Below you will find a very interesting comparison of the compatibility between Libertarianism and Christianity.  Many assume that to be a libertarian one must be either atheistic or at the very  least agnostic because of the fundamental libertarian precept of  “live and let live.”  This article by Steven Yates, borrowed here from the blog of  “LewRockwell.com” who took it from Walter Block’s Autobiography Archive, is an in-depth analysis by a true philosopher of the relationship between the secular and Christian way of looking at life.  This is an exceedingly long article, but is included here as fodder for those of you who are searching for enlightenment on the issue.

How I Became a Christian Libertarian

by Steven Yates

One day, long ago (I think it must have been sometime during 1995), I woke up in the morning and realized that I had ceased to be one of those agnostics or atheists I had known and interacted with while teaching in philosophy departments. Instead, I had become a Christian libertarian. That these two were compatible was one of the important realizations of my adult life. I wish more Christians would realize that initiating coercion to achieve desirable social goals is out of accord with true Christianity (see Rev. 3:20, which I will discuss below). And I wish more libertarians would realize that the freedom philosophy they rightly treasure cannot be made to last among a people who have no sense of the transcendent in their lives, because people just aren’t like that. The story is a fairly long one, but we can hit the high spots. (I know, I know: famous last words.)

It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand – But Not Always and Not Completely.

I think I’ve always been an instinctive individualist. By that I mean I don’t recall a time when I wasn’t aware of my individuality, whether it came from a sense of being somehow different from most of the people around me (classmates, when I was in grade school and high school; later, when I was teaching, professors) or a larger and not-yet-articulated sense that the word individuality touched on something important about the human condition. Individualism, of course, stands at the core of libertarianism, even before we get to issues about rights or proscribing the initiation of force. We are essentially individuals before we are anything else – family members, members of a community, citizens of a nation, members of an ethnic group or gender. That doesn’t mean these other entities are imaginary or unimportant, of course. Individualism does not mean complete individual self-sufficiency. Strong families are important (we’ll see why below). So are stable communities (ditto). Individuality doesn’t mean complete aloofness or aloneness. People involved with family, professional groups, and community are both happier and healthier. Communities – villages – come about when the breadwinners in families settle together and transact with one another peacefully, each person trading skills, services or goods for compensation in a value-for-value exchange (I am using the word value in its economic sense, of course).

But individuality is still the bottom line for us. No two people are alike; none have the same levels of intelligence, skills and motivation. This is why egalitarianism is impossible – a “revolt against nature,” as Murray Rothbard called it. This is why, should it turn out that there really are racial differences in intelligence, the claim doesn’t carry as much weight as either its advocates or its detractors think. Claims about average intelligence within groups are statistical abstractions and entail nothing about the intelligence of any particular individual. Likewise, men and women can be spoken of as members of a group. Perhaps in some sense men are more “logical” and women are more “emotional.” But again, even despite the obvious biological and hormonal differences between men and women, this says nothing about any particular individual. I have encountered my share of “emotional” men (they usually become socialists, or “alpha males” like Al Gore). And I know or have met women whose “logical” abilities are good as any man (they don’t become radical feminists!). Group identity is not a nothing. Most people prefer the company of those similar to themselves. This is normal. But group identity will not bear the weight placed on it by either neo-racialists or sexists of any stripe, or academic leftists, those purveyors of the “politics of identity.”

But on with the story. I just realized I mentioned Ayn Rand in my subhead but nowhere in the text! Not to worry; she’s coming.

Discovering Philosophy.

I was always a bookworm. My parents both having scientific and professional degrees, I grew up surrounded by books: on science, on history, on health, and so on. My neighbors’ collection of books eventually came to my attention while I was taking care of their cats. Among the volumes that I kept going back to was the small, dog-eared paperback edition of a book called The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. (There she is!) One day I started reading it. The next thing I knew, three hours had gone by. Howard Roark had captivated me that long.

