[This is part 3 in a series on libertarian philosophy and the scriptures. See part one, two, four].

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris 

It is not uncommon for secular libertarians to point out that statism is a religion, ie., that statists essentially regard the State as a god and worship it as their lord and savior (even if they do so without realizing it). These claims are true. In every way, the State is an attempted substitute for all the things—protection, prosperity, health, knowledge—promised by God. Men who support States hope for “salvation” in presidents, militaries, police, etc., and they believe it is found nowhere else. They trust in the State as men who are truly Godly trust in God. Those who seek out men as their rulers thus have a “god” in these men and their systems.

The State, in every way, resembles what we might call “religion.” It has its “sacred” symbols (flags, eagles, statues of presidents); it has its “prayer” (pledges of allegiance to Caesar); it has its temples (the White House, Lincoln Memorial, Congress); it has its rituals (voting) and its forms of worship (screaming your head off at a presidential rally); etc.

But pointing out this “religious” nature of statism is unfortunately used more as a rhetorical device to (rightly) deprecate their opponents than it is to point out that it is truly a false god system. For some, pointing out that statism is a “religion” just means that both statism and God are false and that the State is just another mythology among mythologies. For the atheists who say this, statism is just assumed to be bad or “religious” because all religion (in their view) is false. 

What is often missed is that statism is not just a “religion” among other equally-false religions, but a false religion that goes against the truth of God. So the seriousness and profundity of this claim of statism-as-a-religion is unfortunately missed. It escapes them that statism is not just religious in nature, but is a false religion that goes against God and attempts to set itself up in His place. They aren’t aware that God also thinks the State is a false religion and that its agents attempt to rule “as gods.” As God says of the ruler (the king) of Tyre,

“Your heart is proud, and you have said, ‘I am a god; I sit in the seat of gods in the heart of the sea.’ Yet you are a man and not a god, though you have regarded your heart as that of a god” (Ezekiel 28:2).

And so many libertarians are able to make these great and correct charges of “religion” against the idolatrous statists all while remaining atheists. This is a shame, because if only they realized we have God on our side against these great evils, our arguments are all the more powerful. For then they are not based in mere name-calling or secular theory, but “thus saith the Lord.” Amen. State rulers are not just gods, but false gods who “have lifted themselves up in height” (Ezekiel 31:10) in their attempt to usurp God’s throne. Statism is not just “another religion” among all religions which are false, as the atheist libertarian might think, but a false religion that attempts to unseat God on the throne. 

The Holy Bible 

The liberty movement could be launched to the moon if everyone would realize that these things they say from a secular perspective are not just fun argumentative tricks to disparage the statists, but are everything God always taught and always hated. 

The State, as a false god, naturally attempts to violently replace all the offers—peace, prosperity, protection, etc—of the true God. Thus, God tells us that trusting in the State for protection—you won’t learn this from your average police worshipers in America who professes Christianity—is something that anyone who trusts in God should never do, and that trusting in police and soldiers to “protect” you is precisely to trust in another god. As one prophet puts it, 

“Look now, you are trusting in Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff that will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust in him” (Isaiah 36:6).

As we see, this isn’t just a fancy secular idea to use strong language against statists. To trust in the State, according to God, is precisely to abandon God for false gods. Those who seek man-gods (politicians, soldiers, police officers) as their “saviors” do not trust in God. The prophets make it very clear that trusting in agents of the State is proof of one’s lack of faith in God. 

“Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in their abundance of chariots and in their multitude of horsemen. They do not look to the Holy One of Israel; they do not seek the LORD” (Isaiah 31:1).

Those men who call themselves “the government” and claim to be protectors are false gods. As the prophet went on, “The Egyptians are men, and not God; and their horses flesh, and not spirit” (Isaiah 31:3). 

When men chase after state rulers, God says “they have rejected Me as their king” (1 Samuel 8:7). To chase after human kings is “forsaking Me and serving other gods” (1 Samuel 8:8). When God said, in the first of the Ten Commandments, that “thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3), He meant kings and their armies just as much as he meant, say, some physical statue of a deity or some other “god” of the pagan pantheon. 

