Tea Theology
Religion News Service’s Alfredo Garcia has a great story today asking whether the Tea Party is “unbiblical.” Garcia neatly encapsulates the arguments offered on both sides of the question. A couple of choice excerpts:
“I think that the general ideology of the Tea party is not a Christian one,” said David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and co-founder of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a faith-based nonprofit.
“This kind of small government libertarianism, small taxes, leave-me-alone-to-live-my-life ideology has more in common with Ayn Rand than it does with the Bible.”
On the other hand, there’s this:
Lloyd Marcus of Deltona, Fla., a spokesman for the Tea Party Express, is a born-again, nondenominational Christian who says flatly that “Jesus was not for socialism.”
“Yes, the Bible advocates giving, but out of the goodness of our own hearts, not out of government confiscation of wealth or re-distribution of wealth,” he said.
An interesting and commonly raised point, albeit one that evades the “render unto Caesar” argument. I’d add that it’d be difficult for Jesus to be a socialist since he lived over 1,800 years before that system was created, but that’s a side point. Garcia’s story dispenses with Marcus’s claim:
But the Bible, and particularly the Hebrew prophets, are also firm on need to protect the vulnerable, which sometimes requires government action, said Simon Greer, president and CEO of the Jewish Funds for Justice, which helped fuel the progressive backlash against Beck.
Greer said his New York-based group is founded on “the fundamental religious call to care for others,” which in turn is based “on the belief that we’re all made in the image of the divine.”
“The only sensible conclusion is that we need mechanisms like effective government … to solve the pressing problems that our country faces,” he said.
Garcia then notes that “American church-goers gave only about 2.5 percent of disposable income to churches in 2007; of that, only about 0.37 percent–roughly $100 per member–went to charities beyond the church. Those figures are down by about half since 1968.” [Another side note: over that period, tax rates have been slashed repeatedly.]
Head-to-head with theologically grounded arguments for the common good and social justice, the Tea Party’s biblical case for libertarianism doesn’t have a prayer.
Good post. The passage of the original article that catches my eye is the gentleman’s claim that government social welfare programs are akin to “coercively taking money from people and redistributing to other people, which, at the end of the day, is legalized stealing…. And the Bible is pretty firm on stealing.â€
Interestingly, the early Church fathers, like St John Chrysostom of the 3rd/4th century, (their faith steeped in scripture) frequently offered a different perspective — that for us to refrain from giving what we have to those in dire need is not just choosing against doing something we might consider doing “out of the goodness of our hearts,” but is morally equivalent to stealing what rightfully belongs to the poor.
The idea is repeated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.”