John Locke on Limited Government

“A limited government is one that levies just enough taxes to provide for national defense and police protection and otherwise stays out of people’s affairs.”

“The free society is an experiment not a guarantee.”
Michael Novak

The notion of limited government in early thinkers such as Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Calvin is clear, but in the last three thinkers the notion is tied to a symbiosis between church and State that was problematic to many. Even in Calvin’s day a group of Christians began to emerge all over Western Europe who sought to unravel the relationship between these two institutions by protesting the one common element in European society that linked church and State—infant baptism. Their basic argument was that infant baptism was an unbiblical idea, but their secondary concern was that since all European governments required christening within the first thirty days of a child’s life, that it had, in effect, become the single practice that knitted church and State together in such a way that the rejection of the authority of one necessarily implied the rejection of the authority of the other.
Social expectations, legal enactments and
interpersonal relationships all built on this
foundation. So to deny that the paedo-baptism
of all was legitimate and to insist on a later baptism of
only a few could not be simply a personal decision
with the goal of pursuing greater spiritual fidelity.
It inevitably also entailed a stinging indictment of
the Christian faith of the others and of the
legitimacy of the civil state.
Forming an alternative church was thus tantamount to sedition. This would have to unravel before further progress could be made in developing a notion of limited government for the world of the future. The one man, along with these scattered Anabaptists, who did most to effect divorce between church and State was John Locke.
In 1665, England sent a diplomatic mission to Cleves—a Prussian city, a Lutheran city. One member of the delegation was a young scholar who had written treatises defending the authority of government over all areas of life, and especially over religion. He had accepted the view promoted by the Tudors of the previous century and the Stuarts (and the French Bourbon kings) of his own time that any kind of religious dissent was dangerous and threatened to undermine society. In Cleves, the young John Locke (1632-1704) found a city in which several Protestant faiths existed peacefully alongside Roman Catholicism. As he put it, “They quietly permit one another to choose their way to heaven.” Locke’s world was transformed overnight.
This visit to Cleves brought about a paradigm shift in Locke’s thinking. “Over the next few years it gradually dawned on the young scholar that religious dissent is not the cause of political conflict over religion. Rather, the outlawing of religious dissent is the cause of political conflict over religion.” Locke would make a major contribution in the development of a philosophical commitment to religious liberty in England and the Western world, as well as to the nature of government in general.
Toleration of religious opinion was nothing new. The Romans, as we have shown, tolerated the religious views of the provinces, after a fashion. The Dutch had been tolerant of religious diversity, all the while having a State Church that was, successively, Roman Catholic and then Reformed. They even had a term for it: “Go Dutch.” To “Go Dutch” meant to “go the easy way,” that is, the tolerant way, since the Dutch allowed Jews, Anabaptists and other movements the freedom to live and practice their faith in the Low Countries. Locke now saw that real religious liberty, not mere toleration, was one of the lynchpins to an overall commitment to limited government in general.
