Demsetz concludes his paper by suggesting further lines of inquiry, for example intellectual property:

Consider the problems of copyright and patents. If a new idea is freely appropriable by all, if there exist communal rights to new ideas, incentives for developing such ideas will be lacking. The benefits derivable from these ideas will not be concentrated on their originators. If we extend some degree of private rights to the originators, these ideas will come forth at a more rapid pace. But the existence of the private rights does not mean that their effects on the property of others will be directly taken into account. A new idea makes an old one obsolete and another old one more valuable. These effects will not be directly taken into account, but they can be called to the attention of the originator of the new idea through market negotiations. All problems of externalities are closely analogous to those which arise in the land ownership example. The relevant variables are identical.

The analysis is compelling, both historically and logically. However, one of the difficulties with the Stiglerian “exists-ergo-optimal” type analysis is that it takes process for granted. The ordering forces that lead humans to realize optimal solutions given costs are simply assumed to exist. Thus, once the negative externalities of the commons outweigh the costs of instituting a set of rights, it’s practically inevitable that property rights come into being.

This is, of course, the primary Austrian critique of Chicago-style economics. These processes cannot simply be assumed, for their operation is part of the question. How can we assume that the lowest-cost solution will be obvious? Introducing information costs only deals partially with this problem; serendipitous discoveries or epiphanies are not “costly” but to a large extent unpredictable. Hence we see the necessity of the idea of entrepreneurship not only in an economic theory of the market, but in institutional analysis as well. Before any spontaneously adjusting forces can come into play, someone has to have the idea to privatize his property.

From here, several things can happen. The primal privatizer can privatize his own land, taking on the negotiating and policing costs himself and convincing others to join him. As he succeeds or fails, he will either get others to follow his example, or those whom he had initially convinced will abandon the project. The important feature here is, it doesn’t matter whether the institutional entrepreneur has the right reasons for doing something: his success or failure speaks for itself. In this way, the development of land rights in Northeastern tribes can indeed be said to be an institutional adjustment to a new optimum.

But this is not the only way institutions are shaped. If the tribal leader suddenly makes a change to the set of property rights heretofore enforced, and if he has a police force to do so, the adjusting forces are seriously weakened. Here, it matters a great deal if the leader uses right reason: a suboptimal decree can only be overturned when its costs outweigh the costs of overturning his rule (whether by changing his mind or deposing him), and an entrepreneur exists to accomplish it.

Thus we would expect socially optimal property rights to emerge from something like a common-law or polycentric system, with small jurisdictions and many examples to follow. The Indian tribes had nothing resembling modern political authority structures, so one could reasonably expect their customary rights to be somewhat optimal. There is no reason, however, to expect statutory rights under a central political authority structure to be anything close to optimal. Democratic deliberation has much higher information costs than experimentation.

Thus we return to intellectual property. Intellectual property rights are by necessity statutory. They require wide police powers over a large area, an area which must become larger as the costs of information reproduction decline in they are to be effective. Hence we see the United States government pressuring foreign governments to adopt its own stricter intellectual property laws, since with practically costless reproduction over the internet, their laxer laws render its own ineffective.

There is simply no way for intellectual property rights to arise without a central and far-reaching decree. Without that, they are unenforceable. Self-defense of one’s intellectual property is a nonsensical idea. One cannot mark off an intellectual boundary and police it, and negotiation would be useless without the consent of every potential violator. To defend intellectual property requires a police apparatus and a central authority, making it practically impossible that such laws could ever reflect a social optimum in the same way that land rights did for the Indian tribes.

Intellectual property laws increase the incentive to create by hindering the ability to improve. By hinting at the former and ignoring the latter, and by ignoring the processes by which the contours of rights emerge, Demsetz is able to treat intellectual property as if it were “closely analogous” to land property, and as if “the relevant variables are identical”. In fact, the relevant variables between these two cases are not the costs at all, but the processes.

There are attempts to rescue these terms as descriptively useful for ideologies by prefacing them with “fiscally” or “socially”. But what does social conservatism have to do with fiscal conservatism ideologically? Others have drawn up a multiplicity of moral foundations to explain why people group around these labels. This is probably closer to the mark: emotional appeal is a better test of a mass movement than ideological consistency.

But rather than a collection of foundations, the dichotomy between the conservative and the liberal mindset can be boiled down to a heuristic; a mental shortcut when looking at a stranger: the liberal says, “This person is like me”, and the Conservative says “This person is not like me”.

This is why, according to Moral Foundations Theory, solidarity plays such a big role in the conservative mindset and not the liberal. It’s why the world seems scarier – the threat of muslims, terrorists, and communists always strike the conservative heart more deeply. It’s also why conservatives tend to see their culture as it exists as something in need of protection, whether from immigrants, gays, or youth.

