Why Liberals (Sometimes) Love the Bible

Dear Friends:

Liberals will use anything to support their unsupportable worldview, even if it's the Bible. They will use the Bible when they can manipulate it enough to fit their agenda. How many times have you had a liberal throw Matthew 7:1 back at you when you mention that some particular behavior is immoral? "Remember what Jesus said, 'Do not judge.'" When you criticize a piece of unconstitutional legislation or a law that the president wants passed, you'll have "render unto Caesar" (Matt. 22:21) thrown in your face.

Every Christmas season we hear the inevitable revisionist version of the Christmas story in order to further government programs. Jesse Jackson was the first to turn Joseph and Mary into a "homeless couple" when he claimed that Christmas "is not about Santa Claus and 'Jingle Bells' and fruit cake and eggnog," of which all Christians would agree, but about "a homeless couple."1 He repeated his "homeless couple" theme at the 1992 Democratic Convention:

"We hear a lot of talk about family values, even as we spurn the homeless on the street. Remember, Jesus was born to a homeless couple, outdoors in a stable, in the winter. He was the child of a single mother. When Mary said Joseph was not the father, she was abused. If she had aborted the baby, she would have been called immoral. If she had the baby, she would have been called unfit, without family values. But Mary had family values. It was Herod - the [Dan] Quayle of his day - who put no value on the family."

Jackson made a similar claim about the biblical record in 1999 when he stated that Christmas "is not about parties, for they huddled alone in the cold stable. It isn't about going into debt to buy extravagant presents; the greatest Gift was given to them although they had no money. It is about a
homeless couple, finding their way in a mean time."2

We can agree with Jackson that Christmas is not about Santa Clause and all the modern commercial trappings, but to turn the biblical account of the birth of Christ into a political hobby horse cannot be supported by an actual study of the text of Scripture. Barbara Reynolds, a former columnist for USA Today, following Jackson's early lead, scolded the Christian Right for opposing government welfare programs: "They should recall," she writes, "that Jesus Christ was born homeless to a teen who was pregnant before she was married."3 Hillary Clinton, in comments critical of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's homeless policies, sought to remind all of us that "Christmas celebrates 'the birth of a homeless child.'"4 Rev. William Sterrett told The Providence (RI) Journal the true Christmas story is about the poor and needy. "We have a very clear picture about the whole thing," Sterrett said. "But the truth is Mary and Joseph were homeless. She gave birth to Jesus in a barn. This image captures the essence of a Christmas story because you cannot get any poorer than that." Pat Nichols, writing for The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA), concludes, "At the core, the story of Christmas is about a homeless couple about to have a baby. It is a story about poverty that most of us never experience, people with little more than they carry on their backs and a donkey to provide transportation."5 Have these people ever read the Bible?

• Mary did not engage in premarital sex. Her circumstances, to say the least, were unique (Luke 1:26-28). Many young girls got married as teenagers.
• Mary went to live with her cousin Elizabeth upon hearing about her pregnancy and "stayed with her about three months, and then returned to her home" (Luke 1:56). Presumably her parents owned a home and did not throw her out when they learned of her pregnancy.
• Mary and Joseph were actually married at the time she learned she was pregnant even though a formal ceremony had not taken place. Joseph is called "her husband" (Matt. 1:19).
• Joseph was a self-employed carpenter (Matt. 13:55).
• An edict from the centralized Roman government forced Joseph and Mary to spend valuable resources of money and time to return to their place of birth to register for a tax (Luke 2:1-7). Joseph's business was shut down while he took his very pregnant wife on a wild goose chase concocted by the Roman Empire to raise additional tax money.
• Typical of governments that make laws without considering the consequences, there was not enough housing for the great influx of traveling citizens and subjects who complied with the governmental decree (Luke 2:1).
• Mary and Joseph had enough money to pay for lodging. The problem was inadequate housing. The fact that "there was no room in the inn" (Luke 2:7) did not make them homeless. If we follow liberal logic, any family that takes a trip is by definition homeless and then finds "no vacancy" signs, is technically homeless.
• Joseph and Mary owned or rented a home. It was in their home that the wise men offered their gifts: "And they came into the house and saw the Child with Mary His mother, and they fell down and worshipped Him; and opening their treasures they presented to Him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh" (Matt. 2:11).
• Joseph, Mary, and Jesus became a family on the run when Herod, agovernment official, became a threat to them (Matt. 2:13-15).

In 2006, Jesse Jackson got it right: "The story of Christmas is about a couple - Mary and Joseph - forced by an oppressive imperial government to leave their home to travel far to be counted in the census."6 I'm amazed how politicians and social critics are quick to quote and misquote the Bible when they believe it supports their quirky political views. When conservatives appeal to the Bible, we hear the inevitable "separation of church and state," "you can't impose your morality on other people," "religion and politics don't mix." The Bible is clear on moral issues that are culture killers: homosexuality, homosexual marriage, and abortion. The Bible is also clear on the moral issue of poverty. Nowhere in the Bible is civil government given authority to help the poor by raising taxes on the rich to pay for wealth distribution schemes. In fact, as history shows, the "war on poverty" became the war on the poor.7

We would be more accurate to say, the Christmas story is about how taxes hurt the poor and government decrees can turn productive families into the disenfranchised by enacting and enforcing a counterproductive law.

SOURCES:

1 As reported in The Atlanta Journal/Constitution (December 28, 1991), A9.

2 Jesse Jackson, "The Homeless Couple," Los Angeles Times (December 22, 1999).

3 Barbara Reynolds, "These political Christians neither religious nor right," USA Today (Nov. 18, 1994), 13A.

4 Cited in "Washington" under Politics in USA Today (December 1, 1999), 15A.

5 Pat Nichols, "It's time to offer a helping hand," The Berkshire Eagle (December, 12, 2004).

6 Jesse Jackson, "Peace Is At the Heart of the Christmas Story," Chicago Sun-Times (December 19, 2006). In a January 8, 2009 article, Jackson once again describes Joseph and Mary as a "homeless couple": "The real story is about a homeless couple, immigrants ordered by the government to return home to be counted."

7 Thomas Sowell, "'War on Poverty' has left nation in poorer condition," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 18, 2004), A13

Respectfully,

Mark

Stories Behind the Christmas Carols

Dear Friends:

We sing them every year! We’ve sung them all our lives! As Thanksgiving ushers in the Holiday Season, we begin to hear their familiar strains on the radio and in department stores. As the days of December pass, we hear them more frequently – in pageants, programs and even by carolers who keep their tradition alive. Wherever we hear them, we find ourselves singing along! The carols of Christmas are the golden threads of the Season’s festive tapestry that actually turn on the Christmas spirit in our hearts.

But, as with so many familiar things, carols are such a basic part of our lives and our Christmas history that we often take them for granted. We hum them and hear them year after year, but we hardly ever think about the significance of the words or the origin of the lovely melodies. We can actually overlook the fact that somebody wrote these wonderful songs, and as a consequence, we miss much of their magic. Join me for just a few moments as we explore the fascinating history of the carol as a genre of music and the stories behind just a few of our favorites.