Locke’s more general political theory, seen especially in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, was founded on his belief in the social contract and in his view of human nature. Locke was convinced that men would recognize the need for a social contract with one another in order to secure their own peace and safety. The state of nature is potentially a state of war (Hobbes would say that it is a state of war), so Locke argued that reasonable men would avoid this at any cost. “To avoid this state of war (wherein there is no appeal but to heaven, and wherein every the least difference is apt to end, where there is no authority to decide between the contenders) is one great reason of men’s putting themselves into society, and quitting the state of nature: for where there is an authority, a power on earth, from which relief can be had by appeal, there the continuance of the state of war is excluded, and the controversy is decided by that power.” In other words, they would freely form the social contract because they would know that this is the only reasonable way to live.
Having made the social contract, what ought persons in society together to do with it? Locke next made the point that all men have been given the property that belongs to them, and that none should take it from them. “Everyman has a property all his own: that property is his own person. This nobody has a right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” Once we have removed something legitimately (generally through labor or purchase) from the state of nature, it belongs to us. “The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his consent. . . . For I have truly no property if anyone can by right take from me what he pleases against my consent.” This applies as much to government as it does to seizure by any individual.
What kind of government would be best suited to these ends? In his First Treatise of Civil Government Locke had refuted the ideas of Sir Robert Filmer, whose book Patriarchy had argued for divine right kingship and that the citizens of England should see themselves as the “children” of the king. (Remember that King Charles II did believe in divine right kingship.) The Second Treatise gives one chapter to refuting these notions again (chapter 6), rejecting the idea that an “absolute prince” or “czar” or “grand seignior” ought to be recognized. He then, in a style reminiscent of Aristotle, surveys various forms of government, including “perfect democracy,” “oligarchy,” and monarchy, concluding that none of them really fits in with the pattern of the kind of just government he has been describing. Rather, Locke opts for the notion of “commonwealth.” This form of government would have as its highest and most important branch of government the legislative. “The legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have placed it.” Then again, he states, “In a constituted commonwealth there can be but one supreme power, which is the legislative, to which all the rest are and must be subordinate.” Neither the executive nor the judicial can trump the legislative or act contrary to it. The role of the executive is to stand as the proxy for the legislative when it is not in session and always to comport its actions in a manner consistent with that which has been laid out by the legislative, the true and most immediate representatives of the people themselves.
This is limited government. Though Locke believed that his ideas were consistent with New Testament teaching on governance (but not with the Old Testament, and he accused Calvin of appealing more to that part of the Bible ), these ideas were not solely dependent on any part of the Bible, but rather were derived from a rational consideration of the human condition as such. Further, though this set of convictions had not been held by the Protestant Reformers, they set the stage for it. Luther’s emphasis on vocation and on the priesthood of all believers set the stage for a new form of individualism. Calvin’s political theology and his emphasis on such matters as fundamental law, natural rights, contract and consent of the people were part of Locke’s lexicon. As we noted elsewhere, “Modern Democracy is the child of the Reformation, not of the Reformers.” Locke is thus the person who brings about a confluence between both the Reformation tradition and the Enlightenment. His view on limited government is, perhaps, the best expression of that. What we need to understand more than anything out of his treatment is that the role of the legislative ought to be supreme. That is not the way it is in America today.