The tendency to downplay interpersonal differences also explains the liberal insistence on unqualified welfare benefits. Unable or unwilling to see any differences except accidental ones between himself and a less well-off individual, he imagines himself in that situation without any thought to the circumstances leading up to it. Thus the stridence with which liberals oppose drug testing, means testing, or any sort of restrictions or qualifications on welfare, serves to preserve their own hypothetical dignity. Conversely, the animus against the rich common on the left reflects the fact that these liberals, not being able to conceive of themselves as deserving vast sums of money, cannot conceive that anyone should deserve it. “No one can earn a million dollars honestly,” as the saying went.

These mindsets also inform the typical attitudes toward criminal justice. The liberal is more likely to chalk up the guilt to external circumstances because he imagines them constituting most,if not all, of the difference between them. The conservative, on the other hand, is stereotypically “tough on crime”. Unable to see himself committing such a crime under any circumstances, it’s easier for the conservative to assign blame to the criminal’s personal character.

It’s been said that conservatives are generally less bothered by inequality as such than liberals, for exactly this reason. Where the liberal cannot see any difference between himself and the less fortunate, the conservative is always ready to posit a difference that explains the outcomes. Thus conservatives oppose what they see as leveling against the natural order. The decline of the landed elites in the face of the rise of the market was deeply lamented by conservatives as liberalism fought against political privilege. Now that the liberalism has turned against the market in pursuit of ever more egalitarian aims, conservatism has adjusted itself to hold the market, rather than heredity, as reflecting the inherent differences in people.

This even holds outside of the political context. Theological liberalism was a rejection of the supernatural in favor of a universal brotherhood of man under God. On the other hand, theological conservatism universally rejected universalism, likely in large part as a reaction against liberal protestantism. The distinction between the saved and the unsaved is inconvenient for the liberal mind, and perhaps too convenient for the conservative mind.

Finally, this also explains why National Socialism is considered a “right-wing” movement while Leninism is considered “left-wing”, despite being largely similar in terms of actual political ideology (“Socialism of the German variety” and “Socialism of the Russian variety”): they rested on appeals to very different mindsets. Nazism embodied extreme parochial nationalism on the one hand, and Leninism extreme revolutionary universalism on the other. The one emphasized the uniqueness of the Aryan; the other the universal solidarity of the working class.

This is, of course, painting in broad strokes. No doubt many self-consciously intellectual and self-described conservatives and liberals do come to conclusions from a consistent ideology, rather than piecemeal from a heuristic. But the fact remains that, whatever the specific ideological content of the words at any point in time, that content has shifted radically – but the type of person generally self-describing as those words has not changed. The more ideological may indeed find themselves on the opposite side from where they started: consistent pro-market ideology, once called liberal, now called “classical liberal” or libertarian, now often finds itself lumped in with conservatism, despite their lack of affinity for the conservative heuristic.

Nor does everyone necessarily fall to one side or the other. There are aspects in which people are similar to one another, and there are aspects in which they are different. It is the task of an ideology, whether political, theological, sociological, or anything else, to determine at which points people are similar or different, and which of these points are salient. A persistent bias one way or the other, far from being a point of identity or solidarity, is a cloud over clear thought and a vitiation of its ideology.

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Transcript follows.

In September 2011, the North Carolina General Assembly passed SB 514, called “An act to amend the constitution to provide that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.” In May of 2012, voters of North Carolina will get to decide whether or not to ratify Amendment One.

The push for this amendment has been mainly from social conservatives who believe that homosexuality is wrong. The slogans we hear supporting it are cast in terms of a culture war. Indeed the short title of the bill is the “defense of marriage”.

First, let’s define what we mean by marriage. We’ve got to go deeper than “one man and one woman” – lots of things are between one man and one woman that aren’t marriage. Marriage, to the Christian, is a living picture of the relationship of God with his people. Throughout the Old Testament God describes himself as “married” to Israel. In the New Testament, Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands, as the Church submits to Christ. And he tells husbands to love their wives, as Christ loved the Church – and gave himself up for her. In Revelation, John calls the Church the “Bride of Christ”. This relationship isn’t just symbolized by marriage; marriage gets its very meaning from this reality.

What about marriage between unbelievers then? What about marriages which are lived out without any regard to the symbolism there? This is when it becomes clear, once we move beyond the rallying cries and the slogans, that it’s not the same. In fact, there’s a totally different thing we also call marriage: we’ll call this “civil marriage”, as opposed to “Christian marriage”.

So what is civil marriage? It’s a set of contracts. Visitation rights, next of kin, power of attorney. What’s the spiritual significance of these contracts? Zero. The state of North Carolina has the power to define civil marriage. God has defined Christian marriage. So which one are we defending with the “defense of marriage act”?

If we’re defending Christian marriage, we don’t need to. As long as the spirit of God is active, Christian marriage cannot be destroyed. No one can change the reality that lies behind it. When Jesus founded the Church, he didn’t say to Peter, “Peter, I’m building a Church. I need you to be a rock for me – don’t let the gates of Hell overpower it!” No – he said “Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell will not overpower it. The homosexual agenda doesn’t believe in Christian marriage, so how can they touch it?

