1. There’s a lot of talk about Kim Davis right now. My mind went back to the “Battle of the Bakery.” I have some thoughts to share.
I see the story as important not merely for what it says about today’s society, but also because it raises an important point of political philosophy to which most Christians (maybe even you, dear friend) have not yet given enough thought.
I’d love to hear your opinions, detractions, or additions. Please do weigh in, even if you strongly disagree. I see this Facebook Group as an opportunity to learn from others and “beta-test” my ideas before putting them in a more official form in a blog post or a book. So now’s the time to catch me if I stray from logic.
About the bakers: let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. The bakers were fined because of their refusal to serve the gay couple.
They were not fined for revealing the names of the people suing them via social media. There has been a lot of confusion about this issue. The fine was explicitly for their refusal to serve the couple. You can learn the details here: http://m.snopes.com/2015/07/03/sweet-cakes-melissa-damages/
There was indeed discrimination, and it was indeed illegal. Which raises the question, should discrimination be illegal? Should there be certain kinds of protected acts of discrimination? Who gets to decide which kinds of discrimination should be protected? To what kind of society would/could that lead?
I don’t want to live in a society in which my actions are subject to the voting veto of any majority, much less a majority that we now know to be explicitly anti-Christian. This society may one day see my entire belief-system as a crime. They may make it illegal to teach my children my beliefs. Or they may make it illegal to act on my beliefs.
I want to challenge an assumption that YOU probably hold. Why should the law require anyone to serve anyone else–in any way–ever?
Christian, you may think anti-discrimination laws are good (and they were incorrectly applied in the “Battle of the Bakery”). Why? By what principle do you say you can impose your moral system on a racist owner of a restaurant, while a secular society cannot impose its moral principles on you?
Because your moral principles are right?
They are right; but again, how do we justify imposing right moral principles on others? Which right moral principles, in which circumstances? We need a complete answer to this question, if our position is to be defensible.
In fact, this question has been answered. It was answered in the Declaration of Independence. Every person has a right to his life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Every person has a right to his property. These rights are inalienable, meaning they are true, whether or not a particular government recognizes them. (There are rights recognized by a government, and there are natural rights.)
The purpose of law is to protect people from the initiation of force by others. The government should define crime as the set of actions whereby physical force is perpetrated, as in murder, assault, robbery, and theft, and a long list of similar actions.
If we make a law that one must serve another, we effectively take away that person’s right to choose how to control his own life, liberty, and property. The one who refuses to serve another (even if the reasons be trivial or immoral) is not actually depriving the other person of the right to life, liberty, or property.
The baker battle illustrates the direction society will go when rights are neither understood nor protected.
It’s worth comparing the case of the bakers to the case of a white restaurant owner not wanting to serve a black person. That restaurant owner would be morally evil, but he would be within his natural rights as a human being. Whether or not society recognizes it, he has a right to be wrong, and he has a right to his property. As long as he does not impose force on another person, the government should do nothing to stop him. Otherwise the government and other people are making a claim to own his life, which is the essence of slavery.
Under the current laws business, owners are not allowed to discriminate. But the current laws are wrong. And they have been for a very long time. While the government’s force was being used to impose your own correct ideology on others, you may not have seen the danger of a malformed political philosophy.
Now you see it.
2. Q: As Christians, we are all part of the body of Christ. Does that mean individualism is wrong? Does it mean collectivism is right?
A: In some sense the church is a temple of living stones, and a body of many members, and a single bride. These are metaphors. Scripture also places importance on the individual soul. One’s own soul is one’s primary realm of responsibility and concern (1 Cor 9:24-27).
The plurality matters because the primary unit, the individual, matters. As Christians we work for individual reward. But the work itself often consists of serving others. We are individuals, and we do form a collective.
But “individualism” and “collectivism” are approaches to answering philosophical questions such as, “How do I know that my knowledge is valid?” and “What should my motivation be?”
Collectivism answers that knowledge and values are both “group” phenomena. Individualism counters that thinking and valuing are functions of individual men.
Questions for discussion:
1. Do “individualism” and “collectivism” mean what I’ve said?
2. What is your evaluation of “individualism” and “collectivism”?
3. Can you support your evaluation from Scripture?
4. Do any passages of Scripture seem to pose difficulties for your evaluation?
3. Five Wrong Assumptions about the Purpose of Laws in the United States
1. Laws should establish the will of the majority.
2. Laws should establish the will of a judge or legislator.
3. Laws should establish what is morally right and wrong.
4. Laws should establish a better society.
5. Laws should establish equality of outcome.
Why do I say these are wrong assumptions? If these are wrong, then what is the purpose of the law? It’s the same as the purpose described by Paul in Romans 13: to punish wrong-doers. Meaning, to punish those who initiate force against others to harm their life or property. That’s all.
v. 4b
For he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
The law, the rulers, the police, and the military exist for these reasons only: to define when rights have been violated, and to punish those who have violated them.