Chad Owen Brand

This is an excerpt from an essay that will soon appear at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics.

[The following is a guest blog, written by my daughter, Sandra Bradford. You can follow her on Twitter at @SandraLenay.]

America has changed. We cannot put the total blame on Obama or the Democrats or even the media without taking some of the blame for ourselves. We do not live in the same America as my grandparents and we do not face the same issues they did. The America we live in, its citizens who voted for an Obama second term, are for the most part largely uneducated about the Republican and Democratic parties. Twitter users were calling us racists, white supremacists, evil rich people, oppressors, and the language gets a lot more colorful from there. These are the terms liberals have put upon us, and instead of proving them wrong, we turned the other cheek in hopes that the public will find the truth. As times have grown harder in our country, the public has grown more outraged and hate has seeded its way into our political parties and in this 2012 election that seed sprouted into a flourishing ugly reality and we failed to inform the public of who we are.

In some ways, the Democrats have out-smarted us. When the country began federal funding, spending, subsidizing and adding department after department, it began to transform this country. Policies that we know have ruined our country, in some cases, were put there not because the law makers thought they would help us prosper but because they would help us fail and the government would be there to pick up the victims. When the public depends on the government for their livelihood, the poster boy of that government (Obama) becomes the public’s favorite celebrity.

The original issues of Republican vs. Democrat have been lost in the debates and in the media; instead they have been replaced, strategically, by the Democrats to issues that the government has no business making federal arguments in the first place. Issues like abortion, birth control, healthcare, and gay marriage have highlighted the race. We have lost sight of the fundamental issues of big government vs. limited government and the left loves this. Democrats don’t make arguments about the fundamental beliefs of the Republican party because they know the typical American citizen is ignorant of the true differences between the two parties, and we have allowed them to shy away from this by entertaining the new issues that they have indoctrinated in the American public. Democrats know, simply, that public ignorance is their bliss. If every citizen were informed about the real issues and beliefs of liberal vs. conservative, they would be free to choose what they perceive to be the best choice for America, but we have failed to educate them and the Democrats just sit back and take it in. These fundamental doctrines are no longer taught in school and they certainly are no longer discussed in the media, so what is left? Social arguments.
Our founding fathers would have never wanted the issues of abortion, birth control, etc. in a federal government debate because these type of issues were meant to be debated on a state level. Democrats have taken advantage of the uninformed majority and we have done nothing to stop them. We have not educated the public. They say we want to take away a woman’s right to choose and we defend our stance. Are these things that need to be talked about? Yes. Are they serious issues facing our country? Yes. But why are we talking about them on such a large scale? Romney meant to fire up his base by stating he will defund Planned Parenthood when he forgot about the most important thing. His base is on his side, it is the uninformed that were more fired up about this because we did not explain. It should not be federally funded because government should not use the money it has to either take from our taxes or borrow from other countries to grow more government. We must use that money for what the federal government was meant to do when it was founded by our fathers. We didn’t talk about this; instead we threw our religious values in their face in an America that has become so secular. Forgetting the uninformed was like a Christmas gift to the democrats because they were then free to tell them that Republicans want to take away their rights to their own body, which created an uproar. In a country where fundamental political differences are no longer taught in school or talked about by either party, how can we be surprised when the uninformed youth pick a side based on issues that federal government should have no say in anyway?
You who are so surprised that a 7.9% unemployed public would pick the president for a second term, you are forgetting that the new America does not know the policies that have brought us to this state or how to interpret them. We put so much blame on Obama and damn him for blaming it all on Bush, but in only doing this, we helped him to be re-elected. The average uninformed American citizen does not know why unemployment is so high, they simply know that we are struggling. Instead of informing them on how America has lost so many jobs, Republicans threw statistics and percentages at them and told them Obama is a failure, and that Romney has a plan.
We in many ways insulted them by saying how horrible it is that they are on food stamps and forgot to tell them why food stamps should be a last resort. We preached against government dependency while those who have known nothing else don’t understand that America was not built to support them but to create the culture and environment for them to succeed and prosper on their own. We didn’t explain that to them, so when we damn entitlements with no history lesson for the uninformed, we make it so easy for the left to tell them that we don’t want to help them, we want to leave them on the street to suffer, and we want to take food out of their mouths. When Romney spoke of the 47%, he was both right and wrong. He was right in the sense that there is a vast majority of citizens who use entitlements, and they think they should. He was wrong in the sense that most of these people are not vicious moochers who want to lie on the couch all day and watch soap operas, while the tax payer pays for their survival. Yes, some do take advantage in this way, but not most. Most of that 47% simply do not know the true purpose of the federal government. They do not know that those entitlements are there for the truly needy and that it is meant to be in most cases, temporary. Our government has grown so big over the years, that these entitlements are seen by most of the public as “the new normal” and most of this 47% view it as a benefit to being an American citizen. They think this way because nobody has informed them of the truth. Our failure to articulate this 47% statement to the public made it so easy for the left to use it against us and make Republicans look like haters of the poor and that we cannot relate to their struggle.
America is not the same, my friends. The people, like me, who did not live in the Reagan era, do not understand the fundamental responsibility of federal government. I spent the last two years educating myself because I wanted to understand the right path for our country but I am in a small group of exceptions. My generation and the one before me are generally uninformed of the fundamental differences of our political parties and we conservatives have taken that for granted while the liberals have thrived upon it. Go back and listen to the great speeches of Ronald Reagan. Not only does he inspire, he informs.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”

“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!”

“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15.”

“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much. To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.”

“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

” Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”

“All of us should remember that the Federal Government is not some mysterious institution comprised of buildings, files, and paper. The people are the government. What we create we ought to be able to control.”