On the other hand, if we’re defending civil marriage, why waste our time? Why does it matter to the Christian who’s allowed to make a certain kind of contract with another person? Winning the culture wars won’t save anyone. Jesus did not command us to make sure we have a family-friendly culture. He commanded us to make disciples of all nations. The Defense of Marriage act is a poor excuse for evangelism and discipleship.

So come May, when the Defense of Marriage act comes up on the ballot, before you cast your vote, think to yourself: what am I defending, and why am I defending it? Voting no doesn’t condone anything; it simply recognizes the fact that the state of North Carolina has nothing to do with defining Christian marriage. If we value our religious liberty in the United States, Christians should be the first to say that the marriage the state defines is not the same as Christian marriage. What an opportunity we have to leave the state its civil marriages, and reclaim for the Church its authority over Christian marriage.

To read more about Christianity and the gay marriage debate, see the following:

• The Toaster Marriage Canard
• “Natural Marriage”

And on the Christian’s place in politics in general:

• The Politics of Monergism
• Faith And Activism, or, The Bible is Not a Blueprint for Society
• Peace and the Politics of Conscience:

One of the lesser splits between Catholic and Protestant doctrine concerns the relation of politics to the fall of man. Would we have presidents and legislatures and kings on earth had there been no fall? Certainly if politics is no more than these, then it is clear that it must be a result of the fall. Human wills in perfect accord with one another and with God do not need to have an external will imposed upon them. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” as James Madison put it in Federalist 51. But men are not angels: it is the fallen rapacity of men that leads them to form governments, both to protect themselves against the rapacity of others, and to exercise their own.

But the Catholic tradition regards political power as not wholly fallen, or even a positive good, should other considerations be joined to it. Catholic social doctrine, following Aristotle’s high conception of the political, holds that “the political community and public authority are based on human nature” (Dignitas Humanae 74). Hardly a clearer affirmation of political power could be made. The salient feature of political authority for Catholics, however, is not its coerciveness but its preeminence among the various associations which men form. Perhaps this is because, at various points in its long history, the Catholic Church has itself exercised coercive political authority. Regardless, the purpose of government for Catholics is to foster the common good (Aquinas, 90.2), which includes justice, order, and virtue.

Justice and order are functions of government agreed on by nearly anyone who believes in a role for government at all. Christians in particular have justified these functions as temporary remedies for the fall; to counteract its most obvious outwardly destructive effects by maintaining order and social peace. Virtue on the other hand, as a component of the duty of political authority to its citizens, is enabled by the pre-fall conception of the political order. If virtue cannot be logically or scripturally sustained as a goal, then severe doubt will be cast on the naturalness of politics.

Virtue Politics

Virtue seems almost obvious as a beneficial goal of political authority, especially in a democracy. Indeed, if our faith informs the ends toward which we aim when participating in democratic decision-making, the spiritual virtues would seem to commend themselves above earthly values. What better end than the salvation of our neighbors, and what better method than the apparatus of government to direct culture thereto?

Virtue politics, however, is not the exclusive domain of the Christian: it takes as many forms as there are people with moral opinions. It is a relatively short leap of logic from personal conviction to institutionalization, so although different forms may indeed vigorously oppose one another, virtue politics as an essential form is omnipresent.

The leap of logic from personal conviction to virtue politics was described well by Milton Friedman, an ardent opponent of virtue politics of any sort, in a 1977 interview with Reason Magazine:

If you really know what sin is, if you could be absolutely certain that you had the revealed truth, then you could not let another man sin. You have to stop him.

That is, if you are convinced of the definition of virtue (or even of a virtue), of something that is categorically good for all men everywhere, you have a moral duty to do everything in your power to prevent men from taking other paths.

For Friedman and others who follow in the vein of liberal thought, the premise of virtue politics is absurd because one cannot know what sin is. One cannot say what the highest ends for all people are – or even if such ends exist at all. The very principle of subjective value, central to so many defenses of human liberty, holds individual values as the ultimate given; not open to outside scrutiny.¹ The question of what values should be is nonsensical; we can only speak of what values are.

It should go without saying that for the Christian, this assertion is itself absurd. Where Friedman would assert an agnosticism of ends, the Christian must assert teleological certainty.² Despite Friedman’s skepticism, the Christian does know what sin is, and is absolutely certain that he has the revealed truth. And of course, love requires him to share this truth with a perishing world.

Must the proper end of earthly authority be therefore, for the Christian, the moral virtue of its citizens?

Soteriology of Agency

The discussion thus far has taken for granted the character of sin implicit in Friedman’s statement: an external act; something one does. Otherwise there would be no requisite duty – how could you stop him? It would be more apt for him to say you could not let another man do a sin.

This is, however, far removed from a Christian understanding of virtue and sin. Indeed, so far as virtue is constituted by these things it is completely irrelevant to the Christian. The principal dichotomy in the New Testament is between grace and works, salvation being a result the former, not the latter (Eph. 2:8-9). Virtue defined as action has no power of salvation – it can never be more than “filthy rags” so far as eternal merit is concerned (Isa. 64:6).

