchaeus and He did.  The city of Jericho where Zacchaeus lived on the other hand, we don't know how many were saved that day, just that one individual was.

As long as the perversion of the gospel that is social justice continues to infect Christianity I cannot seem to say this enough.  Social justice must go.  The individual today climbs a tree to see who Jesus is and instead of seeing Jesus in us, the individual gets knocked to the ground and condemned for his greed.

On judgement day will some of us need to answer why we failed to help "the least of these" and then say that we "thought some were getting what they deserved, that it was social justice."?  I speak so that they can repent before it comes to that.