“We are learning that the way to prosperity is not more bureaucracy and redistribution of wealth but less government and more freedom for the entrepreneur and for the creativity of the individual.”

“The historian Edward Gibbon wrote about ancient Athens, the first democracy and the fountainhead of Western culture. He wrote that when the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.”
These are just a few examples. When was the last time you heard something like this from a Republican speaking on national TV to the public? When we stopped informing, educating, and inspiring, and instead assumed that the public was educated in conservatism vs. liberalism, republic vs. socialism, Republican values vs. Democratic values, we lost the people, and thus lost the election. And today as we are all pleading, scratching our heads and wondering how America voted for socialism, I tell you that they do not know what that is or how to thrive by restoring America.

Sandra Bradford, via Chad Owen Brand

The Blaze has just reported on Evergreen State College in Washington state, a school that has a non-discrimination policy, following state mandates that transgendered persons cannot be discriminated against. In other words, persons who have a set of genitalia belonging to one gender, but who perceive themselves to be the opposite gender, must be allowed to use campus facilities restricted to that gender. At Evergreen the uproar is over 45-year old wo/man Colleen Francis. Francis is a man who sees himself as a woman, and who therefore uses the women’s restrooms and locker room. Though there has been an outcry over this from parents, spokesman Jason Wettstein has defended the school’s decision, saying, “State law doesn’t allow us to ignore gender identity disorder as one of the protected classes… therefore the transgendered individual has the right to use our facilities, including the locker rooms.”

Now, this would be bad enough if only college age females were subject to sharing their locker room with this man, but the school rents its sports facilities out to local high schools. So, one campus source gave this report: “In late September a parent called the police after her daughter walked into the locker room and observed a naked man using the sauna.  According to the police report obtained by Campus Reform, the transgendered man in question, 45-year-old student Colleen Francis, was ‘sitting with her legs open with her male genitalia showing’ with girls as young as six years old present.” Dads at home would not think of showing their genitalia to their six-year old daughters for the sake of protecting them from things they ought not to be made conscious of at their tender age. But that protection apparently breaks down if they attend a sporting event at a local college.

What is behind this? What has allowed such an egregious sort of display to be allowed, nay, demanded? It is the whole series of laws that has rendered LGBT persons to be treated as a minority, and that, therefore, they cannot be “discriminated against” by barring them from going wherever they wish. If a non-”transgendered’ male wandered into the locker room, he would be subject to arrest. But not Colleen Francis. He, in fact, raised the specter of anti-discrimination laws by offering this: “This is not 1959 Alabama. We don’t call the police for drinking from the wrong water fountain.”

Unbelievable! This man does not even have the decency to recognize that parents don’t want their six-year old daughters to be subject to the perverted display of his body parts.

What needs to happen here? We need to turn the page back and realize, in light of this very example, the sort of example many of us warned would happen while “anti-discrimination” legislation for these persons was being passed, that laws are passed to protect the innocent. There is nothing innocent about what is happening at Evergreen State College. What else? Parents whose children are considering which college to attend ought to vote with their feet and their checkbooks en masse against schools like this. Money talks; it might even make a lot of noise at some voting booths in the near future.

Chad Owen Brand

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This is the first part of the First Amendment, the part that deals with religious liberty. People often misunderstand its intent, and thus misuse it in public discourse.

The purpose of the amendment is to limit the power of Congress. Congress can make no law that establishes any religious tradition as a federal church, nor can it prohibit people from the free exercise of their faith. That is all.

The amendment does not limit the freedom of churches, nor the freedom of individuals. This has become a relevant issue since three days ago, Peter Manseau, writing in the New York Times editorial section made this claim: “Viewed strictly in terms of sequence, the First Amendement’s ‘first freedom’ might be seen as freedom from rather than freedom of religion.” He then proceeds to offer the historical litany regarding people like Patrick Henry, who wished for state support of churches, of all churches that is, and shows that Madison and Jefferson and others rejected that. Just so. And as a Baptist I am glad they did reject Henry’s proposal. Others have argued for other freedoms as “First Freedom,” with FDR believing it to be freedom of speech and the NRA believing it to be the Second Amendment, since only the right to bear arms protects the other amendments in the Bill of Rights being taken away from us.