But virtue is not a result of certain actions, but rather certain actions are a result of virtue. It is understood not as conformity to a moral code, but as a relationship with God founded upon an understanding of God as the highest good; i.e. faith (Heb. 11:24-26, 39-40; 12:2), from which proceed works. It is an internal quality with external ramifications.

Nevertheless, this does not yet forbid us from adopting a virtue politic that stops short of forcible conversion. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the wider Christian Right, for example, stand out as exemplars of Christian virtue politics on the modern American Right. The Catholic church likewise has throughout history had very specific social goals for the states and societies of which it has been a part.

Because of the certainty that Christians possess over the Good, any concept of the relationship between the Christian and earthly authority must be informed by the doctrine of salvation – that is, how the Christian obtains that Good – and in particular the doctrine of election. If salvation can in any way be aided or impeded by political action, then the Christian has a duty of love to support policies with the potential to save the maximum number of people.

Virtue politics for the Christian are thus justified, and even required, by any sort of concept of conditional election – that is, salvation which in some way depends on the saved. There are several variants, which differ based on the amount of agency they offer to the human. Starting with the most generous:

1) Pelagianism and Semipelagianism

Pelagian thought places all agency toward salvation on the human will. Salvation is entirely an act of the will; of man accepting or rejecting the gift of God. In so asserting, they reject the concept of a sin nature, something that prevents our coming to God of our own accord. Adam’s sin did not condemn the entire human race, they would say, but rather set a bad example for everyone who followed. Though little of the writings of Pelagius himself survives, references to his assertion that “the sin of Adam affected him alone” survive in the canons of the Council of Orange (529) and in the writings of Augustine.

Part of the “foolishness” of the Gospel to the gentiles is the very idea of a sin nature that subjugates our will (cf. 1 Cor. 1:23); the real desperation of the human condition. This posture of desperation is what separates theology from mere philosophy. Election is a difficult concept to come to terms with by human wisdom, so Pelagianism essentially ignores it. Though their ideas continue to dominate folk theology, even among the nominally Christian, Pelagianism and Semipelagianism have been roundly condemned by all major Christian traditions.

Yet there are theologies which attempt to wed human agency as we perceive it to the distinctive desperation of the Christian faith. Among these include:

2) Corporate Election

Corporate election, held to by Catholics and a minority of Protestants, takes the choice of God in election to refer to the Church as a whole – generally the invisible Church, though in the past it has been taken to mean the institutional church – without respect to any particular individual. Individuals are thus saved by joining themselves to this mystical body, and may forfeit salvation by apostasy – by severing themselves from that body.³ The grace of God for salvation and sanctification is then mediated through the Church. In Catholic doctrine, this idea is also joined with the idea of synergism, in which the cooperation of man’s will is necessary for the grace of God to be effectual to salvation. The important feature is that joining to the Church is an act of the will; that God has not preordained the salvation of any particular person.

3) Individual Conditional Election

Individual conditional election, which along with several related doctrines constitutes Arminianism, has become the dominant strain of Protestant thought. It goes significantly farther than the previous ideas in admitting the helplessness of man. Indeed, the impetus for its development was the reconciliation of human agency with sola gratia – salvation by grace alone – which stands opposed to the idea of synergism.

In Arminian thought, man is totally depraved and unable to come to God of his own will. However, God intervenes with prevenient grace, which allows a decision of the will toward salvation as if it were free. God therefore elects individuals to salvation based on foreknowledge of their response to his prevenient grace.

Salvation and Circumstance

Pelagianism holds the will to be the decisive act of salvation. Corporatists hold that salvation is a gift to be partaken of rather than received. And Arminianism, though admitting the helplessness even of the will of man without the grace of God, nevertheless asserts that God graciously allows and then effectualizes our own choice in the matter.  Each of these as a soteriology of the will depends crucially on the related idea of Unlimited Atonement: salvation in general may remain the sole gift of God, but offered to all indiscriminately or mediated through the church, the salvation of any particular person depends on an act of the will. It is this feature that unites them in requiring a methodology of virtue politics.

To give humans metaphysical agency apart from the sovereign choice of God also necessarily severs the operation of the natural world from the direct, meticulous will of God. To the degree that God leaves specific outcomes in the world to human choice, the salvation of any particular person is subject to at least a degree of chance and historical accident.

Humans do not live in a vacuum of circumstance. Any choice, moral, immoral, or amoral, is arrived at based to a large degree on circumstances: not only so far as they shape each decision individually, but especially so far as they shape the perspectives and values from which we make decisions. You can no doubt recall a tipping point in your life which profoundly affected your worldview. Imagine then all the previous choices by other people which, cascading through your own choices, could have prevented that tipping point from occurring. As various fields of science have demonstrated, often with unnerving ease, the will is remarkably easy to manipulate.

