When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism

I recently acquired the new edition of Otis Q. Sellers’s 1961 booklet Christian Individualism: A Way of Life for the Active Believer in Jesus Christ (CI) which, to my surprise, I did not already own. [Learning of this gap in my collection, Sam Marrone, my friend and brother in Christ, graciously sent me a copy of the 3.5″ x 5.5″ original, which arrived April 10th. Thanks, Sam!—A.G.F.] The text was reset by the folks at The Word of Truth Ministry, which makes nearly all of Sellers’s writings and recorded messages available, mostly free of charge. The publication is available for sale on Amazon.

What caught my eye was his quotation of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), playwright, novelist, and philosopher of individualism. I doubt he would have cited her on individualism (or anything else) had he known she was an enemy of Christianity.

In 1957 Rand had published Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, but even in 1961 she was probably best known for The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel that was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper six years later. In the year that novel came out, Rand began working on “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” A “condensed” portion (which you can read here) appeared as “The Only Path to Tomorrow” in the January 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest.[1] When he cited it, it was already 17 years old and something that would have been collected in the war-related scrap drives. I’m inclined to think he had bought it when it came out and kept it from the paper salvagers.

Having died in 1992, Sellers didn’t live to see the suffocating ideological conformity that every institution in his country demands. What Sellers quoted from Rand’s essay rings ominously relevant to our day; it bears on the individualism he calls Christian. Rand wrote:

The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers, but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.

Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism is the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.” . . . No tyrant has ever lasted long by the force of arms alone. Men have been enslaved primarily by spiritual weapons. And the greatest of these is the collectivist doctrine that the supremacy of the state over the individual constitutes the common good. No dictator could rise if men held as a scared faith the conviction that they have inalienable rights of which they cannot be deprived for any cause whatsoever, by any man whatsoever, neither by evildoer, nor by supposed benefactor.

This is the basic tenet of individualism, as opposed to collectivism. Individualism holds that man is an independent entity with an inalienable right to the pursuit of his own happiness is a society where men deal with one another as equals.[2]

Leaving aside how Rand’s atheism—she called her philosophy “Objectivism”—supported “inalienable rights,” it fascinated me to learn that the Russian émigré’s individualism resonated with her American contemporary.[3] “What she said,” Sellers wrote, “might well be projected to take in individualism as a way of life for the active believer in Jesus Christ.”[4]

One of the things Sellers most loathed about churches was the pressure to conform:

Christian Individualism is for the active believer in Jesus Christ who has discovered that his interest in God’s truth and his growth in the knowledge of Jesus Christ has brought him into conflict with the status quo that is so fervently maintained by the organizations that call themselves churches. (CI 17)

But he was not a nonconformist for its own sake: “I am not an eccentric, subsisting on fruits and nuts, and I do not wear robe or sandals.” (CI 18) His interest was solely in the truth and the liberty to follow it wherever it led him, a freedom upon which churches do not look kindly.

My individualism is something that is reserved almost entirely for the Lord Jesus Christ. It is for His glory, not mine. I do not think it is wise to try to escape the trend toward conformity so far as the material side of life is concerned [e.g., what one wears]. (CI 18)

And he had nothing but disdain for the globalist One-Church movement called “ecumenism.”

Up to the present decade [the Sixties] ecumenicity has always been a dream. However, the tendency toward standardization and uniformity which is sweeping the Western world has given it great impetus. It is no longer a dream, it is a fact. It has received general acceptance from a majority of Protestant churches, and the whole ecclesiastical machinery is slowly grinding toward it. (CI 20-21)

In 1962, the year after Christian Individualism came out, the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church convened the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican whose proceedings many Protestants were invited to observe. (Go here for photos of Pope John XXIII greeting many non-Catholic observers.) “There can be no doubt,” Sellers fears, “but that this movement has as its goal the complete homogenization of all professing Christians, in which all ideas and values are to be mass-produced, and in which any opinions which deviate will have no right to be heard.”

The Christian Individualist stands aloof from all this. He is unable to fellowship with those who worship the movements and programs which are motivating the churches today. He cannot go along with those whose sole desire is to merge their identity with a group. Some men simply do not want to be free, and an organization is often a spiritual sanitarium for men who are afraid to stand alone. (CI 21)

Christian Individualism “is not for the nominal Christian. This way of living will not be satisfactory and will be of no help to that great multitude of people who at one time ‘professed faith’ in Jesus Christ and then became passive about the whole matter.” (CI 16) And by “way of life,” he does not mean “a way or manner of obtaining life.” That is, it’s not a way of salvation, but rather the “way or manner of living in respect to certain conditions and circumstances for the one who has obtained life through Jesus Christ.” (CI 16) And it has nothing to do with belonging (or not belonging) to a church.

The believer in Jesus Christ has every right to refuse the quid pro quo that makes organized religion to be an enlargement or development of the New Testament ecclesia. My own studies in this subject confirm what [Emil] Brunner [1889-1966, the Protestant theologian whom Sellers had just cited] declares unremitting research has found, namely that there is no similarity between the Biblical ecclesia and the churches of today.[5] God’s ecclesia . . . was not an organization which men joined. God’s ecclesia were individuals, out-called men and women. In the Acts period these out-called ones mediated between men and Christ, as their every act and work shows. This mediatorial work came to an end at the close of the Acts period, leading Paul to declare that there is “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5) This is present truth. This is truth for today. . . . We are the out-called of God in promise and expectation . . . . The word ecclesia told them what they were. It tells us what we someday will be. (CI 22; my emphasis.—A.G.F.)

