[This is part 2 of a series on libertarian philosophy and the scriptures. See part one, three, four]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

It is greatly unfortunate that the word of God is largely neglected in the modern “liberty movement.” Even among many who also consider themselves Christians, appeals to freedom by libertarian thinkers are often made in secular terms and ways of thinking: Liberty and free markets are “logically consistent” philosophies, the result of correct human reasoning, the conclusions of deductions from first principles, etc. Most popular free market/libertarian writers rarely develop an article around scriptures, even the ones who may consider themselves Christians on the “religious hand.” As if God has nothing to say in the area of ethics or economics, many unfortunately relegate this “religion” to being merely their spiritual or private beliefs; for a theory of ethics or economics they often rely exclusively on secular tools of reasoning.

Relying on theory, reason, or logic are thus the usual routes for defending the doctrine of liberty in our time, despite the Christian roots being stronger in an age past and even predating the modern libertarian movement that has things sort of stripped down to theory and principles. God is rarely preeminent in modern libertarian thinkers, but very often just a back burner issue to their foreground role of defending liberty in terms of ethical and economic arguments.

This is a shame. Arguing for liberty could be done much more effectively with scripture, not only because it’s the word of God, or that religious people are more likely to be converted by appealing to God, but because all these ideas are contained in God’s work and preceded the works of men by millennia. The modern “libertarian movement” is, at best, a secularization of the scriptures. It can’t take credit for having crafted something new. As the scriptures say, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The modern theoreticians of liberty are not really coming up with anything new or unique, and as much as we may appreciate some of their writing, it is somewhat a demonstration of human pride that men act as if they’re the ones to discover these things.

The case of Murray Rothbard

What I submit is that these ideas—what are really the secularized ideas of God more than some ideas that were developed by some great theorists—will stagnate as long as we refuse to get right with God and learn to chop the statists down with scripture. Nothing cuts as hard as the word of God. The prophet Isaiah hits harder than anything Murray Rothbard ever wrote. But a lot of what Rothbard said—the State is not “us,” but an institution of plunder, propped up by false prophets who spin its lies to the public, born in rebellion against the natural order—is all in the scriptures. Sometimes, even, one wonders if Rothbard was deliberately secularizing the scriptures, whether maybe to try for a greater appeal in our secular society or to attempt to secretly secure these ideas in secular-scientific terms. 

But for some reason—this is kind of a great mystery—Rothbard didn’t want to defend the doctrine of liberty theologically. He based his case for liberty on natural law (see, Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty, 1982). It’s a little curious why. Was he afraid of losing intellectual respectability to stand up the cause for liberty on the word of God? Or was it just a blindspot for him to do so? Surely he knew the Bible, too. Was he lost in the secular world? Did he not think the theological defense was there? Was he purposefully and deviously trying to strip God out of liberty and leave the doctrine to flounder on that ground? Or did he just think that “reason” was a better case for establishing the negative effects of violent intervention than “thus saith the Lord”? All of these are hard to believe. I don’t think Rothbard was afraid to say anything he thought was true. I don’t think he ever put his reputation over what he thought was right (and surely willingly gave up money he could have made if he wanted to be a lousy, generic economics professor at a better university). He was not at all unaware of the theological roots of the liberty doctrine. And I take him to be an honest intellectual. But what gives? How did he basically put together a case for liberty that could be supported by scripture, without appealing to these theological defenses?

The problem, as I argue, is that liberty needs more than simple economic theory and philosophy to support it. “Liberty” is really quite a vague idea outside of the Kingdom of God. It is not enough to simply try and build a philosophy around this concept as it stands alone in the world. We won’t really see the depth of the fight for liberty, or reveal it to others, until we see that the State is an ancient plunder system based in sin and rebellion to God, and that God denounced from the beginning (1 Samuel 8). The liberty idea never really comes to life until we see that it’s not just a “philosophy,” or the “logical deductions” from ethical principles or axioms, but God’s great plan to liberate humanity from tyrants. We won’t get far without appealing to the religious nature in men and showing people just why the State is a false god that goes against God.

