The Sinful Nature Of Statism
Only the Bible tells you why limited government is the only option: no person can ever be trusted with absolute power.
“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”
- Romans 3: 23
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. “
- Lord Acton
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
- Genesis 3: 5
A consistent theme running through the bible, or rather what the bible is about, is man’s helplessness against his sinful nature. We have fallen and there is nothing we can do to restore ourselves to our former position in God’s order. This is the strongest argument for libertarianism or classical liberalism. It is no coincidence that it is an ideology that came out of the christian West while the atheist West produced the totalitarian ideologies of socialism and fascism.
First, consider the famous Lord Acton quote above. Is it really true that power corrupts? From a christian perspective, not really, if power corrupts, God would be corrupt. Humans are already corrupt, giving them absolute power merely enables them to manifest their immoral desires. If the human is greedy, he/she will use absolute power to steal from others, if the person is lustful, they will use their power to rape others etc
What Lord Acton was observing was the phenomenon where a “nice” person gains power, an ordinary person just like yourself, your family members and your friends. And gradually starts engaging in evil. Apartheid South Africa is an example but even more so modern Sub-Saharan Africa. This does not mean Christian leaders are good leaders, Christians are not better than everyone else when it comes to sin, in fact, the bible explicitly tells us that God chooses the most sinful and most prone to sin.
That is why I will ally with atheist libertarians before allying with so-called Christian nationalists. The libertarian atheist understands instinctively what the Christian nationalist should have known if they actually read their bible instead of being seduced by the allure of power. Of course this does not mean that libertarianism means accepting state sanctioned abortion or homosexual marriage, the correct answer to the first is that the right to life (God-given) of the unborn trumps the property rights of the mother and the correct answer to the second is that marriage is not a government competency and people should be able to contract freely with one another.
Libertarianism also doesn’t mean subscribing to French-style secularism where government officials and representatives are forbidden from expressing belief in God or praying in public. There is nothing that violates the right of the atheist if public representatives go on tv and lead the country in prayer. Or if sessions of parliament are opened with a prayer or even if the constitution or other laws specifically declare that the country and its leaders submit to God.
Sin is also not just some abstract notion of wrongdoing. The bible makes it clear that sin is the tendency to distance ourselves from God, but what does this mean exactly? How does distance from God lead to wrongdoing? I believe the answer is in the Genesis verse above. The serpent did not lie to Eve, it told her exactly what would happen. She would eat the fruit and she would make her own decisions about what is good and what is evil, just like God does.
That was the trap. Eve was seduced by the thought of becoming God instead of deferring to and submitting to God. This is what all sin is at its core. This is why the bible spends so much time focusing on hypocrisy and it explicitly says, multiple times, that those who cannot forgive the sins of others will themselves not be forgiven because our sins against God were much greater but we were forgiven.
What this tells me is that there is a tendency in man to make himself the moral standard of others, what this means is we want others to do what feels/seems good to us even if we can’t reciprocate by doing what seems good to them. This is why the golden rule is powerful. We cannot do unto others what we would have them do unto us, because we are so helplessly fallen.
This is what makes God different. Christ suffered the punishment for sins that were not his and not just that, he had the power to avoid such punishment. But he believes saving immoral people like you and me is worth it because of his abundant love. Often the unbeliever will ask why God doesn’t just get rid of sin, of course there’s a free will argument to be made and for now I’d rather avoid the Christian free will debate, but our will, free or not, was created by God so he can simply use his power to stop us doing the bad things, but he has the restraint not to do that but at the same time he ensures justice and salvation both take place regardless, that makes God special beyond his absolute power, he has a holiness we can hardly comprehend.
So going back to this sinful tendency to make ourselves God over our fellow man, this perfectly explains Lord Acton’s famous observation. The most righteous human King that has ever existed, David son of Jesse, used his power to engage in adultery with the wife of a trusted soldier, a man who was one of his very best and most loyal soldiers (Uriah the Hittite). Then he had this man killed because he wanted to cover up what he had done.
Some wise men instinctively or through experience, understood the fallible nature of men and the dangers of absolute power. That is why we had Republican experiments like Rome and men like Cincinnatus within those states. These are people who understood the dangers of power, so it’s by no means something that is unique to Christianity and some would argue that libertarian tradition could just as easily derive from those examples.
Indeed, the Scottish enlightenment that produced the American constitution drew heavily from Rome. But these were also Christian men and they specifically referenced God as the source of our rights. History can lead to a libertarian conclusion just as much as the bible does, but only the bible tells you why limited government is the only option, only the bible tells you that there can never be a good enough person to assume absolute power, only Christ is worthy and he will assume that power some day but before then, not even the Pope or any other Christian leader can be trusted with such power.
To end with, recall that ancient Israel didn’t start out with a King even though Moses and his descendants could easily have anointed themselves Kings. In fact, the top leaders/officials in Israel after the emancipation and exodus from Egypt were the Judges. Their job was simply to adjudicate disputes as Moses had done.
These included Judges who achieved some incredible feats like Deborah, Gideon (his son did try to name himself King and it ended in disaster), Samson and Samuel. The people of Israel demanded a King after some horrific events like the gang rape, murder and dismemberment of a young woman (Judges 19) which led to a civil war.
God relented by anointing Saul of the tribe of Benjamin. Which was itself an interesting choice because the civil war had been the other 11 tribes against Benjamin, therefore Benjamin was much diminished after the war. God continually elevates people who come from the most humble circumstances.
But look at what God says when he agrees to grant the people the King they want, talking to Samuel, who was also a prophet in addition to being a Judge:
“Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.“
- 1 Samuel 8:7
To God, demanding a King was equivalent to rejecting God himself. This is something Christian monarchists and Christian nationalists never fully engage with. I do think monarchy is better than rule by the mob (democracy), but this should not be an absolute monarchy.
It is too easy for any man to make themselves an idol for worship instead of God, of course democracy and other forms of governments also have their own idols, the communists of North Korea are officially atheists but they worship the Kim family. Worship is a part of being human. The only question is whether one worships God or some idol like money, yourself or the state.
Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer and an associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.
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