To be sure, Sellers cautions:

Christian Individualism does not mean that the believer stands alone. But it does mean that he knows how to stand alone, and that he will without complaint stand happily alone if he deems it to be a part of the worthy walk of his calling. . . . He has a profound sense of his personal responsibility to God; therefore, he will put Him first and every other consideration must be subservient. While he earnestly desires fellowship and community with others, he refuses to allow this desire to be the reigning influence of his life. He dislikes isolation and aloneness as much as anyone, yet he will not compromise in order to belong. (CI 24; my emphasis.—A.G.F.)

Sellers’s work depended on the work of “churchmen,” but that’s no reason to impute a divine status to the “churches” that underwrote their books. As I wrote a few years ago:

For Sellers, as for the Reformers, the sources to be freshly reexamined were the Holy Scriptures. Unlike the Reformers, however, he had no interest in composing a creed around which to organize a “church” to compete with the Roman Catholic Church as did the Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Although the Reformers took great strides ad fontes—and we owe them much for their translations, commentaries, dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances—they retained many of the merely human traditions inherited from the dominant religious society they separated from. Despite their great formal learning and (sometimes) the best of intentions, they went only so far in returning ad fontes aquarum.[6]

We must admire the great works of charity (for example, disaster relief, to name no other kind) that Christians have performed for centuries under one or another church banner. Church membership may be the occasion of the exercise of their virtue of charity, and their churches its instrument, but that does not make them ekklesia.

And belonging to churches is not a necessary condition of being saved by Jesus Christ. What is required for that is to believe in the One Whom God has sent (John 6:29), and we find out what to believe by studying the record God gave of His Son (1 John 5:10). But

. . . in order to be obedient to the Word of God one must be acquainted with it . . . [which means] we must carefully study it. And how should we study it? Merely to find proof texts to supports our own preconceptions and ideas? Or should we study it with an earnest desire to understand its contents, with profound reverence for its authority, and with an honest purpose to obey and conform to its truth, whatever it may cost us? (CI 29)

Those who choose the latter course are Christian Individualists, whatever they call themselves. Their choice, however, will be tested when they find something in the Bible that contradicts what their church teaches. For “let God be true and every man a liar” (Romans 3:4) and let us “obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29) when the latter contradicts the former—even if the man has “Reverend” before his name.

I’ll close with the words of my late friend Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015), who introduced me to Sellers’s writings over 45 years ago [7], wrote:

Let it be clearly understood here and now however, that I do not believe in the destruction of any church, but in the freedoms of speech, worship and the press granted under the [U.S.] Constitution. And more than this, I believe in the freedom from fear, especially that type of fear which is instilled in a person by his religion to prevent him from either questioning, verifying, or disproving their claims. . . .

I wish to arouse in the reader an interest to compare his church’s teachings with clear statements in the Bible—if they are in conflict, to have the courage to bring them to the attention of others. This may eventually result in his expulsion from his church. . . . The Christian should now be independent, that is, an individual who should think for himself. He should be free to accept new teachings and reject old ones when compared in the light of the Bible.[8]

Notes

[1] Sellers cited only the magazine’s title, issue date, and the article’s range of pages; I had to research the rest.

[2] Here’s page 88 of Reader’s Digest, January 1944, which includes the text Sellers cited. “Rand was furious to discover that the published article had been altered from her original, primarily by softening her language and omitting mention of Stalin as a totalitarian dictator.” Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Oxford University Press, 2009, 312n52. Rand’s biosketch in the lower left corner of page 88 reads: “Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad [but St. Petersburg again since 1991.—A.G.F.]), Russia, and graduated from the university there. She took up writing and in 1931 came to the United States ‘in order to write as I please.’ She is the author of the Broadway hit The Night of January 16th, which ran for three years in the ’30’s. Among her books are We the Living, Anthem, and the recent best-seller The Fountainhead, which is soon to be made into a movie.” Actually, 1931 is the year she became a U.S. citizen; she had arrived in New York City five years earlier, age 21.

[3] For a critique of Objectivist epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, as one adherent has articulated them, see my Atheism Analyzed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God” (2019). I defend the worldview on which this critique rests in my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Amazon, 2022.

[4] This tension has been explored by Jennifer Anju Grossman, “Can You Love God and Ayn Rand?,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2016 and Bishop Edward S. Little, “Ayn Rand Led Me to Christ,” Christianity Today, June 29, 2011. For a defense of Christian Objectivism, see Sean Edwards, “Are Ayn Rand and Christianity Compatible?,” The Ray Edwards Show, June 23, 2013. For a discrediting of this option, see John W. Robbins, Without a Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System, Trinity Foundation, 1997. That a cult of admirers clustered around her is ironic. Sellers made sure nothing like that happened around him and his teaching, and nothing like it has. See Murray N. Rothbard’s 1972 The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult, whose text can be read here.