And yet Rothbard, who was ultimately a secular libertarian reasoning in terms of the modern world, always seemed to have realized this shortcoming. He said, in a 1980’s edition of Liberty Magazine, 

“The libertarian movement…will get nowhere in America—or throughout the world—so long as it is perceived, as it generally is, as a movement dedicated to atheism.”

Rothbard was fully aware of the enormous importance of religion on a man’s thinking and how crucial it was to not neglect this intrinsic aspect of men (see, here and here). As he said in a 1989 article, “The End of the Secular Century,” 

“The long-term strategic lesson for secularist libertarians of the resurrection of religion in the modern world should be crystal clear. The prospects for the eventual victory of liberty, in the United States and in the rest of the world, are excellent; the prospects for the triumph of atheism are nil. Secularist libertarians should stop trying to convert the religious to the dubious glories of atheism, and should start trying to convert them to the cause of liberty.”

Though not considering himself a Christian (though he was not ignorant to the Christian contribution to libertarian philosophy), Rothbard had a hunch within him that something was amiss to have left God out of the libertarian idea in the modern age, especially considering that “libertarian theory” or a “rationalist ethic” was relatively new compared to the Christian tradition. Even more profoundly, he wrote,

“In the field of ethics and philosophy in general, it is simply an empirical fact that the greatest thinkers, for two thousand years, have been Christian [and] to ignore these Christian philosophers and to attempt to carve out an ethical system purely on one’s own is to court folly and disaster…We stand on the shoulders of thinkers of the past…Few people have the ability or inclination to carve out an ethical system on their own….Christianity is the longest and most successful tradition, with the largest quota of great minds…It is a bitter pill for us non-Christians to swallow, but I’m afraid it is inescapable nevertheless…Today’s libertarian movement…[has] sunk into vain attempts to carve out a system of objective ethics on their own…[while] the Christian ethic is, in the words of the old hymn, a Rock of Ages, and it is at least incumbent upon the individual to think long and hard before he abandons that Rock, lest he sink into the quagmire of the capricious and bizarre” (Rothbard, “Comment,” Libertarian Forum, July-August, 1971).

Rothbard was seemingly seeing that there is no real theory of liberty apart from the Christian tradition whence it came. And so he was defending what he called the “Christian ethic” against unnecessary and even hateful attacks by secular libertarians, who were sort of pridefully imagining that they were carving out a theory on their own and that tradition or scripture never really had anything to do with it. It’s rather odd that many libertarians today see a compatibility between their atheism and libertarianism, rather than between God and liberty. (The idea of many anarchists that “we don’t have any gods” allows them to think like this, without seeing how much God hates statism and how much statism is truly a false god rather than just another religion among religions). And it’s rather odd that many of them insist on atheism or at least don’t think much about liberty from a theological perspective. Because it wasn’t always this way. As Rothbard went on to point out in his Liberty piece, 

“Nock, Morley, Chodorov, Flynn, et. al., were not atheists, but for various accidental reasons of history, the libertarian movement after the 1950s consisted almost exclusively of atheists.”

This indeed was an interesting development, one that still weighs on the libertarian movement today and arguably hampers it from development. People began to be more interested in cults-of-personality like Ayn Rand and other such figures, who claimed to have created their own philosophy, and whose militant atheism would help to derail any attempt at people realizing the necessity of having God on our side in the development of the ideas of liberty if one ever hopes to be successful. They became convinced that theory, logic, and reason and such, were alone sufficient in fighting Leviathan. Even worse, many believe—this admittedly isn’t helped out by the many so-called “Christian” state-worshipers—that God’s word and statism go hand in hand, when nothing could be further from the truth. 