A ruler is a “revenger to execute wrath.” By definition, the power of the rule is to destroy. What happens when we place this power in the service of other goals, not related to revenge and “wrath upon him that doeth evil”?
What happens when this, the principle of Paul, and the founding principle of the United States Constitution, is overlooked?
1. The majority votes to steal from a minority.
2. Judges decide based upon personal opinion and we become not a government of laws, but of men.
3. Rulers impose moral standards on people who are not violating the rights of others, thus establishing the position of the state as a paternal supervisor forcing people follow someone’s moral code for the sake of “the public good.”
4. Rulers intervene in the nation’s economy, causing market distortions, lowering market efficiency, and creating disincentives to producers while at the same time rewarding laziness, corruption, and pull.
5. The government becomes the lowest sort of thief and the greatest threat to human flourishing.
4. Q: Is there more than one type of morality? Is there a distinctly “Western approach” to morality which amounts to, “It’s fine as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else?” Are there other kinds of morality?
A: This is a really interesting question. Just some random observations:
There are numerous approaches to the form of morality.
C.S. Lewis noted that in his time and country “morality” was widely taken to mean “conformity to society’s standards regarding sexual activity.” An immoral person was a promiscuous person.
Ayn Rand observed that most Americans considered ethics and morality to be a matter of restraining oneself from taking too much from others. Morality was a set of rules about what was improper or evil. The attitude was that people should go about their lives as normal, pursuing life’s practical needs, only stopping to think about morality when some crisis came up.
Rand promoted a better way of thinking about morality: she said all (or nearly all) of man’s choices are, in some way, moral choices. When a man goes to work, this is a moral action. When he buys groceries, this is a moral action. Anything promoting life is moral in this view.
Religious people tend to have a similar view of morality: that it applies to all of life. All actions are to be measured as good or evil. The more seriously one takes his religion or ideology, the more conscious is the evaluation.
Christians and Rand tend to disagree about the question of legalizing drugs. While both tend to agree that most or all of life’s choices are moral choices, there is a different idea about how morality should affect public policy. Say, I as a Christian know that lying, adultery, and robbery are wrong. Should I make all three into crimes? Why or why not? Why do I make robbery a crime, but not the other two?
I suggest that most Christians have not asked this question, and have accepted tradition.
Those that do ask the question may reason in several different ways. One is to try to model public policy after ancient Israel, a theocracy. A problem with this view is that we would be imposing biblical standards on non-Christians without any New Testament precedent for such an action. In fact it would seem to go against some New Testament teachings.
Another way Christians reason is from a pragmatist foundation. They may simply ask what the expected outcome will be if one or another kind of law is passed. One trouble with pragmatism is that it offers no standard of judgment. Even if you could predict the outcome, what decides which outcome is desirable?
A last and better way for Christians to reason is to make “man’s life” the standard of morality and also to make “man’s life” the standard of public policy. Man’s life requires that he be free to think and to create and use his product and his life as he chooses. As long as his actions do not deprive others of the same requirements, he should be left free. From this principle we discover the concept of rights.
5. Do you believe rights exist even if the government doesn’t recognize them? Why or why not? What is a right? Can it ever be right to violate a right? What are our rights?
Instead of saying rights exist, we can say rights pertain/apply, if you like. Rights apply to men regardless of whether any particular man or government recognizes it: aka they are natural rights.
Rights are principles stating which freedoms of action are proper in a context of societal life. What is and is not proper is discovered, not invented, because the requirements of man’s life in a social context are objectively provable.
Rights pertain to action, not result. Therefore they are negative: a right is a moral prerogative to act without interference. When such right is violated (the only way being, by initiation of force) the right still pertains/applies. The moral prerogative is still on the side of the actor.
We can also speak of rights as those things a particular government recognizes as rights. To be precise, that is a legal right, not a moral right.
What are our rights? Fundamentally: to live, which means to act in those ways man’s individual life requires, which means to produce, aquire, and dispose of property without restriction, regulation, penalty, or tax. By definition, it can never be morally correct to violate a right of another, and also it can never be one’s right to violate the right of another (which is a more specific way of saying the same point).
When we act in self-defense we do not violate the right of the attacker. In his act of initiating force, he has forfeited his right so that it no longer applies to him.
Few people affirm the above concept of rights, or are even aware of it. The key to understanding rights is to understand man’s nature as a productive, individual, thinking, living being, and to understand that the initiation of force is the main threat to man’s life as man (in a societal context).
The founding fathers lived at a time before these principles had been clearly articulated, yet even so, they understood much about rights–more than most leaders or professors do today. The principle of individual rights is essential to what America is and what it must become if we are to one day regain our claim to being a land of justice and of virtue.