I haven't posted in a while friends. The issues are large, intense and numerous but my energy and focus has been consumed by life. However I just received the Hillsdale College, "Imprimis" issue, which has an excellent article by the president of the college, Larry P. Arnn. Please read this and think on these things... Regards, Dr. Dan
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Many Christians, while they cherish religious liberty, seem to
believe that property rights, and the commerce that arises from the
establishment of property rights, are somehow un-Christian. At the same
time, a lot of free marketers seem to think that all we need are
property rights and the rest will take care of itself. Neither of these
views is correct, and I will explain why with reference to both James
Madison and Winston Churchill.
Pope Francis is one who sometimes seems to be an example of the
Christian who reads the New Testament as pointing in the direction of
socialism. Commerce appears, in some of his writings and speeches, to be
a grubby business purely based on self-interest—maybe even on
exploitation, the opposite of charity. This reading of the New
Testament—which I think flawed, by the way—is why Karl Marx, although he
was famously an atheist and militantly opposed to Christianity, praised
Christianity in one respect: that it declaimed against private property
in the name of an otherworldly denial of self.
In writing my book on Winston Churchill, I spent a number of months
reading about the founding of the Labour Party in Britain—Churchill
detested the Labour Party from the beginning, so I was interested in its
origin—and I found that Christians cooperated in its founding, and thus
in the founding of British socialism. There were two strains of
Christianity involved, one of them sounder than the other I think. The
first was a strain that took its inspiration from Jesus’s insistence
that we take care of the poor. The second strain—one that is much less
sound in exegetical terms—held that since Jesus came down to earth, our
task as Christians is to build a heaven on earth. Lots of Quakers in
particular seem to have thought that. Although many socialists were
atheists, many Christians took up with them for either or both of these
reasons.
Today in America we can see as well that at the heart of the leftward
movement in our government is a claim against property. The claim goes
this way: the divisions among us are as deep as they are because of
economic inequality, and if we do not address that inequality today, it
will worsen tomorrow. Many well-meaning Christians think this way.
On the other side, recognizing that property is at the heart of the
political argument we are having these days, are those who say that all
that is needed is to protect property rights. Get money right and get
property right, these people think, and leave it at that—leave morality
and religion out of the political equation. But that way of thinking too
is foolish. [For more follow the link below]
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/property-rights-and-religious-liberty/
