Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

When we try to show men the Kingdom of God that Christ preached and lead them out of the Egyptian bondage we have gotten ourselves into, we must remember something important: Our world is one of spiritual warfare and not simply a battle of ideas. The ideas that men hold are not ones that are arrived at through thinking, argumentation, or logical deduction. We are not dealing with a mass of people who all pursue the truth and accept whatever philosophical or economic ideas that are logical. If that were true, we might have collectively realized a long time ago, after simply “walking through the logic,” that a free society (i.e., a society that is absent of state aggression) is the only “system” that can bring lasting peace and prosperity. We would have been able to reason men to the truth. The fallacies would have been purged from the public mind as we progressed as a whole. We could have simply walked men through the logical conclusions until they finally accepted them. They would have seen the light and no longer accept the illogic of statism.

But this hasn’t happened. Men hold all the same bad ideas they have for millennia. Something more than just the “intellectual” or the “ideological” is playing out among men and the ideas that they hold, though. Men are influenced by spiritual evil to buy into the false ideologies of the world, namely statism and its many forms. They have been “taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

Therefore, secular libertarian arguments will not suffice to turn men away from the evils they have bought into. Such approaches to conversion as telling a man to read an economics book are not enough to change men who are not merely fools, but have been tempted into accepting the worldly philosophy of political violence. We are dealing with an evil and sinful philosophy of statism, not merely some philosophy that is in error or doesn’t stand up to the logic (though, I believe, secular economists have succeeded in showing that this is the case too). Statism is a philosophy of unrepentant men, not merely men who had poor reasoning skills as they read through the great works of philosophy (though this may be the case too).

Statism is a religion

For anyone who has spent time trying to persuade violent interventionists out of their ideas by showing them that such policies would only serve to make us poorer should now begin to see why logical chains of reasoning, though helpful, rarely change the statist: statism is a false god that men have bought into in their sin. Again, if that were simply the case that men had this logical argumentation wrong and mistakenly arrived at the wrong ideas as they philosophized their way through them (which few men ever do), the theory of liberty would have won out a long time ago. For the “logic” of socialism truly cannot stand against the scrutiny of economic science. We would have just been able to lead them down the correct logic paths, they would have admitted to their errors, and we could have moved on. But this treats men as if they are all just honest, innocent truth-seekers who are all seeking intellectual defenses to their ideas, when there is hardly anything intellectual going on for most of the people who have found themselves adherents to the philosophies of the world (eg., socialism, democracy, communism, constitutionalism, fascism).

The problem is that logic alone doesn’t explain the position of statists and socialists. They didn’t reason their way here to begin with. So they won’t be reasoned out of it. Few men survey the range of ideas out there to pick from and say, “I think this one sounds most reasonable.” Few men read the economics or philosophic literature, compare these ideas among different writers, and reason that one of them is correct. And often when they do, pre-existing biases lead to them to men who feed them what they already want to be fed, and they simply have their pre-existing ideas confirmed for them by some crony intellectual who they can now appeal to as authoritative on the issue.

It isn’t like the millions of people who advocate central planning and nationalization of goods and services actually read Karl Marx and then became Marxists. It isn’t like the lay public actually reads John Maynard Keynes and agrees, with their new economic understanding, that the fiscal and monetary policies of government are needed. These people may have helped to give some pseudo-intellectual case for these things, to make people think that these ideas have academic or scholarly support, but such writings (which few men actually read) are not the driving force behind the support for violent political intervention among men.

Furthermore, it isn’t like the millions of men who worship the military and the police read intellectual cases for and against defense monopolies and decide that it would be best to support tax-funded, state militaries. No, they do this because they are idolaters who have not yet been convicted by God of their idolatry. It isn’t like men have considered the position of Christian voluntaryism, where a free people serve each other out of love of the Lord and love of neighbor, and rejected it because they found another idea to be superior. Rather, few people have ever even come across these ideas or considered them. It isn’t like people read works that defend constitutional republics and become convinced after reading them, but that they were born into these systems and assumed it must be right to defend them.

The point is that men don’t need socialist literature to become socialists. They need nothing more than to not search the ways of the Lord and to fall into the traps of the world as a result. Most men are where they are because they have unthinkingly bought into the ideas of the world. This is why they can’t be simply reasoned out of their positions, which were never reasoned into in the first place. It is why men live in a state of refusal to repent from the false ideas they have bought into. They are part of the false religion of statism and have not yet come out of the world of false ideas.