Later, in college, the philosophy virus infected me, and I never recovered. How this came about is a story in itself. I had been casting about for a major I could propel myself into completely. I’d tried anthropology, history and geology. None of them had worked. During one chaotic semester, at age 19, what little time I spent apart from a member of the opposite sex who had captivated me in a different way, I spent trying to figure out what the dickens I wanted to do with my college education and my life. Much of modern education, even then, struck me as a direct and concerted attack on the student’s individuality. College and university curricula had only molds to force-fit people into. Most people fit into them reasonably well, of course. But some of us did not.

Moreover, my hobbies – and the relationship I mentioned – consumed far more time than my studies which were then cure-alls for insomnia. One of my favorite hobbies was collecting information on what seemed to be verified facts that didn’t fit into anyone’s theories. I’d read my way through writers such as Charles Fort, Charles Hapgood, Immanuel Velikovsky, Erich von Däniken, Charles Berlitz, Robert Anton Wilson, and many, many others. Some of this stuff was not very good, of course. Von Däniken’s books are silly. But others – Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, for example – were thoroughly researched and made a lasting impression. I became convinced there was something wrong with the “conventional” view of the human past, and possibly with the Darwinian theory itself. In my senior year of high school I had done a research paper on flood legends and myths from around the world. I was amazed how prevalent variants of this story were. They existed all over the world, from the Middle East and Eurasia to North America and the Far East, even among Australian aborigines and other peoples who could not have had any contact with one another for thousands of years. Sometimes, in these legends, it was a single family that survived, as in the account of Noah, his wife and three sons (and three daughters-in-law) in Genesis; sometimes a single couple, sometimes a larger group. The names of the survivors were obviously different. But surely a legend this prevalent reflected a real event, possibly on a global scale. Add to this any number of curious discoveries, including objects clearly of human origin found buried in solid rock supposedly millions of years old (Charles Fort offers primary sources for such reports), and it paints a picture of the remote past that ought to disturb purveyors of the status quo.

The prevailing view in geology was then called uniformitarianism: “the present is the key to the past.” It completely rejected the idea of geological catastrophes. Its author was one of the founders of modern geology, Sir Charles Lyell, who lived in the early 1800s. Charles Darwin studied Lyell, seeing in uniformitarianism the long-term ecological stability necessary for evolution by natural selection to take place. In this view, there were no catastrophes. Yet authors such as Fort and Hapgood seemed to have assembled evidence, apparently unknown to my professors, that there had indeed been catastrophes. A variant on this idea began to catch on in the 1980s – that the dinosaurs, for example, had been wiped out by a global cataclysmic event such as a comet or asteroid strike on the Earth. The intellectual problem of what to do about geological anomalies – facts that don’t fit – had stuck in my mind as a kind of near-obsession that conflicted with my studies: studies whose working premises seemed to me dubious at best. I was supposed to be studying geology, but what I couldn’t take fully seriously, I couldn’t study. I considered taking a purely vocational attitude toward the subject: f’getaboutit and learn to explore for oil! Goes without saying, that didn’t fit my particular mindset, either.

I was miserable, and almost dropped out of college until the day of a conversation with a local pastor. We didn’t talk about Christianity. That came much later. But we did talk about ideas, especially questions about morality and its foundations, questions about science and its authority – including whether science was the sole authority over such questions as whether human beings really have free will. These, he pointed out, were problems of philosophy, not science. I went back, looked at my library, and realized I’d already begun collecting philosophical writings, especially the sort that would help sort out my questions about the nature of science. These came to include Thomas S. Kuhn’s ever-fascinating The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s ideas about paradigms seemed to fit my own observations, including the paradigm shift that began in geology around 1980. At some point I resolved to change schools and change majors – from geology to philosophy. I would specialize in the history and philosophy of science, because so many of my interests converged on the epistemic authority of science in one way or another.

