Month: April 2020

Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?

The following review of Robert Grözinger, Why Libertarianism Needs Christianity to Succeed (Kindle eBook, April 7, 2020) was published on Amazon today.—AGF

Only in this post, not in the Amazon review or anywhere else it was published, I clarified my statement of Scripture’s status as divinely inspired (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos). The writings, not the human authors as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, are “God-breathed.” —AGF, February 19, 2024

This provocative essay derives from a talk given to the Libertarian Alliance in London late last summer. German economist and translator Robert Grözinger (Jesus, der Kapitalist: Das christliche Herz der Marktwirtschaft, Munich, 2012) argues that libertarianism, which traditionally prides itself on its alleged independence from philosophical frameworks, cannot succeed without one that gives meaning to liberty-seeking itself. Arguments for, say, the superiority of free to hampered markets don’t compensate libertarianism for its lack of an adequate framework of meaning or worldview. Libertarians should identify theirs and persuade others on its terms if they want libertarianism to be more than an intellectual hobby. For if libertarianism’s attitude toward ultimate-meaning frameworks remains as laissez-faire as its politics, its attractiveness will remain limited. Grözinger believes Christianity best meets that need.

Robert Grözinger

Grözinger believes that most people—regular folks, not nerds who read themselves into and out of ideologies—are not libertarian for this reason: they seek meaning as much as (if not more than) economic well-being. Intellectual conviction that in a libertarian society everyone will be, on the whole, materially better off than in any alternative arrangement is not enough to seal the deal. For the masses, liberty may be a great good, especially when they’re deprived of it, but not necessarily life’s chief good around which all others revolve. If one wishes to attain and retain other great goods, the libertarian argues, one cannot neglect liberty. Liberty doesn’t defend itself, so people must learn to make it an object of thought and protection. Grözinger amplifies this insight: theoretically self-conscious defenders of liberty must, no less self-consciously, ground their defense in a worldview that embraces many values, not just one.

In his short book Grözinger packs in enough topics to fill an interdisciplinary graduate seminar in politics and religion; I’ll have to pass over how he draws upon Jordan Peterson, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Friedrich Hayek and focus on the writer who answers Grözinger’s question to his satisfaction: Reformed historian and theonomist Gary North. Of the several scholars whose work Grözinger draws upon, North is the only one who’s also a professing Christian—and one with whom many (if not most) other Christians disagree. Continue reading “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?”

Only Light can overcome the darkness

This review of Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America by David Horowitz was published yesterday on Amazon. [Added 04/04/2020: Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella addressed some of the issues I raise below.—A.F.]

DARK AGENDA: The War to Destroy Christian America - Kindle edition ...

Across Dark Agenda’s dozen chapters David Horowitz (Radical Son; Mortality and Faith; Black Book of the American Left [in nine volumes]) starkly surveys the outrages that the Left has committed against traditional American sensibilities for more than a hundred years. This short book isn’t a treatise on political philosophy, although evidence of his training in it enriches its pages. It delivers the clean, spare reflections of an American octogenarian who once promoted the leftist worldview he’s been exposing for over thirty years.

According to Horowitz, the Left hates Christianity, Western civilization’s dominant religion, and therefore hates America, arguably that civilization’s finest political creation. These mutually reinforcing hatreds take many forms. Leftist denials of anti-patriotic animus are worthless, for evidence of it abounds and is of long record.

For example, there’s the “discovery” of a mother’s alleged right to procure the death of her unborn child. This offends against the first right named in the Declaration of Independence. Then there’s the ban on public school prayer: Leftists seem only to have heard of the First Amendment’s non-establishment clause, not its free-expression twin.

Democratic-led (i.e., Leftist) state and local governments virtually nullify the right to bear arms articulated in the Second Amendment, a bulwark against a potentially tyrannical government. In a health emergency, for example, the government shutters as “non-essential” gun stores along with theaters and restaurants.David Horowitz | Young America's Foundation

Neither able nor willing to build consensus and win arguments in town halls and voting booths—the American way—Leftists, in addition to their slander, rioting, spying and other crimes, have achieved their aims by seeking and winning diktats from unelected jurists.

A moral theologian once aphorized that social engineering begins with verbal engineering, and Horowitz abundantly illustrates that truth. Americans live under a linguistic tyranny against which no charitable appeal to nuance or good will is a defense. (He notes that “‘people of color’ is a term created by people who are at war with this culture” [167].) Dissenters from the politically correct orthodoxy are diagnosed as suffering from one “phobia” or another.

Racism “explains” nearly everything the anti-Christian elites don’t like about America, past and present. Quack psychiatry replaces arguments. “Democratic” American Leftists are not slow to suggest that their political adversaries—mainly, but not exclusively, conservative Christians, and especially those of European descent—are lunatics for whom an asylum is medically indicated. This was, of course, business-as-usual in the old Soviet Union.

Continue reading “Only Light can overcome the darkness”