We all have our opinions, but my main problem with Manseau’s article is not really with the debate over First Freedom, but with his comment quoted above. The First Amendment has nothing to do with freedom from religion, any more than it has to do with limitations on churches or citizens, but with the limitation placed on Congress with regard to religion. Congress can neither enforce a federal church upon Americans, nor can it rob people of their right to express their religion in any way they choose, or in no way at all. The problem with people like Manseau has to do with their failure to interpret history on its own terms, trying instead to enforce a twenty-first century secular mindset on people who did not share their presuppositions. History has to be read on its own terms.

Chad Owen Brand

A few days ago, President Obama said that he was responsible for the Benghazi situation. It is one thing to say, “I am responsible.” It is another to spell out that responsibility, the kind of specificity that has been lacking for four years.

The president has said over and over again, “We will do a full investigation. When we discover just what happened, we will tell you.” We appreciate that. Of course, the Senate hearings do not start until November 15, nine days after the election. Not much chance that will affect the way the election goes, but would anyone expect less from Harry Reid? “Less,” not “more” is all one can expect from the charismatic senator from Nevada.

But here is what needs no investigation: What Obama did and did not do on the afternoon and evening of September 11. All he needs to do is to say what he himself did. Did he deny requests for additional security for the Benghazi compound? Did he deny requests for real time assistance when Americans were under attack? No investigation would be needed to answer those questions. So, what is it, President Obama? Or are you going to seal the records of what you yourself did?

What commander in chief has ever denied assistance to Americans under fire? Panetta’s response that they did not know the situation well enough smacks of cowardice. This is becoming one of the most shameful moments in all of American history. It does not have to be this way.

Chad Owen Brand

Tom Pratt and I have written a new Kindle book analyzing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged from a Christian perspective. Rand was an atheist, but she was also a realist about politics and economics, and her views deserve a hearing in light of the drift toward Socialism in America today. We present an analysis that shows where she is right and where she is wrong. Check it out!

http://www.amazon.com/Clash-Titans-Shrugged-Christ-ebook/dp/B009L5QWL6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1349361229&sr=1-1&keywords=Chad+Brand+Atlas+Shrugged

Here is an excerpt from my forthcoming book with Tom Pratt, Seeking the City.

One of the great questions that has been raised by historians is whether or not John Calvin’s views were the basis of later Republicanism, such as that which prevailed in the American experience in the 1770’s and 1780’s. The best answer seems to be that Jefferson and Madison worked out an approach to government that was consistent with some Calvinist ideals, especially in regards to human depravity and the need for limited government, but clearly not identical. Calvin favored the idea of decentralization in governance, an idea consistent with Jeffersonian politics. One scholar has argued that a synthetic reading of Calvin shows that he held to five principles—“fundamental law, natural rights, contract and consent of people, popular sovereignty, resistance to tyranny through responsible representatives”—what this interpreter calls the “five points of political Calvinism” that would later be a description of Republicanism in essence. But he would likely not have favored the exact system we now have in the United States. As one historian has put it, “Modern Democracy is the child of the Reformation, not of the Reformers.” Modern Republicanism is a sort of working out of the basic ideas that come from the Reformation, but it is not found in the Reformers’ teachings explicitly.

Chad Owen Brand

“Government is the only thing that we all belong to. We have different churches, different clubs, but we’re together as a part of our city, or our county, or our state, and our nation.”

So said the host committee of the DNC in a video that was shown at the convention Tuesday.

I have one question. Did any of these people take a high school civics course? Or, maybe they did, and the problem lies with public education today. One thing I know, and that is that we have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. There is nothing in that great address or in any of our founding documents that even hints at the idea that the government is something that we belong to. To the contrary, it belongs to us!