The doctrine of prevenient grace is an attempt to circumvent this problem by allowing people to choose salvation as if in a circumstantial vacuum. But this is hardly a solution. Stripped of the circumstances which shape the values and perspectives from which we choose, choice has nowhere from which to flow but innate temperament, which is no choice at all (and if determined by God, tantamount to unconditional election anyway).

This is the uncomfortable and inevitable consequence of will soteriology: our salvation is still no more in our ultimate control than if we were simply chosen without regard to personal characteristics. But though it is uncomfortable to fully articulate, believers in such soteriologies testify to its truth with  by acting in the political realm as if the salvation of others depended on them.

This is the link to Friedman’s virtue politic and Christianity: so far as the essential difference between a believer and a nonbeliever consists in an act of the will – as far as any individual’s salvation is dependent on circumstance – every Christian has a duty of love to do everything in his power to bring about circumstances most conducive to salvation for the most possible people. Naturally, if our goal is to execute this moral duty, the most potent way to control circumstances is the power vested in government.⁴

Habit to Virtue Then and Now

This was the logic behind St. Augustine’s change of heart regarding forcible conversion (Bigongiari, p. 355). Augustine conceived of the will as an uncaused cause; the decisive factor both in the initial turning from God and in the subsequent return (City of God 12.6). He developed the doctrine of compelle intrare – compel [unbelievers] to enter [the church] – not because belief could be forced, but because he believed the will was subject to the force of habit. External force could break bad habits, thus bringing people to salvation (Wills, p. 103f). This same conception of will with regard to earthly authority was later systematized by Aquinas, who quotes Aristotle saying that “lawmakers make men good by habituating them to good works” (Aquinas, 2.92.1).⁵

The early and medieval Church fathers were not so naïve as to think that a forced belief could bring salvation. But the loophole of habit allowed for a praxis which was essentially no different than if they had believed so, and any scruples Augustine and Aquinas might have personally had about compelle intrare in practice were quickly swept away under the command of more practical consensus-builders. Built on a foundation of Thomist and Augustinian thought and supported by a synergistic soteriology, the Catholic church had a strong theological basis for the political expansion of Christendom.

The Augustinian and Thomist conceptions of the will live on today, hardly modified but usually implicit, in arguments from the Christian Right for “family values” and from Catholics for “Christian institutions”, for example in Leo XIII (1891, 27). Each focuses on making Christianity the path of least resistance in society, the better to instill Christian habits, and therefore, the reasoning goes, eternal virtue. Carl F.H. Henry (1947, p. 71), in his seminal Evangelical social manifesto, wrote,

[T]he unregenerate [who] are moved by Christian standards . . . are more easily reached for Christ than those who have made a deliberate break with Christian standards . . . To the extent that any society is leavened with Christian conviction, it becomes a more hospitable environment for Christian expansion.

This cultural engineering extends far beyond current hot-button issues like the definition of marriage. The Christian Right focuses heavily on children, in whom Christian habits are presumably most easily established. This focus can be seen clearly in the 2010 Texas Board of Education controversy over alleged pro-Islamic bias in textbooks. In March of that year, the Texas Board of Education made sweeping changes to history and social studies curricula in the state adopting history books presenting a more Christian narrative (though, unsurprisingly, a distinctly state-centered narrative, among whose notable changes was a marked de-emphasis on the American legal doctrine of the separation of church and state).

The Papacy too has concerned itself with the establishment of Christian habits, focusing in particular on the working class. Its concern for workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was partly a response to the rise of Marxism⁶(simultaneously condemning it as a philosophical system yet admitting the failure of the church in addressing its grievances). This concern was manifested in an assertion of the responsibility of employers to encourage Christian habits in their employees⁷ – as if the salvation of workers could be (and indeed was being⁸) thwarted by their employers! It should come as no surprise then that Pope Leo XIII, the architect of Catholic social doctrine, was deeply influenced by Aquinas.⁹

Can workers be nudged toward salvation by their employers? Are children threatened with eternal harm when Islam is presented as a legitimate alternative to Christianity? The core question here is, can salvation be effected by the formation of virtuous habit? The answer, from both Catholics and Evangelicals, is yes, and they take their consequent moral duty very seriously. The subtle and not-so-subtle cultural engineering favored by today’s Evangelicals and Catholics is simply an adaptation of compelle intrare to a pluralist culture whose people will no longer bear the sword directly over their souls.

Unconditional Election

But Christianity needs not bind itself with the quixotic duties of will-based soteriology. Against the three soteriologies discussed above, we can contrast a fourth:

4) Unconditional Election

Unconditional election asserts that God has elected individuals to salvation based solely on his sovereign choice. Our will is not uninvolved, but rather than God responding to our will by election, our will responds to God’s electing initiative (cf. John 6:44, 65). Salvation is not the result of faith, but rather the cause of faith.¹⁰

Where will-based soteriologies attest to unlimited atonement and avoid universal election by making it conditional (i.e., individual election is dependent on an act of will), unconditional election (also called Monergism because of the sole initiative of God in regeneration) avoids it by way of limited atonement. That is, the blood of Christ was not applied to all mankind and then made effectual in individual cases by an act of acceptance; rather, the blood of Christ is itself effectual. It is not the blood of Christ plus an act of the will that commends a man to salvation; no one to whom the blood of Christ is applied will fail to be saved.