In their earliest beginnings, carols really had nothing to do with Christmas – or even with Christianity, for that matter. The melodies were originally written to accompany an ancient dance form called the circle dance which was associated with fertility rites and pagan festivities in the medieval Celtic countries of Europe. As the Christian Church established itself in these areas, the familiar melodies and rhythms of carols found their way into Christian meetings and celebrations. But because the songs had such pagan roots, the Church was very uneasy about them for a long time. In fact, a Church Council in the mid-Seventh Century explicitly forbade Christians to sing carols, and the Church continued to frown on carols well into the Twelfth Century. (See, kids, the old fogies have always been against hip music!)

As the austerity of medieval Christianity began to soften, a kind of renaissance took place and carols merged with folk songs that were the Pop songs of the day – the songs that were whistled or sung by ordinary people. History credits Saint Francis of Assisi with bringing about a new interest in the feast of the Nativity and the Babe in Bethlehem. The priests in St. Francis’ order developed a style of religious folk song called a lauda. Laudas had happy, joyful dance rhythms that were so catchy and memorable that the song form soon spread across Fourteenth Century Europe. The religious lauda got mixed together with a popular pagan custom called wassailing, in which people sang from door to door to drive away evil spirits and drank to the health of those they visited. What evolved from the marriage of wassailing and the lauda was the custom of caroling, which is still so much a part of our Christmases some seven centuries later.

By the Seventeenth Century it was clear that everyone was having entirely too much fun! So the Grinch – otherwise known as the Puritan English Parliament – decided to abolish Christmas altogether! That’s right … not only did the carols get the axe, but the entire Christmas Holiday was eliminated. People who continued to celebrate the birth of Christ with happy and lighthearted carol singing were actually accused of witchcraft and risked imprisonment or death! It took several dark and gloomy decades before the prohibition against carol singing was lifted and people again began to write and sing carols freely. The popularity of the carol increased rapidly throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and it was during this time period that many of our favorite carols were created.

Which brings us to our first fascinating Carol Story and to one of the most prolific songwriters of all time. His name is Charles Wesley – all you Methodists will recognize that name as it was Charles’ brother, John, who became the patriarch of Methodism. During Charles’ lifetime, he wrote over 600 songs (quite a catalog for any songwriter)! One of his most famous lyrics is Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, which many theologians say is the entire Gospel of Christ in one song. The melody for this familiar carol was composed by the famous Felix Mendelssohn almost a hundred years after Wesley wrote the text. How did the words and music come together? Here’s the scoop behind the carol….

The little known fact is that neither Charles Wesley nor Felix Mendelssohn would have wanted this music to be joined with these words. Felix Mendelssohn, a Jew, had made it very clear that he wanted his music only to be used for secular purposes. Charles Wesley, on the other hand, had requested that only slow and solemn religious music be coupled with his words. However, in the mid Nineteenth Century, long after both Mendelssohn and Wesley were dead, an organist named Dr. William Cummings, joined the joyous Mendelssohn music with Wesley’s profound words to create the carol we know and love today! (By the way, if you hear a slight whirring sound as you sing this carol … it is probably just the sound of both Mendelssohn and Wesley turning over in their graves as they hear us sing the words and melody together!)

OK, on to the next carol! We have all sung the fun but zany lyrics to the Twelve Days of Christmas, but – if you are anything like me – you have absolutely no idea what the crazy images have to do with Christmas. Is this just a nonsense song? Not hardly!! The roots of this carol go back to that very depressing Puritan era in England when English Catholics were not allowed to openly practice their faith. The Twelve Days of Christmas was actually written as a catechism song for young Catholics to learn the basics of the faith. The True Love in the song represents God and the various gifts He offers to believers. The partridge in the pear tree is symbolic as well. Apparently mother partridges will act as decoys to lead predators away from their young. Also, in ancient times a partridge was often used as mythological symbol of a divine, sacred king. So, in the carol, the partridge represents Jesus who died on the cross. The other symbolic images are as follows:

• Two turtle doves are the Old and New Testaments of the Bible – another gift from God. Doves also symbolize peace.
  
• Three French hens are faith, hope and love – the three gifts of the Holy Spirit. (See 1 Corinthians 13). The French hens can also represent God the Father, His Son Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
  
• Four calling birds are the four Gospels in the New Testament of the Bible.
  
• Five golden rings are the first five books of the Bible also called the Pentateuch, the Books of Moses, or the Torah.
  
• Six geese a-laying are the six days of creation.
  
• Seven swans a swimming are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. (See 1 Corinthians 12:8-11, Romans 12, Ephesians 4, 1 Peter 4:10-11)
  
• Eight maids a milking are the eight beatitudes, Jesus’ teachings on happiness. (See Matthew 5:3-10)
  
• Nine ladies dancing are nine fruits of the Holy Spirit. (See Galatians 5:22)
  
• Ten lords a-leaping are the Ten Commandments. (See Exodus 20)
  
• Eleven pipers piping are the eleven faithful disciples of Jesus.
  
• Twelve drummers drumming were the twelve points of the Apostles’ Creed.

Once you know the story behind the Twelve Days of Christmas, you will never hear the song again without being reminded of its deeper significance.

Now, we can’t ignore America’s contribution to our catalog of Christmas favorites! Did you ever wonder who wrote Jingle Bells? It’s one of the first carols we learn as children and is so much a part of our lives that most of us probably never even have thought about the fact that somebody really did write it! That somebody was James Pierpont and he wrote both words and music for the song which was to be part of a Thanksgiving program at his church in Boston back in 1857. Jingle Bells became such a hit that the children in his choir were asked to sing it over and over again every Christmas … and we have been singing it ever since!

Or how about O Little Town of Bethlehem? The writer of this carol was the influential American theologian of the Nineteenth Century, Bishop Phillips Brooks. Bishop Brooks wrote the beautiful words that we all know in 1868 in Philadelphia as he recalled a trip he had made to the Holy Land several years before. His organist, Lewis Redner, decided to write music for Brooks’ lyrics so that the song could be used by his children’s choir at Christmas. If anybody is still under the misconception that kids’ music is not as influential as more adult genres, consider the fact that both Jingle Bells and O Little Town of Bethlehem had their starts in kids’ Christmas programs!

And that brings us to one of the most beloved of all the carols – the lovely and elegant, Silent Night. The story behind this carol started way back in 1816 in Austria when a pastor named Joseph Mohr wrote the simple words as a poem. Then, as Destiny would have it, two years later on Christmas Eve, the organ in Pastor Mohr’s church broke down just before the Christmas Mass. Determined that the Mass should not be without music, Mohr gave the poem he had written two years earlier to his organist and friend, Fanz Gruber. Gruber immediately composed the melody and arranged it for two voices, choir and guitar – just in time for the midnight service.

But that was just the beginning of the impact of that simple song. The two writers of the carol thought they were simply doing something to get through a difficult situation with their church service. But almost two hundred years later, Silent Night is still the most performed and recorded Christmas song in history! In fact, there is a wonderful story about the song that comes out of World War I. On Christmas Eve fighting was actually suspended on many of the European fronts while people turned on their radios to hear Austrian opera star, Ernestine Schumann Heink, sing Stille Nacht. She was not only an international celebrity, but Ms. Heink was also a mother with one son fighting for the German Axis and another son fighting for the Allies. Her rendition of this beautiful song had the power to actually bring a few moments of peace to a very troubled world!