President Obama has been saying for months that there are two clear visions for the country represented in this election and that they are diametrically opposed to each other. That is one thing that he has said that I agree with one hundred percent. On the one hand we have a political philosophy that says that the government can handle everything. It can own the automobile industry, it can regulate whole legitimate industries (like coal) right out of business, and it can (and should) take care of many (most) Americans from the cradle to the grave. It can tell us what to eat, what size sodas we can buy, how much corn (ethanol) we have to put in our gas tanks, and what size of cars we should purchase.

Just think of the Julia video produced by the Obama Administration. Julia was helped or completely supported by the federal government at every stage of her life. In 2011 100 million Americans received monthly cash payments from the federal government. That is 100 million! Nearly two-thirds of the US population. The total amount payed out to them was $987 billion dollars. That was almost equal to the total deficit for the year. Now some of those are legitimate. But 100 million? Is that what this nation was built on? Is that what the Puritans came to America for, so that their descendants could find a way to live off of the rest of Americans for a substantial portion of their lives? I don’t think so. Yet the Obama Administration is constantly running ads to see if there are any other Americans out there that we can give money to. Nearly 50 million Americans are on SNAP (food stamps). And Washington is trying to find more people to give them to.

Then there is the other philosophy. It says that people need to find their own way. They need to recognize that God has placed us in a world of wealth, wealth that lies beneath our feet, in the natural world around us, but even more, in the resourcefulness of our own imaginations. Find a way. You can find a way, most of you. Of course there ought to be programs for the truly infirm, for the elderly who have paid in to Social Security and Medicare, and there are ought to be temporary help for those who have the misfortune to lose a job, or who have had some other setback. But other assistance has to be predicated on the willingness of people to find work and to be productive. Bill Clinton worked with a Republican Congress to pass such legislation and the numbers of people on welfare plummeted. But now Obama has repealed that by executive fiat. And I don’t care that Clinton denied that in his convention speech. There is a reason he is known as Slick Willie and there is a reason he lost his license to practice law after he perjured himself in the Lewinsky proceedings. Obama’s policies spell an end to America as a world leader and a country nearly everyone wants to come to. If we keep following his policies, we may no longer have to hold a debate over illegal immigration; it may take care of itself.

There are two visions for America, that is right. Tom Sowell articulated this very issue when he pointed out the difference between the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision. The Constrained Vision says we can’t do everything, and government ought not to do everything. The Unconstrained Vision says that government ought fundamentally to remake society in the image of someone’s idea of a “just society.” That has been tried. Think of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution under Mao. Those men (Robespierre, Lenin, Mao) had unconstrained visions of what they wanted their society to be. Contrast that with the American Revolution. Those men (Jefferson, Washington, Madison) called for freedom from tyranny, and for a society that was based on the liberty of the individual. I know, it was only a freedom of white men, but we have corrected that myopia with a Civil War, a suffrage movement, and a passionate push for civil rights. And that very fact shows that the Constrained Vision represented by the American founders was adaptable to adjustment to eliminate any unjustness still in the system. How is that adaptability working for the French or the Soviets these days?

“Government is the only thing that we all belong to.”  Really?  After four years of planning a convention, that is the message you want to send?  What is next?  Sieg Heil?

There are two visions for America. One could very well lead us to tyranny; it will certainly lead us to impoverishment and decline. The other one still holds out hope–unless we have to wait to long to see it implemented again.

Chad Owen Brand

This is Labor Day, a day in which we, uh, do no labor (except writing this blog). I have recently written two books that deal with, among other things, a theology of work. One is by Tom Pratt and me, Seeking the City: Christian Faith and Political Economy, A Biblical, Theological, Historical Study. This book will be out in early 2013 from Kregel, and a portion of it will appear as an ebook this Fall under the title, Awaiting the City. The other book is a shorter analysis that deals with political economy in the Baptist tradition (title not yet set), and will be published by the Acton Institute, available in November. In celebration of Labor Day, I want to distill a few ideas from my research on the theology of work, and make a slight correction to a post I published last week.