While at first glance such a doctrine might seem harsh or unfair, in light of the premises and logical conclusions of will-based soteriologies, it is neither more nor less “fair”. Our ultimate control over our own destiny is the same. It is, however, a much more secure object of faith. One’s salvation can be reckoned much more surely in the hands of God than in one’s own hands, or in the hands of history.

The doctrine of unconditional election effectively decouples salvation from circumstance, and therefore the Christian faith from Friedman’s moral imperative. The great sociologist Max Weber noted “the fundamentally anti-authoritarian tendency of the doctrine, which at bottom undermined every responsibility for ethical conduct or spiritual salvation on the part of [the institutional] Church or State as useless.” (Weber, ch.4 fn. 28) Church discipline and evangelism are no longer a Christian’s duty to his neighbor, but his duty to God. The evangelist is a participant rather than an agent, his obligation strengthened by the fact that in failure he forfeits primarily his own communion with God. People and circumstances can be proximate helps and hindrances to salvation, but its cause-in-fact cannot be other than the immutable will and irresistible grace of God.

It was this epiphany which allowed Martin Luther to  break with centuries of compelle intrare and advocate so strongly for freedom of conscience. Because faith is a gift from God, not even the establishment of virtuous habit can justify forcing belief on anyone.

However much they rage, they cannot force people to do more than obey by word and deed; they cannot compel the heart even if they were to tear themselves apart trying . . . it would be much easier, although it may mean allowing their subjects to fall into error, just to let them err.¹¹

Luther clearly saw through the loophole of habit. If the Law of the Lord, which is perfect (Ps. 19:7), is nonetheless powerless to effect virtue (Rom. 8:3), how much less is imperfect human law able to harness habit to bring forth virtue? The impotence of law toward virtue is the very reason the Spirit of God came to dwell in Christians. It is hardly surprising then that the article of the Summa Theologica (Aquinas, 2.92.1) which asserts that law makes men good¹² cites Aristotle six times, Augustine one time, and scripture no times.

The idea that salvation lies within the power of the will binds people with so many chains; the Christian with chains of duty, and if successful, everyone else with chains of law. Soteriologies of the will require that Christians hold earthly authority in order to work for the virtue of their neighbors; they require Christians to require Christian habits even of nonbelievers. And in a democratic society, that responsibility extends to all Christians who can vote. The stakes are so high as to push Christian duty to the apex of earthly power – not only taking control of the state, but expanding the power thereof indefinitely to serve their purposes.

On the other hand, the transformation of evangelism from a duty of agency to one of participation – from working for the salvation of a neighbor as such to working simply for the glory of God – is freeing, both morally to Christians and politically to nonbelievers. The doctrine of unconditional election removes the pressure which pushes Christians to exercise earthly authority, and renders social engineering for the purpose of moral virtue ultimately pointless. Because no metaphysical agency at all is left to humans, Christians are free to perform their duty to God and man without an open-ended responsibility to the habits of nonbelievers. And without this responsibility, political authority becomes entirely unrelated to Christian ministry in the world; a distracting and ultimately counterproductive goal for the Church to pursue. “All reformations that propose to stop short of a full surrender of the soul, mind, and body up to God, are of the devil” (Lipscomb, p. 145).

Church Discipline

It may be objected that God may nevertheless use habit and the particular circumstances of state force to bring some to salvation. No doubt any number of people could be found to give testimony that some particular moral policy held them back from some evil.

It is true that every form in which state force exists does so “for good to those who love God” (Rom. 8:28). However, the doctrine of providence is not a doctrine of excuses. When Joseph tells his brothers “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result” (Gen. 50:20), it does not change the fact that the brothers are culpable before God for that evil. To justify virtue politics by the contingent good which God worked from it is to justify all evil everywhere.

The Word of God is not a handbook by which to maximize the number of the saved, nor are we to speculate on such methods. The scriptures are clear that this number has been fixed, and the responsibility is God’s to bring it about (cf. Acts 13:48). It is not the responsibility of the Christian to pry into the secret will of God hidden, and it confers no merit to try.

Certainly evil will not thwart the plans of God, even when committed by Christians. The deeds we commit, whether good or evil, cannot add to or subtract from the glory of God or the salvation of any person one iota. Our sole responsibility is our own character before God.¹³ It is not without reason that we are exhorted to consider our own souls before busying ourselves with others’ (Matt. 7:3-5).

On the other hand, it may also be objected that this doctrine proves too much; that as Weber claims above (fn. 19), it removes the responsibility for mens’ souls and character from the Church as well as the state. This is the reverse of the first objection. Both characterize actions primarily by their results, and can be dealt with along much the same lines.