The secular error

This atheistic progression of the liberty movement has been unfortunate considering the Bible is a virtual freedom manual for getting out of our Egyptian enslavement by turning back to God as our God, rather than men and their statist systems. Though such a move was probably more based in error than foul-play, if there’s anything the devil could have done to derail a movement toward human liberation, it would be precisely to tell men most all of the truth—statism is evil, it comes to plunder humanity rather than help it, people are falsely worshiping it as a god—and then leave God out at the very end. 

Now, I am not saying that libertarians have done this. My generous estimate is that many of them have been trapped in the age of secular humanism themselves and simply miss the God element because the culture tells them religion offers nothing but spirituality or worship, and that you need to get your ethics and economics from men. Or even worse, they take “Christian statist’s” (contradiction) word for it that God endorses statism and approves of the support for Egypt, when He doesn’t and these men are just fools and blasphemers.

At any rate, the secularization of the liberty philosophy has left it stagnating in the fight with secular statists, who are rather consistent as godless folks to be arguing for the State-god and doing so on humanistic grounds. To fight for liberty on the statist’s humanistic turf is like trying to fight a shark in the water vs. the shore. We should stand on the shore, proclaiming that liberty is God’s program, rather than dive in the statist waters and attempt to win there, where statist-secularists have been out-swimming us forever.

This secular progression has caused people to downplay the role of the scriptures in fighting for liberty from tyrants. Libertarians today are able to read over the references to God that permeate the work of nineteenth century thinkers like Frederic Bastiat. I guess, without any qualms about his highly religious perspective and more out of an interest in merely on what economic or political views they can draw from it, they were not bothered by these references but still unable to take them seriously. But Bastiat saw liberty as fully bound-up with God. The “economic law” was the work of God. He ends his most popular book, and one of his last, saying, 

“After having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun—reject all systems, and try liberty—liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work” (Bastiat, The Law, p. 55).

In my opinion, this modern, secular libertarianism that has stripped God out of the picture and made everything into a matter of theory and reason has been a retrogression from the spirit-filled work of writers like Bastiat, who always saw the providential work of God at play. Modern economic theoreticians seem to ignore these points in their attempt to put economics on firm scientific ground. This is somewhat understandable in a secular age that doesn’t believe in God, where other men—statists, socialists, communists, etc—attempt to establish “scientific” social theories that need to be refuted according to their own lines of reasoning. They want to fight back and forth with statist philosophers in academic journals that no one ever reads. But, I would argue, it would have been much stronger to base our arguments on the word of God than to give into the ways of the statist secularists. 

The free market economist Ludwig von Mises was not really bothered by the religion of other economists. In his economic treatise, Human Action, Mises pointed out that “many economists, among them Adam Smith and Bastiat, believed in God. Hence they admired in the facts they had discovered the providential care of ‘the great Director of Nature'” (p. 147, note). He defends them against the socialist’s charge— “you guys believe an ‘invisible hand’ is going to work things out without our central planners”—that their ideas should be ignored because they used religious terminology to express their understanding of economics laws. He said, “Atheist critics blame them for this attitude. However, these critics fail to realize that to sneer at the references to the ‘invisible hand’ does not invaIidate the essential teachings of the rationalist and utilitarian social philosophy” (ibid). With economics in mind, Mises doesn’t care too much to criticize the providential view of the political economists of old; he says their religious ideas don’t really conflict with their economics, that these God-drenched views don’t really have much of an effect on economic truths, and that it’s fine if they’re religious on one hand because this doesn’t play much of a role in what they have done on the other hand in the realm of economic theory. 

This may seem insignificant and even generous that secular thinkers don’t really care if someone is religious, so long as their theories are correct by human reasoning. But to remove God from the picture—the author of the economic law that is so greatly appreciated by libertarians and free market economists—is arguably a fatal mistake. Not only does it forsake God, but it also leaves a void in political theology and tries to beat the statists at their own tricks. (No wonder so many Christians are still statists today and so few atheists have ever been converted to the cause of liberty: Few men in our age try to make the case that God and liberty are inseparable).