Statism is what you get when men refuse to know the Lord. These are people who have “hated knowledge and chose not to fear the LORD” (Proverbs 1:29). It will only be when men fear the Lord that they will see the dangers of organizing a society through the means of political violence. When men don’t fear the Lord, they set up governments to rule over them, believing that these systems are the only means of having peace, security, and prosperity.

Ministry considerations

When planting seeds of liberty and teaching men how to be free, we have to remember that we are not just living in a world where men survey the ideas and attempt to seek the logical conclusions, but that we live in a spiritual war where the devil seeks to pervert all truth and keep men from seeing and seeking the straight path. As Jesus Christ said in the Parable of the Sower, 

“When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart” (Matthew 13:19). 

Planting seeds in men needs not only great nourishment, but to be supported by the Holy Spirit and in men truly coming to God and realizing the spiritual warfare they find themselves in. While we may say that liberty from a secular point of view may help lead one to understand God’s will, since many people read their own worldviews into the Bible rather than to be transformed by it and to come out of the world, the regenerative hearts that one can get from the Lord Jesus Christ should alone be able to lead them there and keep them there. Most men are lost in the world of ideas because they haven’t attempted to know the Lord, not because they don’t know enough economic theory to keep them from supporting interventionist policies or because they did the logic wrong.

We need something even more powerful than economics or philosophy to combat statism, and we have to realize that men are not just statists because they are economic illiterates and just need to be beaten over the head with an economics book to set them straight. (Even many free market economists unfortunately believe this when they suggest that they need to send the sitting administration a paper on price controls, not realizing that it isn’t economic ignorance that they push such policies). Statism is not just an ideology or a false set of ideas that men arrived at by thinking through social problems and believing they have arrived at a logical or reasonable position. Indeed, very few statists probably ever gave much thought to their position at all. They found themselves there by unwittingly walking in the evil path and never having even considered what they were doing.

What we need is an advancement beyond the secular forms of reasoning, which assumes everyone to be logical enough to buy into the correct ideas once they are presented with them, and a return to the spirit-filled, scripture-oriented approach to knowledge and education. We need to get back to the word and ways of God, which truly hold the power to change men, and away from the basic logical arguments of secular libertarian reasoning which rarely serve to turn a man who is committed to the religion of statism away from his “god.”

The great reason that men are statists who never budge on their position is that statism is a secular religion that has the work of the satanic—deception, lies, schemes, frauds, theft, murder, destruction—all over it. Men didn’t “reason” their way to statism, but bought into it out of sin and out of falling for the traps in the world. They are not going to give up the false god state simply by beating them over the head with an economic treatise. Most people can’t even read anymore even if you steered them on the right path. They need not an economics course at a university but to be born again with the spirit of the Lord and see through all the lies they have fallen for.

Things are much deeper than just a battle of ideas with no consideration to the spiritual world around us. As a well-known scripture says, 

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

We aren’t simply encountering fools in our efforts to minister to men, or simply men who just haven’t seen the “logic” yet and “just need to read an economics book.” We are dealing with men who are given up to the darkness and have bought into the false religion of statism because they are being compromised by spiritual evil. Those who identify as Marxists would be better described as demon possessed than economically uneducated. Politicians like Bernie Sanders are not just fools who have failed to understand economics, as many libertarian anarchists and market economists, in their secular ways of thinking, mistakenly assume. They are men who are invested in serving the enemy and his wicked political systems. They are liars, not fools. They are plunderers, not well-intentioned do-gooders who nevertheless mess everything up and would stop “if only they knew economics.” The people on the bottom who have bought into these ideas may be fools and useful idiots, but not the men in power who disseminate these ideas to the public for the purpose of creating statists who will buy into their schemes. At any rate, both of them are spiritually compromised and are not listening to the spirit of the Lord that calls men away from these systems.

The fact that men are not fools but are under deep, worldly deception should cause us some level of caution and should teach us to revise our approach from mere economic or philosophic “reasoning” to spiritual change and regeneration in men. Men need not just to see “the logic” or “economy theory,” which has always been there for the taking. They need to repent of their evil ways and come back to the Lord. They need to be in the word of God and seeking His ways. Men have bought into the worldly ideology of statism because they have turned away from God. “The word of the LORD has become offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it” (Jeremiah 6:10). They are a “stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears!” who resist the Holy Spirit (Acts 7:51). We are not just dealing with men who need more economics and philosophy, but with men who need to hear the call of the prophets to “circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your heart” (Jeremiah 4:4).