The Bible presents a thoroughgoing theology of work. Adam was given work to do before he fell into sin. He was told to name the creatures in the world and to exercise dominion over the world, to subdue it! “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to take care of it” (Gen. 2:15, NIV). Work is not simply a task for those in a fallen world, though now, because of the Fall, we earn our bread by the “sweat of our brow” (Gen. 3:17-19). In the post-Fallen condition men began to work with tools of bronze and iron, and often used such implements to oppress and kill others (Gen. 4:19-24). Jacob went to work for his uncle Laban, who cheated him on his wages, while Jacob himself returned the favor, extorting from his uncle’s herds (Gen. 30). Proverbs teaches that “The wages of the righteous bring them life, but the income of the wicked brings them punishment” (Prov. 10:16).

In the NT Jesus showed the value of work by himself being “The Carpenter” (Mark 6:3). In addition, in his many parables he often taught about the Kingdom of God by depicting people working as laborers. In the NT epistles Paul instructed the Thessalonians to be hard-working people. He makes clear that generosity toward the truly needy is important, but if able-bodied men will not work, they should not be given church welfare. “If anyone won’t work, neither should he eat” (2 Thess. 3:10). This is so that lazy and unproductive people will not be encouraged to “walk in a disorderly manner” (2 Thess. 3:11). When you work, whatever the work is (even the work of slaves), you should do it “unto the Lord” (Col. 3:23). To slaves he wrote that they should obey their masters “like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart” (Eph. 6:3-4). He then enjoins masters to treat their slaves in a just and honorable manner, remembering that “he who is their master and yours is in heaven” and that he sees both masters and slaves in the same way (Eph. 6:4; Philem. 16).

When we turn to the history of the church, we find a robust theology of work. Even monks, who departed from normal life to be secluded unto God, worked with their hands, making the Benedictine monasteries some of the wealthiest institutions in Europe in the Middle Ages. (And that brought its own problems to the monastic movement.) As sociologist Rodney Stark has noted, Catholic monks invented capitalism! One Hungarian monastery in the eighth century had 250,000 acres under plow. Some bred horses and even went into banking.

John Calvin gives us one of the most complete accounts of a theology of work, though we can only touch on the high points here. Building on Luther’s idea that all persons have a calling–not just the clergy–Calvin, who had been brought to Geneva to help reform the churches of that city, taught that all men must work. (Women already worked extremely hard at keeping their homes in that pre-industrialized setting.) Only the very infirm or the very old were exempted. There were no long-term handouts, except for a hand out of town for the lazy! Those who needed training for new employment got it. The very poor who showed up as refugees got temporary assistance from the churches, but no long-term “welfare” was available. And the “successful” were not taxed by the city for redistribution to the “unfortunate.”  The Geneva Reformer integrated his doctrine of sin into his theology of work, in reference both to workers and employers.  Workers should not be paid until a job was completed, so that they would not be slackers; employers must pay the agreed-upon wage, or be barred from the Lord’s Supper.  Calvin believed that God had created a world filled with wealth and that people needed to find a way to make that world work for them.

The heirs to Calvin’s theology were the Puritans, especially the ones who came to America. In America they would find no impediments to entrepreneurship such as existed back in England. There, trade guilds, the unavailability of cheap land, and governmental restrictions in England (and Europe) kept people in the same class of social standing from generation to generation, with virtually no possibility of upward mobility. In America things would be different. New England seemed the least likely place to carve out new financial empires since it was nothing like the fertile Chesapeake Bay area where tobacco and other cash crops could be grown. But New England quickly outstripped Virginia in productivity due to the theology of the Puritans that legitimized hard work, making money, and raising large families. For them, work was one of the means to fulfill one’s calling (and all kinds of work, at that), not simply an act of necessary drudgery.

