Review of Bible and Government - part 1

Written by Dr. John M. Cobin, an investment adviser and Visiting Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Bible and Government(subtitled Public Policy from a Christian Perspective) gives a view of government from a Christian perspective most Christians would probably be surprised to read.

This is not Mike Huckabee government, folks.

And he doesn’t wait till chapter one to get started. In the introduction he asks four basic questions (p. 5):

1. What kind of government should Bible-believing Christians support?
2. What public policy must be obeyed?
3. When, if ever, should Christians revolt?
4. To what extent is the Christian’s submission to the state qualified?

These questions Dr. Cobin seeks to answer in his book.

He then discusses three dominant philosophies of biblical public policy that have emerged (p. 7-9).

…theonomists (or Christian Reconstruction) would tend to allow civil government action that assists in the establishment of the postmillennial golden age. …Anabaptists… advocate non-participation in most civil government offices. [ed.-in some cases, this leads them to pacifism]. …Still a third perspective,…seems to offer a revitalized vision of the divine right of kings….if God ordains the state, then nearly all of what it decrees must be obeyed as if God Himself had issued the order.

Reformed Christians (like Huckabee) see civil government as “a redeemable and, hence, potentially useful institution that may be placed in the service of God’s kingdom as a restraint against evil.” This is what most evangelicals mean by Cobin proposes that at least part of civil government is beyond the pale of transformation.

What might surprise some Christians is Dr. Cobin’s interpretation of 1 Samuel 8:4-20. Israel is asking for a king and Samuel is trying to tell them what a king will mean, especially in the area of taxation.

Another of Cobin’s premises is that civil government is, in fact, a lethal institution. He quotes extensively from a speech that includes data that can be found on this website.

Well, that’s the introduction, there’s more to come.

The Evangelical Crackup (?)

A tip of the conservative cap to the Recess Supervisor for this article by David D. Kirkpatrick from the New York Times magazine. It’s long, 8,000 words, but for anyone interested in where Christianity and politics are going, it is an essential read.

Mr. Kirkpatrick covered the movement and the 2004 election. For this article he went to Witchita, Kansas to see what, if anything, had changed.

I’m not going to comment much on this article, since I wrote my own post on the subject recently.

UPDATE: Jason at The Independent Conservative takes Christians to task over their voting and promises to post on why Christians should support Ron Paul. The Crossed Pond has a similar question.

Nick Schweitzer, Jessica McBride, and Rick Esenberg weigh in on the Giuliani endorsement by Pat Robertson.

GOP notes

At Politico.com today it’s all GOP, all the time.

First a poll finds Thompson appeals to churchgoers.

Giuliani leads Thompson 29 percent to 21 percent among Republicans generally, the new national CBS News poll suggests.

But weekly Republican churchgoers back Thompson by a margin of 29 percent to 19 percent for Giuliani — roughly tying John McCain.

Then Republicans trade blows at fiery debate.

After two weeks of sparring from afar, the top GOP presidential candidates took their attacks up close Sunday, using the first round of their debate here to question one another’s conservative credentials.

Even Rudi claimed to be conservative. The four co-called top tier candidates received most of the questions.

While the lesser-knowns were brought into the conversation more toward the end, they were largely used as foils for the front-runners.

Then the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Straw Poll” found Mike Huckabee winning among those people attending the event but Mitt Romney winning the online poll.

The 5,775-vote total included thousands of people who had voted online, and might have become eligible by paying as little as $1 to join FRC Action, the legislative action arm of the Family Research Council.

Heck, the Romney campaign could have had hundreds just in Mitt’s pocket change.

Although the audience of evangelicals at the Washington Hilton was not told about the alternate count, the crowd favorite by a mile among the 952 attendees who voted in person was former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. He took 51 percent of the in-person votes, compared to just 10 percent for the former Massachusetts governor.

Organizers said they wound up with more than 2,200 attendees, plus more than 400 journalists. Further complicating the voting totals, about 600 attendees voted online, so making it tougher to generalize about the discrepancies, organizers said.

Boy, what confusion. So essentially it doesn’t mean much.

The scrambled results obscured a clear message: To the degree that the group represents evangelical voters, they remain flummoxed about where to put their prestige and muscle in the ’08 race.

Even more surprising, Democrats got 32 of the online votes and 10 votes from those attending. So much for the monolithic Christian right vote, although it was overwhelmingly Republican.

Religious test?

According to Robert Weitzel writing at Fighting Bob

Contrary to Article VI of the United States Constitution, which states in part that, “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,” the realpolitik of American political campaigning is that all candidates for public office must pass a religious test. This is not a de facto religious test. It is the real McCoy. But it has become the de facto law of our Christian nation.