Such is the potential of a song and the challenge to songwriters. As you celebrate Christmas this year, let yourself experience and feel all the wonder of the Season … and then, let those feelings flow into the songs.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Respectfully,

Mark

The Third Rail of Academia

Dear Friends:

The Social Security system has long been described as the third rail of American politics. “Touch it, and you die.” You get electrocuted. If you should somehow survive, the next subway train will cut you in pieces.

There is such a rail in academia: the Federal Reserve System.

A fascinating article appeared on the “Huffington Post” on September 10. Its title was good, and its content was better: “Priceless: How the Federal Reserve Bought the Economics Profession.” The title is a veiled reference to a popular series of MasterCard TV ads. The author began with this, and never looked back.

• The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.
  
  This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed’s thrall, the economists missed it, too.

It is a long article and well worth reading. It presents evidence that the Federal Reserve for three decades has had almost the entire profession of monetary economists on its payroll, one way or another.

He offers this example. In 1993, Greenspan informed the House Banking Committee that 189 economists worked for the Board of Governors (a government operation) and 171 worked for the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks (privately owned). Then there were 703 support staff and statisticians. These came from the ranks of economists.

This was only part of the story: the proverbial tip of the iceberg. From 1991-1994, the FED handed out $3 million to over 200 professors to conduct research.

This is still going on. There has been growth. The Board of Governors now employs 220 PhD-level economists. But the real growth has been in contracts.

• Fed spokeswoman says that exact figures for the number of economists contracted with weren’t available. But, she says, the Federal Reserve spent $389.2 million in 2008 on “monetary and economic policy,” money spent on analysis, research, data gathering, and studies on market structure; $433 million is budgeted for 2009.

That is a great deal of money. This amount of money, the author implies, is sufficient to buy silence. He adds that there are fewer than 500 PhD-level members of the American Economic Association whose specialty is either money and interest rates or public finance. In the private sector, about 600 are part of the National Association of Business Economists’ Financial Roundtable.

If you count existing economists on the payroll, past economists on the payroll, economists receiving grants, and those who want in on the deal, “you’ve accounted for a very significant majority of the field.”

• In addition, the FED has editors of the academic journals on its payroll or grants list. “It’s very important, if you are tenure track and don’t have tenure, to show that you are valued by the Federal Reserve,” says Jane D’Arista, a Fed critic and an economist with the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This suggestion is dismissed as “silly” by Robert King, editor-in-chief of “The Journal of Monetary Economics,” who is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Just plain silly. Nothing to it.

If you do not get published in an academic journal, you do not gain tenure at the top three dozen universities in the United States.

The author cites a 1993 letter from Milton Friedman, which was sent to a critic of the FED, Robert Auerbach.

• “I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results.”1

How many economists who sit on the seven top journals as editors are connected to the FED? Almost half: 84 of 190.

Nothing to it. Silly. It’s just one of those things, just one of those crazy things.

The author cites testimony from Alan Greenspan before the House Banking Committee in 2008. This quotation is all over the Web. The version cited in the Wikipedia article on Greenspan states:

• Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”
  
  Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.
  
  “Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”2

And yet, and yet….

The author did not ask what should have been an obvious question. “Why was the Federal Reserve System immune to criticism from 1914 to 1975?”

Ask that question, let alone answer it, and you will not get your article published in anything but a conspiracy journal or LewRockwell.com.

IMMUNITY FROM 1914 TO EARLY 2009

The Federal Reserve System has been untouchable from the day that the Senate passed the Federal Reserve Act late in the afternoon of the day before Christmas recess in 1913, when only a handful of Senators remained on the floor to vote, and Woodrow Wilson signed it that evening.

There have been a few critics in Congress. In the Wilson years, there was Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh (the father of the flyer). He laid it on the line. His statement appears in his Wiki entry.

• This Act establishes the most gigantic trust on Earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized, the people may not know it immediately but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed…. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill.

In the 1930’s, there was Congressmen Louis McFadden, a former banker. He was the author of the 1927 law that prohibited interstate banking. (It was repealed in 1994.) He was a hard-liner. He moved to impeach Herbert Hoover in 1932. For a Republican, this was unique for his era. Seven House members voted with him. He even introduced a resolution to bring conspiracy charges against the FED’s Board of Governors. It also failed. He was hard core. He was a fringe figure, as hard core people usually are.

In the 1940’s, there was Jerry Voohis, a fiat money greenbacker whose claim to fame was that he lost to Richard Nixon in 1946. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was Wright Patman, the eccentric populist from Texas, who chaired the House Banking Committee. For the last three decades, there has been Ron Paul.

That is pretty much it, 1914 to 2009. This is why Ron Paul’s bill to audit the FED is such a breakthrough. For the first time since 1914, the FED is being called into question.

That is why the “Huffington Post” article misses the point. The economics profession, the American political system, and the media have been silent about the FED until the last year. This is what needs explaining.

ACADEMIA’S SILENCE

A generation ago, there was only one thoroughly critical book on the FED that was written by an academic free market economist: “Fifty Years of Managed Money.” The author was Elgin Groseclose, who was an advocate of the gold standard. The book did not go down the memory hole. It never got out of it. In 1980, it was republished under a new title, “America’s Money Machine.” It stayed in the memory hole. The good news is that it is now available on-line for free at http://mises.org/books/moneymachine.pdf.

All this is to say that the FED received a free ride from academia and everyone else long before it began doling out hundreds of millions of dollars a year to academic economists.

How was this possible? Consider these suggestions, each of which would make a great rejected doctoral dissertation topic.

1. The advisory cartels that shape public opinion and politics in every nation, without exception has always favored central banking.
   
2. The methodologies of all schools of economic opinion except Austrianism and Marxism favor central banking.
   
3. Politicians of all parties want a lender of last resort to buy government debt at below-market prices.
   
4. Investors and their brokers want a floor for stock prices.
   
5. A conspiracy of bankers has pursued a cartel protected by central banking ever since 1694: the Bank of England.

But, you may respond, some of these topics are suitable for a dissertation topic in a history department. Political science, too. Quite true, and the dissertation will be rejected on the day the ABD (all but dissertation) student proposes it. Yet the FED does not fund historians and political scientists.

The protected status of central banking is universal. This is not unique to the United States. Central banking is by far the most protected anti-democratic institution in the modern world. The supporters of no other institution publicly defend the institution on this basis: a necessary means of protecting the nation from its legislature.

“IT’S THE METHODOLOGY, STUPID!”

Modern economics, except for Austrians and Marxists, teach that economics is a true science. Its model is physics. The economists are unwilling to accept the fact that human beings, unlike rocks, make decisions. These decisions make economics a realm of human action rather than physical cause and effect.

The Austrians begin with acting individuals to explain economic causation. The Marxists (all eight of them) begin with the mode of production. The Marxists are collectivists in every sense, but they view economics as a science based on dialectical materialism, not physics.

