Thanks to Bryan Preston at JunkYardBlog and Kevin Holtsberry at Ideas etc., for the links. For those who are interested, I also have another blog - cut on the bias - that looks at media bias, crime and other issues.

VILLAINIZATION OF CHRISTIANS? Bryan Preston at JunkYardBlog thinks that Christians are a convenient target for Americans of different political stripes looking for an enemy to excoriate, including those who should be political allies in at least some contexts, like libertarians. I think his characterization is too harsh, but it does happen. It got me thinking about the odd disconnect that any political villainization of Christians is.

The villainization usually takes one of two forms: Christians are trying to impose moral strictures on the larger population; and Christians are collectively expressing harsh, ugly viewpoints that are inconsistent with personal liberty. I’ll deal with each in order.

In any society, laws are foremost for the purpose of establishing safety and order – the more complex the society, the more varied and complex are the laws. Any imposition of law is by definition an infringement of individual self-determination – I may choose in absence of the law to behave as the law would prescribe, but once the law is imposed my behavior is not a matter of choice but compulsion. Some laws could be interpreted in their simplest manifestation as primarily utilitarian in nature – a proscription against murder is to the general advantage of each individual in society. Other laws are founded more in a moral framework – for instance, a law against spouse abuse that ends short of killing. But imbedded in any imposition of law are purely moral determinations – why is one act considered more reprehensible, or a larger infringement on the collective’s interests, than any other, to the extent that one violates law and the other doesn’t even though the net outcome is not different? Why is a woman killing her five children more wrong than a soldier killing five terrorists? The answer emerges largely from moral assessment. Thus, the struggle in any democracy is most often between those who hold moral ideologies that compete partially or fully.

How does that work for the purposes of this discussion?

I’ll use an example from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds that isn’t a matter of law but shows the different moral ideologies in conflict. He said that while his sister was in college, a street preacher called her a “slut” because of the way she was dressed. The preacher grabbed her, and she hit him. Reynolds used that as an example of “the traditional values crowd” imposing their will on others. But who is to say that the preacher’s worldview is more or less moral than Reynolds’ sister’s? I’m not at all agreeing with the preacher’s behavior – in fact, I think it was ugly. But likely in the preacher’s viewpoint, the behavior of Reynolds’s sister was an example of behaviors that threatened the cohesiveness of society by encouraging sexual activity outside of a marriage relationship, as well as an abridgement, in his view, of God’s law, and thus almost any attempt to correct it would be justified. Conversely, Reynolds’s sister was behaving in a manner that in her worldview was appropriate, even benign, and likely in her view the preacher attacked her for not complying with his worldview, rather than for any objection that held moral merit. In either case, though, the decision about whether or not the behavior was benign was a moral one. The supremacy of the rights of the individual over the individual or collective power of others to impose their will on that individual is a moral tenet, not an objective truth like gravity or the rivers in the sea. So when Reynolds and others object to the preacher’s behavior, they do so on moral grounds – precisely the same grounds that the preacher used in guiding his reaction to Reynolds’s sister. Just because we prefer one position over the other does not make them categorically different.

The argument isn’t that all moral perspectives are equally valid; I don’t think that’s true. I’m saying that it is disingenuous for a libertarian (or anyone else) to say that a Christian who makes moral assessments of behavior is behaving in a way different from the libertarian. And since laws are mostly about making assessments of what behaviors are and are not appropriate in society, any law (including laws protecting individual rights from abridgement by individual or collective power) is by definition an imposition of morality.

The next issue is the characterization of Christians as collectively attempting to impose a wide range of strictures on society that society does not want. This is patently inaccurate and any honest person taking the time to explore the range of beliefs falling under the “Christian” umbrella would have to agree. Those who call themselves “Christians” agree about very little universally; it’s more like a fuzzy ball of matter that gets more solid (i.e. cohesive) as it nears the core. The core, in this image, is the Christians who hold most closely to a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, and those are generally known by the blanket (and increasingly perjorative) term “fundamentalist”. The outer fuzzy fringes are the groups with doctrine loosely based on Christian principles but who view them more as a good place to start than as a binding voice of God. There is almost as much variation inside the “Christian” community as outside it.