This, of course, depends on one’s point of view. Weitzel and liberals like him (not all, just those like him) feel religion has too large a place in politics. He illustrates,

Imagine the scurrilous hay right-wing pundits would make of the following blasphemous snippets:

John Adams: “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”

James Madison: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”

Shall we duel with quotes? Jefferson wrote most of the Declaration of Independence, which contain these words,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Or another?

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

But more than that Weitzel should check his sources first.

This quotation has so far not been found in any of the sources available to us. However, it may possibly be a misleading paraphrase of the following:

“…but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, & perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in church & state: that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated & sophisticated, by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth & power to themselves, that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue & cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ.” - Thomas Jefferson to William Baldwin.

Hmmm. Should I trust the rest of his citations then?

John Adams? Let’s get the context

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!” But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.

Hmmm.

James Madison? Well, one out of three isn’t bad. But Joseph Leconte from the Heritage Foundation gives that quote and many others and makes this point

Liberals make Madison into an anti-religious rationalist, determined to quarantine the republic from the disruptive influence of faith. Conservatives, when not trying to Christianize him, invoke Madison’s faith-friendly rhetoric to justify the latest attempt to reinsert religion in the public square. The truth is more complicated. What is nearly indisputable is that his religious instincts fueled much of his political activity.

But all that aside, what does Weitzel propose for those for whom religion is the foundation of their values? Ignore them?

But at the same time any opposition I have to Romney is not because he’s Mormon. Any opposition would come because of his record as governor of Massachusetts.  Any opposition to Obama would not be because of his religious beliefs or whether he attended Muslim school or not.

But my political values come from my faith.

Could Huckabee be Mr. Right?

Continuing on the recent theme of the Christian Right bolting the Republican Party comes this from Jonathan Martin at Politico.com,

Social conservatives can stop looking for their perfect presidential candidate. There is one Republican who, given his credentials, would appear the likeliest to rally evangelicals and others on the Christian right.

He is resolutely anti-abortion, supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and is a man of deep faith. He has been elected — and reelected — to statewide office in a Democratic-leaning state.

And he’s right under their noses: Mike Huckabee.

But other conservatives have some trouble with him such as Club for Growth over his fiscal policy while governor. He also opposes school choice and opposed tougher illegal immigration measures. He may also have his own Willie Horton, Wayne Dumond.

But I think to most people, he’s just a pleasant social conservative who can’t win the nomination for president.  Back to Mr. Martin,

“They all say Mike Huckabee is a great guy — and then they say he can’t win,” laments campaign manager John “Chip” Saltsman, explaining what inevitably happens when Huckabee meets with top leaders of the religious right.

“‘If you get traction, come back to us,’” Saltsman recounts them as saying, to which Huckabee, in his typically lighthearted manner, replies, “Guys, you are my traction.”

It’s the consummate political predicament for political dark horses — they can’t be viable if they don’t have a wellspring of support, but if they don’t have a wellspring of support, they can’t be viable.

“It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Saltsman admits.[Emphasis mine]

And so goes Mike Huckabee’s chances. A good guy. A better conservative than some of the rest in the Republican field, especially among the front-runners, and yet, unelectable, even by the leaders of the Christian Right who are threatening to bolt to a third party.

One wonders why they couldn’t unite behind Huckabee.

Because he “can’t win.”

But if they’re going to throw away their vote on some party anyway ….

Christian conservatives and the election of 2008

The big question of the campaign season for the Republicans, even more than health care or Iraq even though it hasn’t been discussed at many of the debates except obliquely, is whom are Christian conservatives going to support in the election.

Politico.com had a story on evangelicals turning on Fred Thompson, Salon.com had an article on the religious right’s possible blackballing of Giuliani, The Week magazine in its Controversy of the week (available to subscribers only, but I will note the article referred to at the end of this post), noted articles that talked about Christian Conservatives threatening to boycott the GOP. Locally, grumps pulled together three posts by Wisconsin bloggers about this.

My thinking was spurred by a question by the Recess Supervisor in a comment to this post. Some of this post will no doubt make it into the “About Me” page that folks keep clicking on.

For myself, I am a Christian and I am conservative on most things. I vote my values and these come from my understanding of what the Bible says. I believe if everyone did that the world would be a better place.

But I have always had the tug between politics, which I like and Christianity which I would like to minister to others. Although I wouldn’t go as far as Mark Daniels does here, I am certainly aware of what my responsibilities are as a Christian.

I would not consider myself a social conservative on every issue. I am aware that not everyone in America agrees with my particular point of view. In fact, I would say that no one agrees with me on everything. There are homosexuals in America. Although I believe homosexuality to be wrong and see the degradation of the tradition of marriage as unfortunate, I don’t believe in enacting laws to perpetuate that. I consider divorce wrong also, but I prefer to persuade people rather than enact laws to forbid people.