There is a third group, behavioral economists, who also break with the mainstream. But they do not break with the mathematical formulation of their theories of human action.

The supply-siders have yet to develop their theories into a consistent system. There is no college-level textbook based on their views. Their main pitch is that the government can and should cut marginal tax rates so that the government can and should collect more revenue.

The methodology of Keynesians, neoclassical economists, monetarists, behavioral economists, public choicers, and even rational expecationists are united: it is possible for central bankers to create economic growth and avoid recessions by increasing the money supply. They argue about the correct rate of fiat money growth. None of them concludes: “Shut down every central bank and let the free market decide the correct supply of money, given the right of non-fraudulent contract.”

This is a legal question: What constitutes the right of contract in monetary affairs? This has been answered comprehensively and in great detail by Prof. J. H. de Soto. No other legal theorist-economist has ever presented anything comparable to his 874-page book, “Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles.” It is on-line for free at http://Mises.org/books/desoto.pdf.

The economics profession favors either central banking or else, in the case of strict monetarists, believe the central bank can keep the economy working smoothly by a constant increase of the money supply by 3% to 5% per annum.

CONCLUSION

Until Ron Paul’s H. R. 1207, Congress had remained comatose with regard to the FED ever since 1914. Bernanke is the first Chairman to face skepticism regarding the independence of the FED. This has to do with politics. Politicians want to find out which big banks got how much. This has nothing to do with the fundamental question, namely, the theoretical case for a bankers’ cartel enforced by a central bank.

That question has not been raised by 99.9% of academia, the media, and politicians since 1914.

The Powers That Be will keep the public bamboozled for as long as the economy does not collapse, either through mass inflation, mass depression, or both.

They have had a free ride for a long time. The central banks’ bad policies have resulted in what Austrian School economists had said would happen. Only they have provided a highly developed theory of how central banking necessarily distorts supply and demand, and why this distortion will inevitably be corrected by economic crisis. They do not say when, only that it must take place when the market vetoes the plans of entrepreneurs and politicians who believed in central bank planning.

The bills are coming due. The crash will come. The consumers’ veto will come. The FED’s free ride will end.

In the meantime, audit the FED.

SOURCES:

1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/07/priceless-how-the-federal_n_278805.html?view=screen.

2 http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/greenspans-mea-culpa/.


Respectfully,

Mark

State Constitutions and the Tenth Amendment

Dear Friends:

Our early state constitutions were our first constitutions. They were the fundamental laws of their states, in most states replacing the colonial charters. (Connecticut retained its colonial charter as its constitution until 1818; Rhode Island, until 1842.) They grew out of more than 140 years of their separate histories which gave them distinctly different, deeply rooted cultural and governmental traditions. They were products of the collective worldviews and values, the histories and corporate identities of the people of each of our states which were striving to win their independence, or had won their independence, from Great Britain.

These state constitutions established and defined the institutions of civil government for each state. They defined the powers of civil government for their respective states and placed legal limits on the authority and powers of civil government’s institutions, offices, and officials. Through these means and the formation of declarations of rights or bills of rights they placed legal limits on the kinds of laws each state government (and its legal “creatures,” the local governments) could enact. They stated rights of the people of their states which civil government could not legally transgress.

These early American constitutions, with their declarations or bills of rights, were Christian documents – some more manifestly, even beautifully, so than others. They honored God, recognizing His existence and stating (some more fully than others) certain truths about His nature: Almighty, Creator, Lord, Governor of the Universe, Savior, Inspirer of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and the like. These are Christian affirmations, not products of eighteenth-century Deism. Many of these declarations implied that the people of the given state are in a covenantal relationship with God: in their recognition of Him as the “Governor of the Universe,” the “Great Legislator of the Universe,” and their recognition of His divine providence. This covenantal relationship is particularly clear in their numerous statements – reminiscent of Deuteronomy 8, 28, and Leviticus 26 – of the necessity of “religion,” Christianity, to the preservation of virtue in the people and of the necessity of virtue to the preservation of liberty. They spoke of “rights,” “natural rights,” and “the law of nature,” but the context of these statements made it clear that these rights, and that law, are from God. Some constitutions had Christian oaths or affirmations – of belief in Christianity, Trinitarian Christianity, or Protestant Christianity – which holders of public office were required to make.

To one degree or another, these constitutions, bills of rights, and declarations of rights were based on a Christian view of the nature of man. They saw man as having been created by God (not “evolved”!); thus they saw man as being valuable (and far more important than animals). They saw man as being responsible, under God, for his actions: not as a naturally “neutral,” much less “naturally good,” product determined by his environment. They saw man as having certain inherent, God-given rights, liberties, and duties. Given the overwhelming predominance of Christianity in these states (contrary to the myth that America of the day was dominated by “Enlightenment” rationalism) – in religion, education, law, legal thought, legal education, and political thought – it is easy to see that such “rights” were based on biblical ethical thought. The right to life was based on God’s law’s prohibition of murder (with no pietistic, humanistic, antinomian prohibitions of capital punishment for those whom God’s law deems worthy of death). The God-given right to liberty meant freedom within the boundaries of Christian morality. The right to religious freedom or the freedom of worship meant the freedom to worship God within the boundaries of Christian morality (not an unbounded freedom of men to engage in all manner of sins under the guise of “religious worship”). The right to property was based on God’s law’s prohibition of covetousness, adultery, and theft.

Consistent with the Bible’s teaching that all men are fallen in sin, these governmental documents were founded not upon a confidence in human nature but instead on a realistic distrust of the nature of man – of all men including the officials of civil government. Consistent with Romans 13’s teaching that civil government is a ministry of God to protect those who do good and punish and so restrain those who do evil, these constitutions and their bills or declarations of rights saw the purpose of civil government, under God, as to protect men’s God-given rights against both the private and the governmental actions of men. Denying the neutrality or goodness of man and believing his sinfulness, they framed civil governments. Believing that all men are sinners, they made written constitutions, buttressed with bills of rights or declarations of rights, to limit the authority and powers of the rulers of civil government – and the authority of “great men,” minorities, or majorities in control of the machinery of civil government. They designed republican (representative) governments so that the people of their states could influence their civil governments, but they made these limited governments. They designed systems of separation of powers, with checks and balances between and among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of their governments to do what they thought best to prevent these institutions and officials from usurping power and violating the people’s rights and liberty. They implied (because they were products of each colony’s resistance to British tyranny), and in some cases explicitly stated the right of resistance against arbitrary, unjust laws and tyranny.

And, consistent with biblical teaching, they did not rely on the design of their constitutions alone, nor on that plus their bills of rights or declarations of rights. Rather, they taught that the preservation of liberty depends on the preservation of morality or virtue among the people, which in turn depends on the continuing influence of “religion,” or Christianity on the people. They talked of “free government,” but they meant by it a civil government which protects the freedom and honors the rights of the people, not a civil government free to do whatever its rulers think best. They taught that “free government” cannot be maintained if the people are not virtuous, and that “religion” is the foundation of that necessary virtue, and so of freedom.