First, the proscription against virtue politics is a proscription not against an entity acting (the state), but against a mode of acting (moral coercion), which is now usually done through the state.¹⁴ Needless to say it is as inappropriate for a church to act itself as a state as for a church to co-opt the power of the state, as was the situation for many centuries when church discipline involved varying degrees of real coercion, up to execution for the heretic.

However the scope of the argument has still not been explicitly circumscribed to allow any sort of moral suasion, including church discipline of an apparently benign and scriptural form. If the salvation of a man – even the virtue of a wayward Christian – is solely in the hands of God, what good does it do for the Church to “deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 5:5)?

The answer again involves the aim of our duties. Church discipline, exhortation, encouragement, and all the other means by which we attempt in the context of the Church to keep one another focused on Christ, like evangelism, are duties to God rather than duties to men. And as with evangelism this fact does not lessen the brotherly love in which they are to be done. Discipline, encouragement, and evangelism all hope for a result – the winning and strengthening of a brother – but none of these takes it upon itself to see the result come to pass. We must content ourselves merely to participate in the purposes of God.

If this were not true – if we were in fact responsible for others – Paul would have every reason to boast in his ministry. Instead he rebukes the impulse in 1 Corinthians 3:

What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. Now he who plants and he who waters are one; but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor.

We are rewarded according to our performance of the duties set forth in the Word of God, not according to their results. Isaiah never saw any fruit from his ministry. Are we to count him less faithful for this fact?

The intended beneficiary of encouragement and discipline on the one hand, and virtue politics on the other, will be benefited according to the secret will of God hidden, regardless of whether we choose to encourage him, discipline him, or impose a morality upon him, for our very choosing is a part of that secret will. In this sense – in view of the ultimate purposes of God – there is no difference between discipline and virtue politics. But then in this sense there is no difference between any action and another, and for the purposes of choosing between one action and another this sense is totally irrelevant. The relevant difference between discipline and virtue politics concerns the actor: encouragement and discipline build up not only the person on the receiving end, but also the person on the giving end when it is done in the right spirit.¹⁵ Our reward is for duty executed, not for results realized.

We do have a scriptural duty to encourage and discipline our brothers in Christ. There is no such duty to the forcible imposition of morality. God is not glorified by the external conformity of pagans to Christian mores. And though God will work good from all circumstances, a passionate member of the Christian Right will not be blessed in the same measure as a passionate member of a Christian church. While the latter fights with the armor of God against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places, the former struggles against windmills of flesh and blood.

1. “Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgements for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgement on other peoples’ aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented.” (Mises, p. 19)
2. See Calvin (2008, 1.7) on the authority of scripture to the spirit-filled Christian.
3. It is worth noting that the political power of the medieval Catholic church hung to a large extent on this doctrine. Without a clear distinction between the institutional and the invisible church, corporate election makes excommunication a virtual Hell sentence.
4. “Strict and watchful moral restraint enforced vigorously by governmental authority could have banished these enormous evils [the degradation of the morals of workers – see below, fn. 17] and even forestalled them.” (Pius XI, 133)
   
   Cf. also John Paul II (54): “[The church’s] social teaching is aimed at helping man on the path of salvation.”
5. Cf. also Aquinas (2.93.2): “From being accustomed to avoid evil and fulfil what is good, through fear of punishment, one is sometimes led on to do so likewise, with delight and of one’s own accord. Accordingly, law, even by punishing, leads men on to being good.”
6. Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII 1891) in particular starts off as such a response before it begins constructing a positive Catholic social doctrine. The discussions in later encyclicals commemorating Rerum Novarum also track the development of Socialist thought through the decades, consistently maintaining its incompatibility with the Catholic faith.
7. Ibid., 135, speaking of the duties of employers to their workers:

   Again justice demands that, in dealing with the working man, religion and the good of his soul must be kept in mind. Hence, the employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings.

8. “Truly the mind shudders at the thought of the grave dangers to which the morals of workers (particularly younger workers) and the modesty of girls and women are exposed in modern factories; when we recall how often the present economic scheme, and particularly the shameful housing conditions, create obstacles to the family bond and normal family life; when we remember how many obstacles are put in the way of the proper observance of Sundays and Holy Days; and when we reflect upon the universal weakening of that truly Christian sense through which even rude and unlettered men were wont to value higher things, and upon its substitution by the single preoccupation of getting in any way whatsoever one’s daily bread.” (Pius XI, 135).
9. See Leo XIII (1879), especially paragraphs 17-18, in which he fawns over Aquinas’ contribution to the Catholic faith.
10. Stott (p. 175) makes this point in an exegesis of 1 John 5:1.
11. Höpfl (p. 26). Luther actually quotes Augustine immediately prior to this excerpt, having written before his change of heart, saying that “no one can be forced into belief”.
12. See also above, fn. 5.
13. This does not, of course, imply a monastic or “autistic” faith. Love for others is not lessened for being an act whose moral character is primarily between the self and God. In fact it is only thereby that love can be truly unconditional and agape, without regard to the other’s personal characteristics. Cf. also Augustine, City of God, 10.6: “Therefore even the mercy we show to men, if it is not shown for God’s sake, is not a sacrifice,” i.e., is not acceptable to God.
14. This is not to be understood along the lines of an argument for Christian pacifism or Christian anarchism. We need not invent inviolable human rights. The Bible nowhere morally condemns the institution of force as such, and indeed often condones it (see Luther’s argument against the Anabaptists above, ch. 1, fn. 3).
15. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for evil acts. Compare the examples given by Fredrick Douglass (1845) in his autobiography (especially chapter VI) that the primary evil of slavery is not the cruelty done to the slaves, but the degradation to the moral character of the slaveowner, or Augustine’s argument that “the dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness” (City of God, 4.3). A master cannot prevent the salvation of his subject, but in trying he jeopardizes his own.