So where did libertarianism enter the picture? Actually, it never left. It subsisted as an implicit demand from my mentors to be allowed to think for myself, even if this led to a rejection of the dominant paradigm (to use the Kuhnian term). It emerged openly through a number of conversations with friends who sent me back to Ayn Rand and to the appropriate section of a top-flight bookstore, where I discovered works such as Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty, Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, and Tibor R. Machan’s anthology The Libertarian Alternative. (If anyone had told me that Tibor and I would one day be colleagues in the same philosophy department, at Auburn University, I would have said they were nuts.) These provided perspectives on the topic of liberty other than Rand’s, whose philosophy of Objectivism differed in certain respects from libertarianism in any event. Finally I came across two works by respected academic philosophers: Libertarianism by John Hospers and Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick. I would also discover the two volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies by Sir Karl Popper. I began to devour it all, and to attend a study group led by a member of the local Libertarian Party.

As a result of this reading as well as my experiences with the sciences and with the philosophy of science, I became even more convinced that professional philosophy was where I belonged, and suddenly my goals seemed clear as a sunlit spring morning: attend graduate school, work towards a doctorate, and then become a professor of philosophy at a major research university. I set about doing just this. Most everything I did (aside from enjoyable diversions interviewing and writing features stories on the local bands of Athens, Ga.) was intended to advance me toward achieving this goal.

From Academic Philosophy to Civil Wrongs.

I became a “lapsed libertarian” in graduate school in the 1980s. I was studying history and philosophy of science and cognate areas such as epistemology (the branch of philosophy concerned with the sources, nature and limits of knowledge). My course work was demanding, and politics was pretty much off my mind. But there were signs of things to come, had I been looking for them at the time. There were also very early signs of the eventual breakdown of my commitment to the atheistic, hyperrationalistic libertarianism many libertarians had inherited from Ayn Rand and her disciples.

One of my subsidiary goals as an advanced graduate student was to find a mate, hopefully a marriage partner. The fellow who had taught the first philosophy of science course I’d taken as an undergraduate had met his wife as a graduate student – she had become a professor in the foreign languages department. I envisioned something similar happening with me.

Goes without saying, it didn’t happen. I am still single, for whatever reason (and doubtless there is more than one). To make a long story short, the female graduate students of my generation were (1) not especially attractive; (2) mostly uninterested in men they could not dominate; and (3) held political views I found either silly or abhorrent. It would not be unfair to say that as the years passed, I discovered one trait shared by a lot of academic women: with rare exceptions I could not stand to be around them for any length of time. They were chronic complainers. The one woman faculty member where I did my graduate work made a big fuss about the size of her office. They had no sense of humor. Example: one of my fellow graduate students on grading final exams: “Just bust your butts, pull an all-nighter, and get them done.” It was obvious to us he was being facetious. But she retorted angrily, “John, that’s absolutely heartless, a really insensitive attitude!” They clearly distrusted “logical” types like myself, as opposed to guys whose interests were “softer” or more “literary.” I was told: “Steve, there are other ways of doing philosophy than approaching it as the logical evaluation of arguments and evidence.”

Most female graduate students seemed to wash out of the philosophy graduate program in a year or two. I know of one who obtained her M.A. and then went to work for the Democratic Party. (I can hear some of my readers from here: “That figures.”) A handful stuck it out long enough to get their Ph.D.s. One of the things about graduate work in philosophy, at least in my program: students were expected to write papers employing well-reasoned arguments in defense of clearly stated conclusions. If you took issue with another author, you were expected to explain why. Our research was supposed to indicate that we had mastered more than one point of view. In certain seminars, we wrote what were intended to be publishable papers, and also critiqued other students’ papers. I learned a tremendous amount from such exercises. But by the mid-1980s, the more leftist of the graduate students couldn’t handle this sort of thing. I suspect that standards were relaxing even then.