Statism as a religion is thus what God was talking about all along: Statism—the ideology of political violence that leads men to venerating human rulers as their protectors—is the very sinful evil that God hates and thinks of as idolatry. It is the very turning away from God to turn toward the systems of men. 

What’s interesting is that this lesson hasn’t sunk in for most professing Christians, who are foolish enough to wave flags for the regime and vote for new Pharaohs thinking they are going to reform Babylon, and yet many secular libertarian anarchists have rightly made the charges of a religion against statism, albeit seemingly without realizing that its false religion and false because it goes against God. The latter, interestingly, seem to have (roughly) known God’s natural order of free trade and free people without knowing God, while the former have professed to know God but turned His earth over to statists.

Libertarian recognition of the religion of statism

This view that statism is a religion, which unfortunately many professing “Christians” haven’t even seen (they’re too busy idolizing the State), is prevalent in a lot of secular libertarian and free market economic thinkers.

The free market economist, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), assessed our age as being under “the fashionable philosophy of Statolatry” (Mises, Bureaucracy, p. 74). That is, our people (including many professing “Christians”) are largely state-worshipers who seek refuge in the Salvation State and its supporting ideology. The “god” of many people today, from both democrats and conservatives who see it saving them in some way (from poverty, the bad guys, etc), is the State. This is where they hope to be saved. As Mises went on, “The good [today] is embodied in the great god State” (Bureaucracy, p. 74). While this false religion of statism has always been around, it was in the nineteenth century, Mises says, that “the counterfeit theology of the divine state began to take effect” (Mises, Human Action, p. 827). Notice, he says it’s a counterfeit theology. Statism is not just another “theology” among all theologies which are false, but a false one that goes against God and His word.

Likening statism to a religion ran through much of Mises’s prolific work, existing even in his major economic treatise. The rampant ideas of political intervention in our days, whether among conservatives who don’t know they’re socialists or the democrats who don’t hide it, Mises says, is based in “the religion of statolatry” (Mises, Human Action, p. 689). The State is an institution that raises itself up as a “god” and attempts to take on all the characteristics of God, especially when it embarks on an overt and all-around socialization of society (but no less so when it exists as a monarchy or some other more limited or “republican” form). As he went on, 

“Socialism [is] a religion. It is indeed the religion of self-deification. The ‘State’ and ‘Government’ of which the planners speak, the ‘People’ of the nationalists, the ‘Society’ of the Marxians and the ‘Humanity’ of the positivists are names for the god of the new religions. But all these idols are merely aliases for the individual reformer’s own will. In ascribing to his idol all those attributes which the theologians ascribe to God, the inflated Ego glorifies itself. It is infinitely good, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, eternal. It is the only perfect being in this imperfect world” (Mises, Human Action, p. 689).

These are huge lessons for the professing Christians who think it’s possible to reconcile their delusions of “God and country” and “God bless our troops.” Mises says all these forms of statism—he lists “socialism, statolatry, and nationalism”—are “counterfeit religions” (Human Action, p. 148). These false Christians in America don’t have the slightest hint that their enthusiastic support for the police and military is a false religion that is seeking a “savior” in men. Indeed, they are angered when their statist ideology is attacked or their flags burnt because it is their god. As Mises says, they think “the State is God” (Bureaucracy, p. 75). Rather than seeing the State as a rebellion against God, most people see the philosophy of freedom as a rebellion against their god-State. And so statists go on the defensive when we point out the sin, idolatry, and evil in their reverence for the State-god. 

Mises saw just how much the State and the philosophy behind it was a substitute for the gospel of Christ, which calls people to repentance and back into the ways of the Lord. As he once said, statists “have preached the gospel of war, violence, and usurpation” (Essays by Ludwig von Mises, p. 155). 

Statism is not merely some benign thing that is apart from religion, but it is an attempted substitute for God where men set up another “god” that they believe will “save” them. As Mises pointed out, socialists don’t merely seek socialism because they believe it’s some necessary means to social organization; they have “proclaimed the socialist program as a doctrine of salvation” (Human Action, p. 879). Likewise, the scriptures always exhorted us to never fall for these ideas. “Put not your trust in princes, in mortal man, who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). It is easy to see just how much statists and socialists alike are falling for a false god — and, most unfortunately, just how much most people who call themselves “Christians” share a false god with atheists in the State.