These states’ constitutions, declarations, and/or bills of rights were more than works of necessity. They were the products of their respective cultures, or subcultures, histories, and cherished ways of life. They were, by the language of the Declaration of Independence, the constitutions, declarations, and bills of rights of nations, of separate and equal peoples which had won their stations as in principle equal to the other nations of the earth. The people of each of these states wanted to preserve and protect not only their individual liberty but also their corporate identities as sovereign states, their beliefs and values, their ways of life. They were willing to give up, at least for the foreseeable future, a small portion – a very small portion – of their state’s authority in order to better protect their individual liberty and their state’s corporate identity via the Articles of Confederation.

When the government of the Articles did not work well, they were willing to delegate a little more authority and power to the new governmental system established by the Constitution. But only a little more authority and power. Not enough to threaten their own state’s (or, in principle, any other state’s) corporate identity or its right to govern itself. Nor enough to threaten their states’ protection of their people’s individual liberty. For the Constitution’s federal system of civil government was intended to be consistent with the states’ constitutions, bills of rights, and/or declarations of rights: not to threaten them, nor the corporate identities, nor the ways of life they were framed to protect.

That is why, when thoughtful opponents of the Constitution – and thoughtful men who were neither opponents nor advocates of its ratification – raised legitimate questions about the efficacy of the Constitution to preserve and protect individual liberty, justice, and the rights or powers of the states to govern themselves and preserve their ways of life, so many states’ legislatures or ratification conventions proposed amendments to the Constitution protecting the reserved powers of the states. That is why what became the Tenth Amendment was so easily added to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution or prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Respectfully,

Mark

"I'm Not a Social Reformer, I'm Here to Preach the Gospel"

Dear Friends:

Suppose you are a member of the Mission Committee of your church, and there are a number of missionaries that you support around the world. There is a missionary who you specifically are very fond of, a bright, committed and active guy in the jungles of the Amazon, working among the indigenous tribes there. He sends back amazing reports about scores of natives converted to Christianity, evangelistic outreach, churches planted and so on. The Mission Committee is happy to support him, and your church is proud to display him as one of the most successful missionaries you’ve ever supported.

One day the Mission Committee authorizes you to make a mission trip to the Amazon and visit the missionary and see his work first hand. You pack up your video camera, your toothbrush, and clothes for a couple of days, and one Saturday afternoon, after a short and uneventful flight, followed by a long a very eventful ride in an old Landrover through a rainforest where the ground has never seen the sunlight break through the canopies of the trees, you are safely accommodated at the comfortable though far from luxurious home of the missionary. He is excited. He has talked to you the whole way from the airport, and now he has retired to prepare his sermon for the next day, giving you the opportunity to relax and even get some sleep.

The church service the next day is amazing. The building is full, scores of people, some from other villages, singing hymns, taking communion, and some of them even reading from the Bible. The tribal chiefs are there too, singing and worshiping with the rest. The mission is an obvious success, and you don’t miss to record it on video.

Then comes Monday morning. The missionary has told you that he needed to travel to the nearest mechanic shop to fix his car, so you are left in the village, and you have the opportunity to sleep late and then spend some time with the local people. You are awakened early in the morning by monotonous singing of several male voices. You look through the window and you see not far away a dozen of men on their knees before something that looks like a Tapir hide on a pole. They sing a few words, then lay prostrate before the pole, then back to their knees and sing a few more words. When you look at the faces of the men, you can recognize some of them from the church service the previous day, and in fact, you can also recognize the village chief who read from the Bible the day before!

You frantically dress up and go to find your translator to ask him about what you just saw. His answer is that the chief and the men are going hunting and they are praying to the spirits to give them good luck – in the form of a nice fat Tapir, of course. Before you can recover from your astonishment, the men end their prayer, get on their feet and go to their huts to get their weapons. One of the men, before he leaves his hut, grabs his wife by her long hair and starts punching her mercilessly in the face, yelling at her in their language. Then he pushes her aside and follows the chief and the other men as they disappear in the jungle. You ask the translator why the man beat his wife. The translator says that she was not supposed to feed her mother anymore because she has reached the “separation” age. “What is a separation age?” you ask, only to get the horrible response that this is the age at which old people are left in the jungle to die or be eaten by predators to save expenses for the family.

This is now too much for you. While meditating on the events of the morning, you hear terrible squeals. You run there to see what’s happening and you see a group of boys and a small pig. When you get closer, you see they are some of the boys on the church choir of the day before. But then you see the reason for the squeals: The boys are torturing the poor animal! They are using their knives to flay it alive, and you can see it still kicking and screaming in their strong hands. But the picture is not complete until a group of girls joins in and laughs merrily at the desperate squeals of the pig.

You run back to the house, disgusted and shaken, and you are trying to gather your thoughts. The translator, alarmed by the distressed look in your face, has come back with you and he is now trying to understand what the reason for it is. “Didn’t you see what all these people are doing?” you ask. “The prayer to the spirits, the man beating his wife, the old woman about to be sent to die, the cruelty of those young kids?”

The man is confused. “Yes, sir, I see them. But … what’s the problem with those things, sir?”

“What’s the problem!? Are you serious? These people were in the church yesterday, and today they act as if they have never heard the Gospel!”

The man is still confused. “But our missionary never told us anything against those practices.”

Now you know whom to talk to.

A couple of hours later the missionary is back, and you meet him, determined to corner him and get the truth out of him. The guy is in a cheerful mood; obviously he had success with repairing his car, so now he sits and listens to you with a content smile on his face. You tell him about what you saw a couple of hours earlier. He doesn’t seem moved.

“Well, Mr. Missionary,” you ask sternly, “what do you have to say about it? I saw a few practices this morning, clearly idolatrous and barbarian, and the translator tells me you never really told these people how abominable these practices were! Now, tell me the truth. What exactly are you doing here as a missionary?”

The missionary doesn’t seem to be concerned at all. In fact, he seems to have expected your questions.

“The truth, Mr. Sponsor, is this: I am a Christian missionary, not a social reformer. I am here to preach the Gospel, to save souls, and to plant churches. When I came to your church and asked for support, I didn’t say I was going to do anything else but those three things. I did not say I was going to try to change their society, their customs, and their political structure. I am not trying to tell them how to build their economic system. I am not here to interfere with their education or welfare programs.

“The things you saw are exactly this. You saw the chief and his men going to work. This is part of their economic system. Praying to the spirit of the Tapir is their way of preparation for work. It gives them the psychological and emotional preparedness for the economic task ahead. I know, it seems weird and backwards, but who am I to try to impose my American way of business and economics on them?

“The man beating his wife was only following an ancient custom. The family is a sociological unit, and there are specific rules in the family that are part of the overall social environment. I personally don’t like it, but again, I am not a social reformer, I am a missionary. And yes, it is important that her mother is left to die, because otherwise she would be an economic burden on the family. This is the way their welfare system works: Someone has to sacrifice or be sacrificed so that the rest have enough to eat. Can I interfere there? Based on what authority? I am here to preach Jesus to them and give them the opportunity to save their souls; I am not here to give them solutions to social problems.