That fact doesn’t carry much weight with those who disagree with viewpoints of any of the variant Christian groups. It is convenient and efficient to characterize all as “fundamentalists” or as “imposing their morality on everyone” (as if the libertarian isn’t doing the same thing in advocating a strict individual-rights agenda). In this manner a vague, amorphous but menacing straw man called “the Christian right” is created, where the people in opposition define what “the Christian right” is and then tear it down point by point. The problem is – the straw man bears little resemblance to the Christian collective, and often not much more resemblance to the particular “Christian” group currently trying to get a certain viewpoint into the legal lexicon. The obvious advantage is that many Americans don’t take the time to deconstruct this image to find whatever truth is at its base, and the Christian groups have yet to develop their own strategies to combat the characterizations. It is helpful for those in opposition that the nation’s media have been complicit in both development and dissemination of this straw man image of Christians, and that the fragmentation of Christian belief systems create suspicion between the groups too (an interesting irony).

It is ultimately a shame that this ideological warfare is waged between groups that are, in many ways, natural allies – such as libertarians and many “kinds” of Christians (and there is more intersection between the two than many libertarians I’ve seen online seem to want to acknowledge). The fault lies on both sides. Hard-core libertarians are edgy on principle about the majority Christian worldview which historically has created many restrictions on society (the validity of the restrictions is open to discussion). Many Christians in turn are suspicious of a movement that seems to say “anything goes” – it appears almost amoral at first look, a license for “if it feels good, do it”. It takes a closer look to recognize that the heart of libertarianism is not amorality, but the right to individually determine one’s own morality with the bare minimum of concessions to collective safety and order for society. It is an unfortunate truth that many Christians seem to feel that given the legal option to choose immorality, most will, and thus legislating morality in line with their Christian philosophy is often a preference. But the stronger factor is that many Christians genuinely believe that ordering society in accordance with Christian principles will ultimately preserve society better than any other model. And I agree – the difficulty is, which version of Christian beliefs should be imposed? That is where the libertarians can swoop in and offer a haven for Christians – if you can’t make a decision about what moral ideology to prefer from a legal standpoint, it makes sense to allow room for the broadest range of ideological practices possible. It is an imperfect compromise, but one that would be workable more often than it currently is if both sides recognized the collective advantage.

From a personal perspective, I’m one of the “core” Christians, with a strongly literal interpretation of Scripture and a concomitant sense of responsibility to order my life by that understanding. If I made the laws of this country based on my view of “right”, most of those reading this would pack their bags and move, at least to Canada. But while I do believe this society would be better for a more Christian approach to societal ordering, at the same time I also firmly believe that Christianity is ultimately a moral decision made on an individual basis. I shouldn’t need a law against abortion for me to choose not to have one – all I need is the moral conviction that it’s wrong. And I don’t have to have a law against abortion to spread my moral conviction that it’s wrong – what I need is the freedom to be able to share my understanding of the issue and the rationale of my belief to anyone who will willingly listen. I may prefer to have a law against it, but it is not a necessary corollary to my belief.

That is where libertarians can appeal to me – because we are going to agree that it is better to have fewer laws, they because of their conviction of the supremacy of individual rights, and me because I would rather have no law than a law imposing a morality that I find repugnant. I think we would, for instance, agree that federal funds should not be used for abortion clinics and for offering counseling that encourages abortion – they would object to the increased involvement of the federal government and the use of federal funds for this type of personal problem, and I would object to the abortion advocacy paid for by my tax dollars. The reasons are different, the desired legal result is the same.

That is why the characterization of Christians as “the enemy” is damaging to the libertarian agenda. They are allowing a knee-jerk reaction to ideological differences to prevent them from finding concurrences that would, in the long run, advance their own agenda. I personally am trying not to let my own knee-jerk reaction to their sneers at Christians, which I find elitist, intellectually arrogant and ideologically ignorant, to abridge my willingness to find common ground.