Mises was fully aware that statism was indeed a religion, albeit one without God in it, replete with priests and prophets—intellectuals, academics, media pundits, etc—to defend its doctrines, national anthems in the place of psalms, symbols and flags to give it imagery, and made up wholly by the idea that it was to be the protector of mankind. He wrote of the thinking of the secular age, 

“The dogma that the State or the Government is the embodiment of all that is good and beneficial and that the individuals are wretched underlings, exclusively intent upon inflicting harm upon one another and badly in need of a guardian, is almost unchallenged. It is taboo to question it in the slightest way. He who proclaims the godliness of the State and the infallibility of its priests, the bureaucrats, is considered as an impartial student of the social sciences. All those raising objections are branded as biased and narrow-minded. The supporters of the new religion of statolatry are no less fanatical and intolerant than were the Mohammedan conquerors of Africa and Spain” (Mises, Planned Chaos, 1963).

It is only natural, as Mises pointed out, that the religion of statism would have a class of intellectuals who work to raise the agents of the State up as gods, seen today in the sinister “back the blue” campaign by statists—getting support for the “thin blue line” on bumpers everywhere today—that makes police into the “heroes” and “saviors” of society who put it all on the line for us every day. 

“It was a purposeful confusion on the part of the German metaphysicians of statolatry that they clothed all men in the government service with the gloriole of such altruistic self-sacrifice. From the writings of the German statists the civil servant emerges as a saintly being, a sort of monk who forsook all earthly pleasures and all personal happiness in order to serve, to the best of his abilities, God’s lieutenant, once the Hohenzollern king and today the Fuhrer” (Mises, Bureaucracy, p. 78).

The State has always surrounded itself by false prophets who exist to apologize for the political system and its violence. These “priests” of the State are but another way to liken it to a religion. It was only appropriate that, in further religious-like language, Mises would call these statist intellectuals—the bureaucrats, academics, professors, and authors—who spread the socialist propaganda, “the professional preachers of bureaucratization and socialization” (Bureaucracy, p. 78). 

Mises also saw how statism and its various socialist schemes are able to arise because, without God, men are likely to believe that there are no economic laws embedded into the social structure that prevent them from planning and controlling whole economies and their populations by decree, and no Lord above to punish them for their schemes against His children.  

“No economist ever dared to assert that interventionism could result in anything other than disaster and chaos. The advocates of interventionism—foremost among them the Prussian Historical School and the American Institutionalists—were not economists. On the contrary. In order to promote their plans they flatly denied that there is any such thing as economic law. In their opinion governments are free to achieve all they aim at without being restrained by an inexorable regularity in the sequence of economic phenomena. Like the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, they maintain that the State is God” (Mises, Planned Chaos).

It is only natural that one without God should be led to find new gods in the false systems of human rule. It is no coincidence that the Marxists were express “atheists” who were setting up a new idol in the State. (They weren’t really “atheists,” though, but statists — adherents of a false religion). A godless society—though never truly without gods as we have seen—will always mean a substitute of men for God as the Sovereign. 

Statism as the new religion 

What we see is that “religion” never really fades away, but that men abandon the True God—the one and only creator in heaven—and chase after new “gods,” e.g., the State. They have merely “changed their glory for that which doth not profit” (Jeremiah 2:11). So the religion of our modern, “secular” age is statism. The false god of the State is what you get when you abandon God. And God has no trouble turning us over to the evils we have begged for. As one prophet explains, “Like as you have forsaken me and served strange gods in your land, so you shall serve strangers in a land that is not yours” (Jeremiah 5:19). 

Men haven’t given up on “religion” per se in our world, which is not really an atheistic age but more so a false “theocracy” of the statist religion. It’s just that the new religion of our day is statism and faith in the systems of men. And it’s not just that the State is a “religion” in a world where “all religions are false,” as the atheistic libertarian might be inclined to believe, but that the State is a false god that has sought to substitute itself for the True God and the True Religion.