After graduation in 1987, which began my full-time pursuit of a tenure-track appointment, what I ran into was what struck me as an irrational push to get more women into philosophy. I was told openly at a professional meeting that “our department is under extreme pressure to hire a woman.” I ran into this again and again. Most of these women were either unpublished or had publications limited to the small but growing corpus of radical feminist journals. Some did not even have Ph.D.’s. Combining this with the fact that I’d had a number of articles and book reviews either in print or forthcoming before receiving the Ph.D., and was nevertheless bouncing around in non-tenure track positions from university to university to university year after year, my libertarian sensibilities began to reawaken. Their impetus was my growing battle with the affirmative action mindset that lay behind the aggressive push to hire women regardless of their (often marginal) qualifications.

They awakened fully when I came to Auburn University in 1988, where Tibor Machan had been teaching for several years. We became friends. He was instrumental in helping me return following a year of near-unemployment (I had had a fellowship for part of the year and a part-time job at a small college the other part.) During that year, a radical feminist the philosophy department had hired to a tenure-track job nearly tore the department apart, sending a secretary into early retirement (the woman had had a heart condition). She had left after one year, having hated everything about the university, the town, the region (it was the South, after all!) and the climate (almost no winter, from her perspective – she was a Canadian). With her having washed out, I was able to return.

Auburn, Alabama became, to me, a fairly interesting place. It is also home to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which was then housed in a tiny building literally in the shadow of the football stadium. Their facilities were small and cramped, but this wasn’t stopping them. They were already publishing a monthly newsletter that was growing rapidly in circulation, The Free Market. I admired this sort of independent activity. While teaching in the philosophy department there and continuing to publish, I began to attend Institute events, where I met Institute founder and president Lew Rockwell and several libertarian academics, many of them in the economics department. I special-ordered a copy of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action and began studying it. One of my publications had been on philosophical theories that were refuted – made impossible – by their own internal logic. It came out in the 1991 issue of the journal Reason Papers, which Tibor Machan was then editing. I discovered Mises to have a similar argument in defense of what Austrian-school economists called the action axiom: the denial of the existence of human action would itself be an action, and thus be refuted by its own logic. This convergence of methods gave me an instant rapport with the Misesians. Soon, I was reading my way through other Mises works, as well as more by F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and eventually others. Rothbard was then still living, and it is one of my great regrets in life that I never took sufficient initiative to meet him.

The immediate issue was affirmative action. It affected me personally, since it was clear from my own correspondence – search committee chairs were sometimes surprisingly candid about who they hired – that women in particular were being awarded jobs that should have gone to men. I began to immerse myself in the scholarly as well as popular literature on affirmative action. Was this just? How could it be? Even if you dated the civil rights movement from 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, that meant that there were people coming of age today that hadn’t even been born when institutional discrimination against women and minorities was being dismantled. I approached the topic as an individualist and a libertarian, and began to observe the response. I was not the only one. A number of solid, forthright scholarly works critical of affirmative action had begun to appear. Philosopher Nicholas Capaldi’s Out of Order: Affirmative Action and the Crisis of Doctrinaire Liberalism, sociologist Frederick R. Lynch’s Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action, and political scientist Herman Belz’s Equality Transformed: A Quarter Century of Affirmative Action were just three.

But in academia, a taboo had begun to fall over the discussion. It would gain momentum. None of these books received reviews in major journals, favorable or otherwise. It was the beginning of the era of political correctness, and horror stories were beginning to emerge of professors – some of them highly respected in their disciplines and popular with their students – getting into serious trouble over alleged “insensitivity” to minority students. The latter had come to have a power all out of proportion to their numbers, the power of inculcating guilt in white males and having it enforced through university administrations. It seemed to me almost self-evident that political correctness had been invented to protect affirmative action programs and the mindset behind them from the intense scholarly scrutiny it had begun to receive. The insinuation of political correctness was that anyone who had doubts about such programs was almost by definition a covert racist and sexist, and therefore to be discounted rather than responded to. Critics of affirmative action found themselves shouted down. The attacks on white males and on “Western, white male-dominated culture” rapidly snowballed during the early 1990s. Jesse Jackson’s “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” has become legendary.