Attempting to establish the truths of our social laws in terms of human reason rather than the word and law of God, however, will only hurt the advancement of these ideas which, after all, are the laws of God — our Chief Economist. It’s easy to see why Mises wanted to get economics on the firm ground of science in the secular age: To secure it from any possible argument by statists and socialists that it was illogical. And I think we should still appreciate that such an enormous task has been more or less completed by Misesian economists. 

But as for the future and our path from here, it seems necessary to return these ideas to their rightful home in God, and to defend the political theology of liberty. While I don’t think we can discount the work of Mises in the area of economic theory, we have to wonder sometimes what progress might have been made if these ideas were explicitly scriptural and founded in the word of God. How many more people could have been converted to liberty if the appeal were religious rather than “economic” alone? How much more powerful would this economics be if the providence in it were demonstrated? How much more epic would it be to show the divinity in the economic law? What degenerate atheist has ever really been converted by making the appeal in secular-scientific terms anyway? Why should anyone care more to satisfy statist secularists than righteous truth-seekers? Wouldn’t it have been better to lead a liberty-inclined thinker to God than to satisfy a Marxist by avoiding theology? Why should anyone have cared if Marxists mocked us for saying that the “invisible hand” of God would indeed order our society if we were obedient to the Lord and did not set up statist systems of social organization? Why should this be considered an embarrassing idea? Who cares what God-hating statists think? Let us reunite liberty and God and leave them even more alone in their false worldly ideologies. Let us show them that God and liberty are bound up with one another, and that it makes perfect sense why an atheist would be a statist-socialist: They are making for themselves a substitute god in the political machinery.

Bringing God back into the picture

While the work of economists like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard was instrumental in smashing the theories of statism from a secular perspective and securing the soundness of the “system” of voluntary exchange from all interventionists in terms of logic and reason alone, I’m afraid they do not go far enough in the cause of advancing liberty in their lack of appeal to the scriptures or the aid of the Lord. In a best case scenario, they were mostly only secularizing what was already God’s law. In a worst case scenario, they made it impotent against the enemies of liberty by removing God from the picture.

What we need today is a desecularization of the ideas of liberty, a reuniting of liberty with theology and returning it to where it came from. One will only get so far reading economics without spirituality and God. They will find themselves in the position of thinking that the way to advance liberty is merely an educational one, in which the cause will go forth as soon as we have bashed enough people over the head with Economics in One Lesson. They assume that the only problem with statists and state rulers is that they’re economically illiterate, rather than deeply lost in sin, deeply far-gone from the spirit of the Lord, and even wholly given over to spiritual evil and the wiles of the devil. What we need, more than the great economic treatises, is for men to find their way back to God. We need spiritual regeneration more than economic education. For the reason that men arrive at statist positions is not that they have studied the economic literature and decided that socialism was most logical, but that their hearts have went astray from the Lord.

How Mises felt about the importance of economics (a rather meaningless thing to most people) is how I feel about the teachings of God in the scriptures, which are even more powerful than mere economic theory and also cover the laws of nature that secularists mistakenly believe are only covered by the theoretical sciences. To make this point, allow me to substitute “God’s word” for Mises’s emphasis on the importance of “economics” for leading men to the truth, because Mises was definitely getting at something in wanting to promote these ideas of a free society to the masses. But it needs to be God-centered more than “economics” centered — and is still true when we say it of God. 

“[God’s word] must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man’s human existence” (Mises, Human Action, p. 874).

To relegate the scriptures to “religion” or mysticism when God is the Praxeologist-in-Chief and author of the very laws that economists study is just not right. 

“Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that [God’s word] cannot remain an esoteric branch of knowledge accessible only to small groups of scholars and specialists. [God’s word] deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen” (Mises, Human Action, p. 875).

The scriptures are even more important than the rank which Mises attributes to theoretical economics, for they are the word of God handed down thousands of years before “economics” was an official discipline. Let me modify Mises’ still-pertinent words one more time. 

“There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility [to God]. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters blind reliance upon ‘experts’ and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination. As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than [God’s word]. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake” (Mises, Human Action, pp. 874-875).