But perhaps we should be more critical of the authority which politics and the pulpit mutually confer on each other. For the sake of the Church, scripture can never be used to justify particular policies to unbelievers, and within the Church, within certain boundaries politics are a matter of conscience. Clearly then, politics should be completely separate from the pulpit, both for the sake of the consciences of the congregation, and for the sake of the mission of the Church to the world.

But must this separation be merely thematic? Could a political activist or candidate be a minister, provided his politics do not enter his preaching?

David said to Solomon, “My son, I had it in my heart to build a house to the name of the LORD my God. But the word of the LORD came to me, saying, ‘You have shed much blood and have waged great wars. You shall not build a house to my name, because you have shed so much blood before me on the earth.’”

1 Chronicles 22:7-8

God would not let David carry out a ceremonial function because he was a man of the sword. This in itself did not reflect badly on David. He had been called a man after God’s own heart, and indeed God was with him in many of these wars. Nevertheless, the sanctity, the holiness, of the house of God required a builder with cleaner hands.

It is likewise with those who would build the house of God through the Church by preaching or evangelism. To have been involved in politics (and perhaps the military as well) is to have participated in the machinery of bloodshed and war, regardless of whether the person’s conscience came out clean (which is not in principle impossible – see Luke 3:12-14).

Furthermore, the very nature of politics as a public-facing occupation strongly suggests its incompatibility with professional Christian ministry. 1 Timothy 3:2 requires overseers in the Church to be above reproach. It is not necessarily a sin to be reproached – Jesus himself was reproached, though falsely. Nevertheless, administration of the apparatus of coercion necessarily involves controversy unrelated to the Gospel, because scripture says nothing about policy. The primary purpose of Paul and Peter’s exhortations to obey authority was to prevent the Gospel from being weighed down in extraneous controversies. This has, of course, been the main result of the politicization of the Christian faith in America – one argues against conservatism by attacking Evangelicalism, and attacks Evangelicals for their complicity in the sins of the Right. The same was the situation among liberal churches earlier in the century. No doubt the same results from the fluid boundary between public office and the pulpit. One expects to be reproached in the political arena, and fairly or not, these are controversies that must stay far away from the Gospel message.

Thus a prominent politician, since converted and resigned, would be strongly discouraged from preaching, as would anyone who had been involved in public controversy. It is a fact of life that past actions close future options, and this does not necessarily indicate that a sin has been committed. A converted polygamist, for example, is better according to the principles of 1 Corinthians 7 to continue honoring his commitments than to send away all but one wife. Nevertheless, though he does not sin in remaining married, he is still prohibited from professional Christian ministry by the requirement of one wife, lest he bring reproach on the Church. Conversely, a preacher who desires to hold a political office disqualifies himself for his first job, even if he does so with a clean conscience.

Yet perhaps there is something to be said for the glorification of God through high-profile conversions. Augustine spoke of the glory brought to the Church when the prominent orator Victorinius was converted (Confessions, Book 8). Paul himself was such a high-profile convert. The danger in granting leadership to such converts is that when people see such figures they do not see Christ, but the prior man in all his controversy, now speaking for the Church. The qualifications for ministry in these passages are not categorical rules, but practical considerations for avoiding reproach: an overseer must not be a lover of money (1 Tim. 3:3), but who among us is not to some degree beset by this, even if only for the necessities of daily living? At what point does a new convert cease to be new, opening the ministry as an avenue to him? In the case of prominent converts, let each congregation judge for itself whether in the eyes of the world the glory of God in bringing him to salvation outshines the prior controversies in which he was involved.

Political office, and political engagement, can be a calling just like the ministry, and just like any other occupation a Christian might be called to or find himself in. One is not necessarily less noble than the other, for “there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.” (1 Cor. 12:4) “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing?” (1 Cor. 12:17) Politics is not something that all Christians must participate in, even in voting, nor must all Christians agree on the particulars. Ultimately however, as a practical principle for protecting the sanctity of the Gospel, politics and preaching must be separate not only in their principles, but in their persons as well.