I first did a policy study for a Chicago-based think tank, and then prepared a longer essay on affirmative action, much of it written in a kind of white heat. At least one established scholar who knew what I was up to warned me, “The left will eat you alive.” But I couldn’t stop. The truth had to be told! The essay kept expanding until I it reached book-length proportions. One day I awakened with the title Civil Wrongs on my lips, attached it to the manuscript and began to seek a publisher. Civil Wrongs was rejected by something like 80 publishers until ICS Press accepted it (under the condition that I rewrite it for a more policy-minded and less academic audience, a condition I happily accepted since it was already clear that few academic philosophers would be interested).

The book came out in November of 1994. By that time I was no longer teaching in a philosophy department whose senior people were mostly sympathetic to the libertarian premises that underwrote my particular critique of affirmative action. It was official policy at Auburn University that tenure decisions had to be unanimous among senior faculty, and one senior person had blocked my promotion to a tenure line. The person hadn’t given a reason – and had even concealed his identity from me until I was out of the picture. I ended up at a more typically leftist department (at the University of South Carolina) under a fairly left-of-center administration. This department had needed someone at the last minute. The appearance of Civil Wrongs – particularly as it received a certain amount of local media coverage and was prominently displayed in the front window of an independent bookstore in downtown Columbia – turned out to be a kiss of death, so far as my remaining there or pursuing a tenurable position in a philosophy department went. Part of no longer pursuing such was admittedly my own decision. I had had enough experiences with academic philosophy that I was less impressed by it with each passing year. I had also discovered the hard way that those few senior-level colleagues I could trust generally had no power in their departments. (Most, in fact, have since retired, in some cases out of frustration with an academic environment in free fall.) So I although I enjoyed teaching university undergraduates, I took an early retirement from the profession that was only partly voluntary at best.

What’s Wrong with Atheistic Libertarianism.

Horrible experiences with philosophy departments had not taken away my interest in ideas, and I continued to write whenever possible despite the need to undertake “odd jobs” to survive. These included, at different times, clerical work as a “temp” in a state office, an assortment of technical-writing contract jobs, some ghostwriting, a stint in a health education department and later a consulting firm, and later (by this time LewRockwell.com was getting off the ground) as an obituary writer for the city newspaper. During this period – the mid-1990s and shortly thereafter – I occasionally did philosophical work with research institutes such as the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. I had minimal contact with academia but kept in touch with the folks at the Mises Institute, attending the occasional Austrian Scholars Conference where I could interact with like-minded individuals. But during this period, something was happening. The fact that my involvement with the folks at the Acton Institute created no cognitive dissonance offered an important clue.

The near-atheism that had characterized my thinking when I had been at Auburn had disappeared, and been replaced by a renewed sympathy for Christianity. This happened for at least two reasons. First, there was my mounting puzzlement over something I had noticed more than once: there are people both in and out of academia (e.g., someone else I had known well at Auburn) whose hostility toward Christians and Christianity bordered on the pathological and literally suffused everything they did. Had I been a psychologist, I might have called this a defense mechanism. Without fully realizing it they feared that Christianity was true, and compulsively attempted to convince themselves that it wasn’t. Not being a psychologist I don’t know this, of course. But it was clear that something not rational was going on – one might call it the phenomenon of the “irrational rationalist” who is locked into a materialist and atheist view of the universe with what can only be described as a religious fervor. This fervor the “irrational rationalist” passes off as Reason (capital ‘R’).