“In this society it is not considered cruelty for children to torture animals; on the contrary, it is part of the educational system. All of the productive time of the men is spent providing food by hunting. The children need to learn from an early age to kill an animal, skin it, and cut it into pieces. They need to learn to reject their natural impulse to not inflict pain. It is important economic education, as well as political, because the same skill is necessary when the tribe defends its villages against other tribes. There is no mercy in the political world of the jungle, and I cannot allow my American prejudice to dictate that they should change their political and social rules.

“In short, Mr. Sponsor, my work is with the sacred, not with the secular. I am not a liberal reformer, and I am not preaching a social gospel. I am preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the salvation of men, not their institutions or their societies. That’s why I don’t believe I have the authority to tell the Christians in this village to change their social and political practices. The Gospel is about salvation of souls, not about changing cultures, and that’s what I am doing here.”

Respectfully,
Mark

Thanksgiving: A Religious Holiday All the Way

Dear Friends:

On Thursday, September 24, 1789, the First House of Representatives voted to recommend – in its exact wording – the First Amendment of the newly drafted Constitution to the states for ratification. The next day, Congressman Elias Boudinot from New Jersey proposed that the House and Senate jointly request of President Washington to proclaim a day of thanksgiving for “the many signal favors of Almighty God.” Boudinot said that he “could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining, with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.”1

Roger Sherman spoke in favor of the proposal by reminding his colleagues that the practice of thanksgiving is “warranted by a number of precedents in holy writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple…. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion.”2

There are numerous claims to the first official Thanksgiving celebrated in the New World. One of the earliest recorded festivals occurred a half century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. “A small colony of French Huguenots established a settlement near present-day Jacksonville, Florida. On June 30, 1564, their leader, René de LaudonniPre, recorded that ‘We sang a psalm of Thanksgiving unto God, beseeching Him that it would please Him to continue His accustomed goodness towards us.’”3

In 1610, after a hard winter called “the starving time,” the colonists at Jamestown called for a time of thanksgiving. This was after the original company of 409 colonists had been reduced to 60 survivors. Extreme hardship did not deter the survivors from turning to God in thanksgiving. The colonists prayed for help that finally arrived by a ship filled with food and supplies from England. They held a prayer service to give thanks.

This thanksgiving celebration was not commemorated formally on a yearly basis. An annual commemoration of thanksgiving came nine years later in another part of Virginia. “On December 4, 1619, 38 colonists landed at a place they called Berkeley Hundred [in Virginia]. ‘We ordain,’ read an instruction in their charter, ‘that the day of our ship’s arrival … in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.’”4

Records show that the first official Thanksgiving Day was celebrated on June 29, 1676, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. Gov. Jonathan Belcher had issued similar proclamations in Massachusetts in 1730 and in New Jersey in 1749. George Washington proclaimed a day of thanksgiving on October 23, 1789, to be celebrated on Thursday, November 27.

While none of these Thanksgiving celebrations was an official national pronouncement (no nation existed at the time), they do support the claim that the celebrations were religious and specifically Christian in their origin and purpose. “Thanksgiving began as a holy day, created by a community of God-fearing Puritans sincere in their desire to set aside one day each year especially to thank the Lord for His many blessings. The day they chose, coming after the harvest at a time of year when farm work was light, fit the natural rhythm of rural life.”5

On October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November 1863 would be set aside as a nationwide celebration of thanksgiving:

• We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.
  
  But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy…. I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday in November next as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent father who dwelleth in heaven.

Beginning with Lincoln, Presidents proclaimed that the last Thursday in November would be set aside for a national day of Thanksgiving. Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the celebration to the third Thursday in November “to give more shopping time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”6

This pragmatic and commercial approach to Thanksgiving has been adopted by our secular culture. Are we surprised that government schools want God out? If they keep Him in, they would be obligated.

SOURCES:

1 The Annals of the Congress, The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Compiled From Authentic Materials by Joseph Gales, Senior (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1:949-50.

2 Annals of the Congress, 950.

3 Diana Karter Appelbaum, Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984), 14-15.

4 Jim Dwyer, ed., Strange Stories, Amazing Facts of America’s Past (Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1989), 198.

5 Appelbaum, Thanksgiving, 186.

6 Edmund H. Harvey, Jr., ed., Readers Digest Book of Facts (Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, [1985] 1987), 125.


Respectfully,

Mark

Never Give Up. Never Surrender.

Dear Friends:

Alexis de Tocqueville was a keen observer of American society. Writing from the perspective of the 1830s, the French author concluded that the exceptional virtue, moral fiber, and self-restraint shown by Americans were due to the extraordinary influence of the Christian faith in this land. “It was religion that gave birth to the English colonies in America,” Tocqueville wrote.1

The religion that Tocqueville wrote about was Christianity. “While the United States embraced ‘an infinite variety’ of religious sects, Christianity stood in this new land as an ‘established and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or defend.’”2 Tocqueville considered America’s religious climate superior to that of Europe.

• All foreign visitors to America, Tocqueville noted, agreed that sexual morality was “infinitely stricter” in the new United States than anywhere else in the world. In America, he reported, all books, even novels, supposed women to be chaste, and no one boasted of amorous adventures. He was astonished to discover that in cases of sexual immorality, both the seduced and the seducer were scorned; he was equally surprised to learn that rape was punishable by death, while in France it was difficult to get any jury to convict rapists, even given much lighter sentences.3

The Puritan ethic was solidly entrenched in America prior to Tocqueville’s visit. His observations were later incorporated in his celebrated Democracy in America. But by 1830, European Enlightenment philosophy had gained a foothold in America and was making a significant impact.

Because of the strong influence of Christianity, Enlightenment philosophies were diluted enough so their impact was minimal. Even so, the incremental strides the movement had made were real. Add to this Darwinian evolution (1859), combined with Higher Criticism as propounded by Graf and Wellhausen (1869-1878), and a volatile mix had been concocted to destroy biblical ethics.

• Having turned away from the knowledge given by God, the Christian influence on the whole of culture has been lost. In Europe, including England, it took many years in the United States only a few decades. In the United States, in the short span from the twenties to the sixties, we have seen a complete shift. Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.4

In all of this, man became the interpreter of reality. The Bible was just another book about religion. What Tocqueville saw as differences between European and American worldviews have now become nearly indistinguishable, especially at the academic and political levels. The rallying cry of the nineteenth century was “freedom” without restraint. “To be free was to be modern; to be modern was to take chances. The American century was to be the century of unleashing, of breaking away, at first from the 19th century (as Freud, Proust, Einstein and others had done), and eventually from any constraints at all.”5

What we are seeing today is the fruit of a nation’s steady but determined rejection of the Bible. “Everywhere this thinking, rooted in godlessness, bears fruit today. We can see that the fruit is bitter. In all areas of life man is trying to take control of his own ship. Meanwhile the ship is out of control, and many live in a state of helpless perplexity.”6

The libertines began to turn the ship slowly. They knew it would take time. In terms of television, there is a starting date: November 1, 1972, with the airing of That Certain Summer. This ABC TV-movie featured Hal Holbrook as Doug Salter, a divorced father whose son comes to stay with him for the summer. The boy is shocked to learn that his father has chosen homosexuality and to live with his “lover” (played by Martin Sheen).

