The Evangelical Dilemma in Governance

The job of government is, in large part, to restrain personal behavior for the good of the larger society. Indeed that is why we have government: it is to: "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty . .  .” Thus we have the thousands and thousands of laws that impose everything from speed limits to restaurant cleanliness standards. And that’s why we have law enforcement to make sure people follow those laws. 

We know, as the founders of this country knew, that you cannot leave public safety up to a sense of personal responsibility, although having a sense of personal responsibility for the welfare of others is also important because there isn’t enough law enforcement in the world for a nation of selfish antinomians. 

While Texas Governor Abbott no doubt recognizes this, he also believes that if people’s behavior is restrained then they will not develop self-restraint. 

And this alerts us to the fact that Governor Abbott’s real problem in facing the pandemic stems from his Christian faith.  

Christian teaching has traditionally been that because of human sinful nature people are to a large extent incapable of self restraint.  As a result the oldest churches, the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox and their near cousins, taught that humans must gain that self-restraint through a proper relationship with God cultivated in a disciplined life of worship and work. And that discipline should begin at birth when the child is raised in a Christian family and then the Christian church. 

However, American Evangelicalism, born in an essentially non-Christian population of frontier settlers, is a revival religion. It came to life in the “New World,” with the European understanding of that world. It assumes barbarism, not only of the indigenous population which it has an excuse to convert or exterminate, and of the Africans it felt free to enslave, but also of the European population back-sliding into a pre-diluvian (but post-edenic) lifestyle to match this "new" world. 

(It is interesting, perhaps for another post, to compare how commercial and political interests perverted Christian missionary understandings of the populations they encountered beyond North America, and how American Protestant missionaries differed from their European Catholic and Orthodox colleagues not in the perversity, but in its form.)

For that European population which still possessed some remnant of civilization, American Evangelicalism thus focused almost entirely on the instantaneous conversation of the self-responsible individual. This, not merely being born, is the necessary prelude to cultivating a disciplined life of worship and work. 

And that conversion hinges on the individual’s personal decision for Christ. So preserving the personal freedom of the individual to choose God, or not, becomes the single most important task of the church and the larger society. The robust individualist turned whisky sodden cowboy becomes the model potential convert. 

Worse, the most common trope for personal conversion in American Evangelicalism becomes the whiskey sodden cowboy, It is a story in which the deeply sinful life of self destruction and other-destruction eventually brings people to a psychological crisis. This then drives them to embrace God’s grace. "Me and the good Lord will have us a good talk, later tonight." 

I can remember those discussions in the youth groups and First Baptist and First Methodist churches of Richardson: can those of us living ordinary lives really follow Jesus like the lineup of ex-Mafioso, drug dealers, alcoholics, and abortionists that gave their testimony at the revivals? Could you ever be really good if you had never been truly evil? 

So for American Evangelicals not only must people be free to choose, they must be free to harm themselves and others so that they can come to this necessary psychological crisis. 

In theory the less government there is, the greater the eventual self-governance that emerges in the individual’s life. Evangelicalism loves the dry drunk. 

And we see this played out in the leadership offered by Gov. Abbott and Dan Patrick and in fact across the Republican Party. It is an ideology of personal responsibility grounded in a false doctrine of personal conversion asserting that real self-discipline requires the personal freedom to destroy one’s self and others.

But the Bible doesn’t teach that you must have the opportunity to hurt others and yourself before you can follow Jesus. The corrupt tax collector and the thief on the cross are the exceptions, not the rule in the Bible. And anyone reading the New Testament knows that from the first apostles through the first converts most early followers of Jesus were decent people, usually more hurting that hurtful, who recognized him as Lord. And Paul? He was a rabbi; a morally scrupulous convert to Christ and entirely a law and order kind of guy. 

So the governor’s dilemma, and that of his supporters, really springs from the way his personal faith has been formed by the teaching about conversion endemic in American Evangelicalism. And that teaching is neither Biblical nor responsible. The governor might do better if instead of urging the people to be more responsible, he took up the responsibility of governing instead. Or at least quit standing in the way of the mayors who actually want to do their jobs. 

The job of government is not hoping that a crisis of personal responsibility will lead to conversion. It is to mandate, and enforce that mandate, that people not hurt their fellow humans by their actions or their failure to take action. 

While the governor, like all of us, needs to ever strengthen his faith in Christ, he needs to give up his false religion and begin governing the state.