The second reason was far more important, however. Civil Wrongs had been a secular tract. The somewhat Hayekian “theory of social spontaneity” it advocated as a solution to the problems affirmative action had failed to address was as much a product of Enlightenment thinking as any other current libertarian idea. The thought had begun to eat at me that this wasn’t sufficient, that in the absence of some “deeper” grounding for moral action, being “socially spontaneous” wouldn’t be good enough. I had begun to uncover arguments – going back at least as far as Edmund Burke – that the freedom I had attempted to describe would not make for social stability in an irreligious, hedonistic people, which arguably late twentieth century America had become quite independently of problems involving race and gender. I began to write long and meandering reams of material on this topic (supported by yet another small stipend from a non-academic source) under the working title The Paradox of Liberty. Here’s the paradox: genuine liberty requires some controls on individuals’ actions. It cannot last if individuals are doing absolutely whatever they see fit. It cannot be confused with license. But to have liberty and not authoritarianism, the controls on individuals must come from within. Liberty and objective morality, that is, are mutually dependent. Either individuals learn through a process of education that must begin as small children (and is best acquired from two loving parents) to impose moral restraints on their own impulses – or restraints will be imposed on them from the outside. They will be restrained by strictures of expansionist government that will actually be endorsed by a majority of people who, whether rightly or wrongly, see expansionist government as a bulwark against social chaos.

License, that is, expands the state. This is an important reason why the unbridled hedonism that the materialist outlook on the world seems to encourage must be checked. The hedonism of the Epicureans played an important role in the transformation of ancient Rome from a republic to an empire, and today we have our own version of Epicureanism (think of the MTV culture or most of the evening programming on the Fox television network). A free society must keep license on a short leash no less than the state, to ensure stability. Liberty cannot exist without stability. As Burke argued, “Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”

Have atheistic libertarians confused liberty with license? Some have, some not. I have met libertarians who, if they were honest, would admit that their “libertarianism” is little more than an excuse for wanting to smoke dope legally. Some are stuck in a late-1960s time warp as regards their dress and personal habits. What is worse than the aging hippie who wears a torn, unwashed and bedraggled T-shirt out in public that reads Libertarian Party in large, plainly visible block letters! It is hard to persuade such people that they are impediments to the struggle for liberty. They should clean themselves up and grow up. Be that as it may, many intellectually serious non-Christian libertarians do believe that a source for a morality strong enough to chain our appetites and human weaknesses can be had in this world, tied (for example) to our capacity for reason (here they follow Ayn Rand). I respectfully dissent from this. It had become crystal clear to me by 1995 that your capacity for reason by itself does not make you a better person.

Enlightenment-derived thought, which includes a lot of leading libertarian thought, has trouble with the Christian concept of sin. The Christian concept of sin conflicts openly with the Enlightenment ideal that through education, enterprise, etc., we can perfect ourselves and our civilization. I could look at history, however, and find the idea of sin easy to accept; conversely, the Enlightenment ideal came to seem naïve. Science had vastly expanded our knowledge; technology had vastly expanded our creature comforts and our mastery over our environment. But neither had made us better people. Even capitalism is fully capable of corruption. Consider the businessmen who went into investment banking, seeking to control the finances of the country and through them, the government. This led to the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and a decade later the Council on Foreign Relations, and finally the United Nations. Despite our legacy of constitutional-republicanism, the urge for power was very much alive! We still fought bloody wars (often instigated by the very powerful), and with rapidly advancing technology, twentieth century wars became increasingly destructive until we reached the appropriately named MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) with weapons having the potential to end civilization on this planet.

The idea that building a better civilization could happen if only we elected the right politicians into office – something Libertarian Party libertarians were only repeating in a different guise – came also to seem to me naïve. Though government was bad enough as a destructive, parasitic entity, this wasn’t the whole story. Many of its same characteristics – greed, lack of principle, hunger for power, etc. – could be found in huge corporations, after all. There was something wrong with human nature itself that kept us from building the moral utopia of the Enlightenment philosophers. It stands in the way of any global elite building a utopian New World Order today. Now to be sure, Mises, Hayek and others offered sound explanations why the centralization of socialism could never be made to work. But even if centralization could somehow work, human corruption would still get in the way.