The taboo had been broken, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put the taboo back together again. That Certain Summer was the vehicle the homosexual community needed to make their lifestyle seem normative. They were not after drama, “they wanted propaganda.”7 Even though homosexuals are a minority, they persisted in normalizing their worldview. They never give up; they never surrender. We’ve won a few small battles recently. The Maine anti-homosexual marriage reversal was big. Do you think this 31st setback is going to stop the homosexuals? Don’t count on it. The New York legislature is about to vote on homosexual marriage. It will probably pass. Then it will be up to the voters … again!

SOURCES:

1 Quoted in Allan C. Carlson, “Our National Self-Confidence: Understanding its Decline and Supporting its Revival” (Rockford, IL: The Rockford Institute, 1984), 6.

2 Carlson, “Our National Self-Confidence,” 6.

3 Carlson, “Our National Self-Confidence,” 7.

4 Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1984), 28-29.

5 Roger Rosenblatt, “What Really Mattered?,” Time (October 1983), 25. Emphasis added.

6 Eta Linnemann, Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology?, trans. Robert W. Yarbrough (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 34.

7 Richard Levinson and William Link, Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at the Making of Prime-Time Television (New York, St. Martin’s, 1981), 133. Quoted in Montgomery, Target: Prime Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 77.


Respectfully,

Mark

4 Sheets of Parchment v. 2,032 Pages of Government Control

Dear Friends:

The Constitution of the United States was written on four sheets of parchment. If you count the Preamble and all 27 Amendments (remember there were originally only ten), it comes out to 20 typed pages. If you don’t count the signatures and amendments, you’ll have a document of 11 typed pages. No single Amendment is a full page. Many are only a single sentence in length. The First Amendment covers a multitude of freedoms: religion, press, assembly, speech, and the right to petition the government. It does it with only 45 words. Those original four sheets, about 4,500 words, were good enough to serve as a document to govern a nation.

Can you imagine a 2,032-page healthcare care bill with similar interpretive powers for Congress, the courts, and an always-in-power bureaucracy? Consider how much damage the two governmental branches have been able to do with just four sheets of parchment. What will they be capable of doing with 2,032 pages of a healthcare bill that will enable them to govern every facet of our lives?

Do you remember how the Supreme Court came to legalize abortion in 1973? Seven of the nine justices agreed that they had found in the “penumbra” – the “shadows” of the Constitution – the right to abortion. Here’s how Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, argued for the shadowy “right” to kill preborn babies:

• The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however … the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment … in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments … in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights … in the Ninth Amendment … or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment ….These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed “fundamental” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” … are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage … procreation … contraception … family relationships … and child rearing and education ….

Notice that first line: “The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.” But it doesn’t matter. One can be found in its shadows, and like shadows, they can be interpreted in almost any way, like the game parents play with their children asking what they see in cloud formations. “I see a bear… I see a dog… I see healthcare rationing… I see the right to abortion because the Supreme Court says it’s a right.”

But didn’t some Congressmen vote for the healthcare bill because abortion was stripped out? A lone Republican fell for this nonsense. Once government is in control of something, it gets to define it. Bureaucrats, judges, special interest groups, and all around guilt-manipulators will shine their lights on the dark places of this bill and create the shadows they need to force their long-term agenda on all of us. This healthcare bill is not about health; it’s about control.

It’s a shame that many in the pro-life community don’t see this. They believe they won one for the unborn. They haven’t. They only made it easier for so-called moderates to vote for a bill that one day will support abortion on demand and many new government mandated provisions that will affect us in ways that we cannot now imagine.

UPDATE:

• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-choice lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from going to subsidize abortions.
  
  “I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language won’t be there,” Wasserman Schultz said during an appearance on MSNBC. “And I think we’re all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that’s the case.”

While abortion is a violation of the sixth commandment, this healthcare bill additionally violates the second (sets up the State as an idol), fifth (makes the State our parent), eighth (supports legislative theft), and tenth (makes covetousness a national pastime) commandments. No one has described what we are in for better than Herb Schlossberg did in his book Idols for Destruction:

• “Rulers have ever been tempted to play the role of father to their people…. The state that acts like a wise parent instead of a vindictive judge has been an attractive image to many people. They include ecclesiastical authorities who have completely missed the point of the gospel warning to ‘call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven’ (Matt. 23:9). The father is the symbol not only of authority but also of provision. ‘Our Father who art in heaven…. Give us this day our daily bread’ (Matt. 6:9, 11). Looking to the state for sustenance is a cultic act [an act of worship]; we rightly learn to expect food from parents, and when we regard the state as the source of physical provision we render to it the obeisance of idolatry. The crowds who had fed on the multiplied loaves and fishes were ready to receive Christ as their ruler, not because of who he was but because of the provision. John Howard Yoder has rightly interpreted that scene: ‘The distribution of bread moved the crowd to acclaim Jesus as the new Moses, the provider, the Welfare King whom they had been waiting for.’
  
  “The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect us against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as [C.S.] Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. ‘Our whole lives are their business’ [God in the Dock, p. 134]. The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever. That is an evil impulse. The good parent prepares his children for independence, trains them to make responsible decisions, knows that he harms them by not helping them to break loose. The paternal state thrives on dependency. When the dependents free themselves, it loses power. It is, therefore, parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. Thus, the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.
  
  “When the provision of paternal security replaces the provision of justice as the function of the state, the state stops providing justice. The ersatz [artificial and inferior substitute] parent ceases executing judgment against those who violate the law, and the nation begins losing benefits of justice. Those who are concerned about the chaos into which the criminal justice system has fallen should consider what the state’s function has become. Because the state can only be a bad imitation of a father, as a dancing bear act is of a ballerina, the protection of this Leviathan of a father turns out to be a bear hug.1

If this bill passes the Senate, abortion will be the least of our problems because the government will have a new definition of welfare to work with. Healthcare can and will be interpreted to mean what the judges say it means. We are under a Constitution, but as history has shown the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

SOURCE:

1 Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and its Confrontation with American Society (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1983), 183–84.


Respectfully,

Mark

Is Socialism Biblical?

Dear Friends:

Doesn’t the Bible call for Socialism? After all, weren’t the Israelites required to give up their income for the benefit of 1) the priests; 2) the Levites; 3) the poor; 4) those in debt; 5) those countrymen who were slaves; and 6) the farmers were not allowed to pick their produce up from the ground in order to give to the poor. Isn’t that Socialism?

To paraphrase Paul, “I think not!”

In none of the above instances was the “Socialism” involved enforceable by the civil State. Thus, to talk of “Socialism” is misleading. The measures are socialistic if by socialism you mean private application of charity by individuals, families, and churches in order to benefit the poor and needy of society. It is emphatically not socialism if by that label you mean taxation and redistribution enforced by the State’s gun. Big difference.