I like politics. That’s why I blog and read and watch TV and listen to radio. But my purpose in being engaged in politics is not to impose my Christianity on others in a hurtful way. Or in a way that they don’t have a choice. This is probably complicated for others to see. I am not seeking to convert America to a theocracy or revert it to a Christian nation. Nor do I believe most Christians want this.

Many of us, however, do long for the days when we could leave our doors unlocked at night, when you knew your neighbors, when crime and drug use wasn’t prevalent, etc., and we wouldn’t mind going back to those times.

But, of course, that’s impossible. And maybe that feeds some of our frustration.

Politics is my hobby. But I don’t believe politics will not solve the problems of the world. That can only happen by a life-changing experience with Jesus Christ.

So how do I think Conservative Christians will vote? Most of my acquaintances wondered who in the world Christians would vote for. Democrats? Not hardly. Would they sit out? That seems to fly in the face of what they’ve been trying to accomplish these past several years. Some third party? Which? The Constitution Party? The Prohibition Party (PDF file)? Both claim to be a Christian party.

My gut is that the eventual nominee will make soothing noises toward the Religious Right (such as Giuliani’s promise to appoint judges like Roberts and Alito), while trying not to appear to be in their pocket. And most evangelicals will vote Republican as they have in the past, although the religious right has never been as monolithic as the MSM and opponents try to make it appear.

My gut may be wrong. Others may wish (and probably already have) to join in. Clarifications may appear in the comments below.

The articles reference in the Week:

Conservatives Consider 3rd-Party Run
The religious right’s threat
Will GOP Pander Its Way to Defeat?
Conservative Threat to Rudy Is Just Bluster
Christian Conservatives Consider Third-Party Effort
Why conservatives like Giuliani

Nuggets from the Playground

If you are at all interested in politics and are not checking in regularly at Playground Politics, you should be. A political insider (my guess, I could be wrong; it wouldn’t be the first time), this anonymous blogger regularly exposes idiocy in our politicians, mostly Republican, but I think it’s because he is Republican, though moderate (?) and really likes the party.
He does occasionally point his pen toward the Democrats as he does here.

And I think he’s come up with a reason why evangelicals haven’t connected whole-heartedly with a GOP presidential candidate, although I don’t think he realizes his brilliance here, yet. We’re waiting for the non-pervert (is that a word?).

Revisiting Moyers

Updating last week’s post on Moyers’ comment on Rove’s retirement. One commenter pointed me to this post on Moyers’ blog. Then there was this post by the ombudsman, who appears to not have that great a relationship with Moyers.

I’m not sure now what information Moyers used in his characterization of Rove as an agnostic. For my part it still doesn’t matter, although claiming to be a Christian while in actuality being agnostic would be a little more serious, Rove was an advisor not an office holder. We’ve already read about cynicism in the White House toward the Christian right, so who cares?

By the way, you can see what caused all the commotion here.

A Burkee and Walz Compendium

This is probably more information than you wanted to know.

Surprise! I’m not the only one posting about this race. Certainly I’ve written the most, but I’m not the only one.

The Chief has two posts, on successive days. Josh Schroeder noted Owen’s op-ed and adds a tidbit of his own; Sensenbrenner has updated his web site. Kevin Buckley gives us his thoughts and leads us to Race-Tracker for WI-05 and Sensenbrenner’s article in Congresspedia. Congresspedia also has stubs of articles on Burkee and Walz. Ken Mobile posted previously on the race also.

News items can be found at the GMToday.com site (Conley Publishing–The Freeman and others), and Channel 3000, WISC-TV in Madison. From Channel 3000,

The men kicked off their effort on Sunday in an appearance before about 100 friends and supporters at the Cedarburg American Legion post.

I think it was closer to 80 and that included media. The Conley article linked to above said the crowd was 65. The Journal Sentinel also said the crowd numbered a hundred in their coverage.

Here are photos from the campaign kickoff by the campaign. I’m pretty sure I’m not in any of them.

Here’s a write-up from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Southern Wisconsin District site.

Previous to becoming candidates, the two men had a piece on The Hill. They also had an op-ed that occured in several places. And according to a Wisconsin State Journal article, they split on whom to support in the 2004 election. Here’s another op-ed. The pair also wrote separately (Walz’s piece; Burkee’s) on the Iraq War for the Journal Sentinel.

There you have it. Feel free to add more in the comments, if I’ve missed something.

Bill Moyers Attacks Karl Rove as an Agnostic

UPDATE: Here’s a link to Bill Moyers’ post, missing in the professor’s article. 

From the Professor at Marquette Warrior

According to Moyers, “you have to wonder how those people on the Christian right feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator.”

I just love how liberal commentators, like Moyers [updated for clarity], are so concerned about how I feel about conservatives who either aren’t believers (supposedly) or who have trophy wives who aren’t lawyers, or have been married several times.