What is wrong with human nature is sin, and this is where Christianity enters the story. Sin affects us all (Rom. 3: 23). It is separation from God – the sort of separation that makes the Christian-theist worldview seem incredible to a certain kind of mind. Jesus Christ forgives sins when one becomes a Christian, but this does not mean the Christian ceases to sin. This is why Christians are not necessarily better politicians than non-Christians. The temptations of power involve one significant set of human sins, the wielding of state-sponsored force by some over others. But does the introduction of sin mean that libertarianism is as futile as anything else we’ve tried? If we embrace this sort of view, what becomes of libertarianism?

Libertarianism and Christianity: Enemies or Allies?

Libertarianism is rooted in a philosophy of natural rights that inhere in individuals, not groups. By calling them natural, we mean that they antecede legal pronouncements made by those in governments. They are not created by government. They are encoded by government and sometimes protected by government. But what a government gives, it can take back. There’s an old saying: any government powerful enough to give you whatever you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you have. This means that if we subscribe to the doctrine that government is somehow a necessary evil, its being a necessary evil means keeping it on a very short leash: hence, the idea of limited government.

I fail to see why this must be at odds with Christianity. If anything, it complements a Christian theist’s worldview. A Christian libertarian contends that rights originate not with anything essential to human beings, such as their (fallen and fallible) capacity for reason, but from God. This view has considerably more intellectual power. Most libertarians (following Ayn Rand on one of the points where she was entirely correct) stress the need for a metaphysical philosophy incorporating the idea of an objective reality capable of being known by us, at least in part. But why should anyone believe this? Through experience? What is this ‘experience’? Isn’t it very different for different people?

According to a philosophical tradition going back at least as far as St. Thomas Aquinas and kept alive by those in the Thomistic and related traditions today, God created a universe of many entities with objective properties that interacted with one another in specific ways. He also created human beings with minds designed to function in specific ways, to apprehend reality sufficiently well to solve the problems they needed to solve in order to survive and build a prosperous civilization. According to this tradition, our minds are capable of knowing objective reality because both were created ‘in sync’ with one another by God. Our knowledge of reality is not perfect. There is much that is real that we do not experience visually because our eyes aren’t attuned to it; some of these realities nevertheless affect us if conditions are right (ultraviolet radiation is an example; we can’t see it but we can be burned by it).

According to Kuhn, inquiry is a team effort of sorts. Participation in large organizations can impede the growth of knowledge, however. Those in them are too busy fitting into the organization and being obedient to its rules, including its taboos. A well prepared, highly motivated and highly self-disciplined outsider is sometimes, even often, actually better off! If individualism best describes the human condition, this is precisely what we should expect. Ayn Rand had this much right: there is no such thing as a collective brain. Organizations, even those organized around scientific inquiry, do not have collective brains, either. (These observations should lend at least some comfort to Austrian-school economists, who despite a number of gains over the past decade remain, by and large, outsiders within academic economics generally, just as philosophical libertarians, with rare exceptions such as Robert Nozick, have been outsiders within academic philosophy.)

The upshot: aspects of the Christian tradition supply not just the objective moral outlook philosophers beginning with Edmund Burke have argued is necessary for a free society. They also offer to libertarians the idea that in this life we also really do answer to an objective reality, about which we can have at least some firm, decisive knowledge. The prevailing academic alternative today – postmodernism – is disintegrating into an orgy of skepticism, nihilism and politically correct politics. From the standpoint of social, political, and economic philosophy, a population most of whose members subscribe to moral views obtained through a Christian education will act in the ways F.A. Hayek, in those crucial chapters 4 and 6 of his tract The Constitution of Liberty, says they must act for liberty to be possible. As he puts it (p. 61–2), “a successful free society will always in large measure be a tradition-bound society…. We … are able to act successfully on our plans [involving others] because most of the time members of our civilization … show a regularity in their actions that is not the result of commands or coercion … but of firmly established habits and traditions.” History has shown us no better source for these traditions and habits than the Christian faith.