Christian Socialists have employed this sort of equivocation for 120 years as an intellectual bait-and-switch. For example, in 1889, a group of Boston social gospelers formed the Society of Christian Socialists, and immediately began publication of a monthly journal called The Dawn. Its mission statement read:

• The Dawn stands for Christian Socialism. By this we mean the spirit of the Socialism of the New Testament and of the New Testament church. In man’s relations to God, Jesus Christ preached an individual gospel; accordingly in their relations to God, Christ’s disciples must be individualists. In man’s relations to man, Jesus Christ preached a social gospel; accordingly, in these relations, his disciples must be socialists.1

Notice the squirrely switch between the use of the capitol “S” “Socialism,” and the call for Christians to be lower-case “s” socialists. By the same logic, all humans are Humanists, all people who exist are Existentialists, all people who take communion are Communists, all rational people Rationalists, all people who eat cereal are Serial Killers, ad nauseam. These guys knew Jesus didn’t call for State Socialism, meaning government-power to redistribute wealth. Yet they could play off of the fact that Jesus called us to be hospitable and charitable in our social life among our fellow man – thus, we should all be good “socialists.” Once the Christians get on board with “socialism” and helping the poor in general, then the latent appeals for government Socialism start coming to the fore, as Christians are taught that all property should be socialized, “managed,” and receive “equitable distribution.”

Of course Christians are obligated by the Word of God to take care of the “priests” and “the poor,” but never does God’s Word authorize the civil government to tax people and redistribute wealth for these goals. Each of these measures was part of God’s law, but not part of the subset of God’s law that established and limited civil law. To make this point clearer, let us look briefly at each of the instances related above:

1) the priests and 2) the Levites: The Old Testament law required that a portion of yearly tithes go to support the priests and Levites. The priests and Levites were the temple workers and servers for the twelve tribes. No one else was allowed to perform these offices. The offices themselves came at a price: priests and Levites were not allowed to own land. In exchange for not having their own productive capital, God mandated they live off of the charity of those who did.

Yet God nowhere said that the civil rulers could use the force of the sword of the State in order to collect this tithe. The civil authority had no power to collect it by force, nor to punish those who did not pay up. It was for this reason that the prophet Malachi could complain about the people “robbing God,” for they were not paying their tithes [Malachi 3:8–12]. The punishment was not to send tax agents knocking on doors or garnishing of wages. The punishment was left up to God, Who Himself could bring punishment in the form of historical sanctions: captivity, plague, etc. God would also pour out financial blessing upon obedience [Malachi 3:10–12]. God was very serious about the tithe, but He did not empower the State to carry it out. No Socialism here.

An exception to this may appear in Nehemiah’s reinstitution of the law in Nehemiah 12:44; 13:10–13. But this was Nehemiah’s solution to the problem, and not explicitly commanded by God. Even here, it does not say that the “rulers” and collectors mentioned were empowered with the sword to do the collecting or punish those who refused. Further, they did not even have the knowledge of how much each household had in order to verify that what was given was a tithe. No IRS here. No Socialism here.

3) the poor: There were several “poor laws” in the Old Testament; none of them involved State Socialism. The yearly tithe went to the Levites at a national level, at a central national location. Every third year, however, the tithe remained locally, and was distributed locally to the resident Levites, aliens, orphans and widows [Deuteronomy 14:28–29] (it says nothing of “the poor” in general). Again, nothing is said of government power to collect these tithes or punish those who did not give. The Israelites were expected to give voluntarily and themselves knew God would punish them if they refused, and bless them immensely as they obeyed [Deut. 12:19–21].

4) those in debt: Again this can only refer to certain poor laws, where God’s law allowed for poor brethren to receive no-interest loans for up to six years. In the seventh year any unpaid balance of the loan was cancelled. This was a measure designed to allow the poor brethren to borrow money to get back on their feet. Nevertheless, God gave the civil State no authority to regulate, monitor, or enforce these loans, nor to punish those who refused to lend. This law did not apply to foreign nationals living among the Israelites. Of them a lender could charge interest and continue to receive it indefinitely until payoff. [See Deuteronomy 15:1–11].

5) those countrymen who were slaves: Jews who through debt, theft, or need were sold into slavery would face a six-year term. At the end of this term, they could decide whether to remain with their master, or return free into the marketplace. If they decided to return free, the master was obligated by law to give his former slave clothing and enough money to get going [Deuteronomy 15:12–15]. This income was indeed forfeited by the master, although the slave would have more than earned it through seven years of unwaged labor. Had he been a productive worker, the master would have profited greatly. The master would still be well ahead after giving him his freedom bonus. Had the slave been an “unprofitable servant” [Matthew 25:30], however, causing his master loss, then the master would surely be glad to see him go, and would surely pay to send him along and avoid any future losses. The aim of Old Testament slavery, of course, was to avoid such a situation. It aimed at reform and restoration of the unsuccessful individual. By spending six years working under a wise, successful, and productive master, a slave should learn the skills, mentality, and wisdom to succeed on his own once free. In this case, the six years of servitude and the payment upon release profited everyone involved.

All of this said, God’s Word adds nothing to this about the role of the civil State, nor of civil punishments for those who refused to obey the ideal.

60 the farmers were not allowed to pick their produce up from the ground in order to give to the poor: By law, owners of property were to not harvest the corners of their field, nor pick up sheaves that fell to the ground during harvest. These were left for the poor of the land to come along and “glean.” The gleaning laws gave the poor an outlet, for a very limited time of the year, for a very limited amount, to get food for themselves. They would have to do the hard work of finding and harvesting the slim pickings for themselves, and they would have to do so in competition with all other gleaners. As part of the charity involved here, this was good practice for becoming productive in a competitive market place.

Note again: the State did not enforce gleaning. The State had no mandate from God to punish those who refused to leave their corners unharvested. The State did not collect the gleanings and then hand them out to the poor: the poor had to go pick them up themselves.

So, in none of these alleged measures of socialism, do we find anything that genuinely earns the name “Socialism.” In no instance did the State have the power to redistribute wealth. In each instance, the “socialism” depended entirely upon individuals obeying God’s mandate for charity towards the Levite, the poor, and the disadvantaged.

God kept the State out of the charity business. There’s a good reason for this. If the power of the sword ever mixed with the power to distribute bread, there would be no end to political corruption: the State would use its powers of distribution to control the people; worse, people who grew dependent upon the State’s bread would also then be dependent upon the State’s sword. Acquiring provisions would no longer be an issue of personal responsibility, but of institutionalized force. It would teach the dependent of all shapes and sizes that deriving food at gunpoint is legitimate. Thus, State socialism would be nothing short of legalized armed robbery.

When Jesus fed the 5,000, the people were amazed. But Jesus realized they were not following Him because of the miracle, but because of the free bread:

• Jesus answered them and said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves, and were filled. Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man shall give to you, for on Him the Father, even God, has set His seal” [John 6:26–27].

When Jesus knew that the people would try to make Him king because of His generous welfare, He fled:

• When therefore the people saw the sign which He had performed, they said, “This is of a truth the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus therefore perceiving that they were intending to come and take Him by force, to make Him king, withdrew again to the mountain by Himself alone. [John 6:15]

Jesus was wiser than to mix civil power with welfare. This reflects the wisdom of Old Testament law. Christians need to understand this.

For those who wish to pursue this further, read David Chilton’s Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators, and look for Joel McDurmon’s forthcoming refutation of the New Social Gospel in God versus Socialism: A Biblical Critique of the New Social Gospel.

SOURCES:

1 Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 171.


Respectfully,

Mark