Over the next three centuries America would become the shining city on a hill in terms of productivity. In 1776, the same year as the Declaration of Independence, a Scot named Adam Smith would publish The Wealth of Nations, the first book in human history that addressed what consumed the majority of most people’s waking hours–making a living. Smith argued that the wealth of a nation consisted not in how much gold it had in its vaults, but in how productive its people were. He contended that the division of labor, the use of technology, and low government interference in the economy would make businesses far more productive and thus increase the wealth of any nation. America has proven him right–until now.

In our current situation government interference in the economy, coupled with massive amounts being spent on welfare programs threaten America’s productivity. Regulation, subsidies, and increased taxation on businesses over the last three Presidential administrations have caused a remarkable slowdown in American productivity. According to the Heritage Foundation, 100 million Americans receive payments from the government that amounted to 987 billion dollars in 2011. Over 50 million families are on SNAP (food stamps).

What can change all of that? In part, a reexamination of the biblical theology of work. A new Administration would also help.

Food for thought this Labor Day.

Chad Owen Brand

PS Last week I posted a short piece on Martin Luther King, Jr. that contained what I have now discovered to be an error, and it is directly related to the subject of today’s blog. Here is the quote from my blog: “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” This was supposedly said by King at a rally in New York on March 10, 1968. But a question from my editor Stephen Grabill sent me scurrying to do more research. The quote is in several secondary works and is one of the most viral King quotes on the Internet, but an examination of the transcript of that speech demonstrates that the great man did say, “All labor has dignity,” but the rest of the statement is not in the transcript (not manuscript). On March 18 he said in another speech in Memphis, “”But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the purpose of building humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth.” This illustrates, at the very least, that quotes floating around cyberspace even of great people like King can get distorted. But he is right–labor has dignity and worth!

[The following is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book on Baptists and Political Economy (still untitled) that I have written for the Acton Institute. The book will be available in November.]

One of the most influential Baptist ministers of the twentieth century was Martin Luther King, Jr. King was educated in the liberalizing (or neo-orthodox) theology that was prominent in the 1940s, studying under stellar scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr. Though Niebuhr was no conservative, yet his mature theology took full account of human sin and the need for redemption, both personal and societal. King appreciated the Social Gospel theology of Rauschenbusch, but at the end of the day, rejected it. He believed that the idea that government and churches could somehow come together to improve the lot of humans was an illusion, and he likewise held out no hope, as Fosdick had, that some coalition of church, labor unions, and Progressive politics could solve the racial problems in this country.

King believed that a new generation was dawning. For him, the answer to the problem of racism lay in personal salvation and in appealing to the Christian consciousness of a nation by displaying the injustice of racism. His hope was that a younger generation of Americans would do better than their fathers had. In his 1963 Birmingham campaign he stated, “The purpose of . . . direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” King was no Socialist, nor was he an advocate of Liberation Theology, nor did he ask for special treatment for blacks. He just wanted blacks to have the same opportunities as whites. In keeping with his Baptist heritage, he believed in the importance of work, writing, “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” King’s concern was that black people in America had been cut out of the “American Dream,” and he wanted them to have an equal opportunity as whites to the table of flourishing in this great country. He was not looking for handouts for blacks in America. His understanding of human sin was as profound as that found in Augustine or Calvin. King also rejected any kind of strategy of coercion. What anchored Martin Luther King more than anything else was not his liberal theological education, but his deep roots in Baptist piety and ecclesiology, and the spiritual conversion that he experienced one night when his home was attacked with his daughter inside. King’s approach to justice was color-blind, unlike some of his successors today (Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson), it was not a plea for the Administrative State to come to the rescue. While some of us would find some fault in some of the positions he took, we applaud him as a man who stood for biblical principles and for the Baptist heritage in the courageous way that he fought racism and injustice. I, for one, was deeply moved when he was assassinated (I was thirteen), and see him as one of the heroes of the faith.

Chad Owen Brand