Theocracy?

But aren’t you advocating a kind of theocracy (perhaps in a way that will allow you to squirm out from underneath it if challenged)?

The answer is No; that is why this is a Christian libertarianism. I have argued, in effect, that there are things libertarians can learn from Christians, such as the need for a transcendent morality as necessary for the liberty and the extremely limited government libertarians espouse. There are, however, I am sure, Christians who believe we would all be better off if we simply had a Christian government. I made the point above, however, that Christians are no more fit to rule than anyone else. We’re all sinners. On a large scale, this suggests one of the most important theses a Christian libertarian ought to advocate is decentralization, the idea that power should be as widely dispersed throughout society as possible. That way the damage humans with power are capable of doing can be minimized. On a smaller scale, it underlines some important lessons Christians can learn from libertarians if they are to avoid the charge of being closet theocrats.

Christianity abjures the use of force no less than does libertarianism. Begin with the Christian concept of salvation through faith itself. God does not force His saving grace on anyone; the person must come to Him, genuinely desire to be absolved of punishment for sin via Jesus Christ, and ask for salvation, which only then is granted. Here is the verse I mentioned close to the outset: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3: 20). I consider this to be one of the most libertarian verses in the entire Bible. It implies directly that Jesus does not force His will on anyone. He does not command coercion against anyone, least of all that anyone be converted by force. This has important implications for the Christian libertarian attitude toward any of a number of social phenomena of which Christians do not approve (and of which many libertarians either do approve, accept, or are neutral toward).

Consider homosexuality. Homosexuality is condemned outright in both the Old and New Testaments. Hence no Christian can condone it. Christians have the right, in a free society, to make their case against homosexual conduct. What Christians should not do is advocate force to be used against homosexuals. No Christian should advocate violence or imprisonment or any other such action. Citizens will be secure enough in their own beliefs and confident enough from their own successes in practice that they can allow those who want to be different to go their own way in peace, so long as the latter (1) are not bothering anyone else, (2) not using anyone else’s financial resources to fund their deviant practices, whatever they may be, or (3) not making appeals to the government to use the financial resources of the productive to fund whatever it is they are doing.

Today and Tomorrow.

Christian libertarianism is not a widely promulgated philosophy of society and life, not even on the World Wide Web (although Vox Day, a weekly columnist over on WorldNetDaily.com, also characterizes his views in this way). I believe that reconciliation between Christianity and libertarianism has much to offer. Christianity can check any libertine tendencies hiding within libertarianism – tendencies to moral relativism, subjectivism and latter-day Epicureanism. Libertarianism can check any theocratic impulses hiding inside the veneer of the so-called “religious right.”

Thus the story of how I become a Christian libertarian. This story has no ending, because obviously it hasn’t ended yet. My life is still a work in progress, so to speak – like all of us, I hope! My writing continues, including a treatise on logic, a collection of these sorts of essays, and either a science fiction novel or an attack on the idea of global government disguised as a science fiction novel (take your pick!). I became a libertarian out of consciousness of my need for freedom and sense of my own individuality, a need and sense I share with my fellow human beings. I became a Christian out of consciousness of my sin and a need for redemption – again shared with my fellow human beings. The marriage between the two – Christianity and libertarianism – is bound to be an uneasy one at least for a while yet because of longstanding tendencies within each that lead to distrust of the other. Too many libertarians are too close to Enlightenment rationalism and can become “irrational rationalists.” Too many Christians succumb to the temptation to seek state-sponsorship for their goals. A marriage between the two would benefit both. That such a marriage would strengthen the movement to restore our rapidly diminishing liberties in this country is and continues to be my hope.

December 22, 2003