The case for freedom -- civic evangelicalism, part 2

This is part 2 of an ongoing series. To read part 1, go here.

It has become fashionable to criticize conservative evangelicals on moral or biblical grounds for our commitment to free markets. So-called "progressive" evangelicals make the claim that statist and collectivist solutions to social ills are moral imperatives. So, we are told that health care is a moral issue and that Obama's (or Clinton's) single-payer insurance proposal is a moral imperative. We are told that climate change is a moral issue and that a cap-and-trade policy is a moral imperative. The same tune is sung to different refrains about poverty, AIDS in Africa, the number of blacks in prisons, and a host of other societal ills. Liberals slap the malleable label "injustice" on these problems, then foreclose debate on the prudential question how best to solve these serious issues by declaiming the putative indiference of conservatives to the plight of the vulnerable and marginalized.

This reasoning (if such sophistry can rightly be dignified with that appellation) is as flawed as it is illiberal. These are not moral issues. We do not have moral disagreements about poverty, health insurance, or crime rates among blacks. We have prudential disagreements about how best to solve those problems. Invariably, liberal evangelicals propose greater government intervention as a final solution. Having adopted the secular progressive cause, liberal evangelicals believe, in spite of a century's worth of contrary evidence, that government has it in its power to end poverty, cure AIDS, and keep blacks from committing crime.

By contrast, we conservative evangelicals defend individual freedom, which thrives when government is small and the polity is ruled by law, rather than men. These also are prudential claims, in particular, political claims. However, I believe that a compelling case can be made that the political case for freedom is far more consistent with Christian conviction that collectivism.

Here again, we need not reinvent the wheel. The Dutch Reformed thinker Abraham Kuyper gave evangelicals a model for viewing political problems, which is consistent with practical reason and Scripture. Kuyper's principle of sphere sovereignty holds that different institutions -- the church, universities, familes, financial markets, etc. -- have sovereignty over different realms of civic life. Kuyper rejected the Hobbesian notion that rights and obligations originate with the state. Indeed, in Kuyper's view, the state is not competent to maintain most cultural commitments. (Catholics endorse a similar concept, known as subsidiarity.)

Christians reject the idea that the state is omni-competent and the author of rights. We endorse the scriptural view that God authorizes different institutions to perform different functions and to solve different problems. The state is peculiarly gifted at securing its borders, punishing crimes, and defending against foreign enemies. Churches are adept at ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of the marginalized. Families are best at producing, training, and raising children, and at meeting psychological needs for unconditional love and stability.

When the state is confined to its sphere of sovereignty, other cultural institutions become stronger, freedom expands, and individuals flourish. This is contrary to the progressive line. Progressives see cultural institutions, such as marriage (for example), as impediments to freedom. They think this way because they equate freedom with licentiousness. To progressives, freedom means liberation from institutional and cultural restraints upon their choices. But this is neither a Christian nor an accurate conception of freedom.

Prudence recognizes, and history teaches, that the failure of institutions such as marriage correspond to a diminishing of human flourishing, and of freedom. As cultural institutions fail, the state steps into the breach, taking on duties it is not competent to discharge. As the state grows in power and influence, individual freedom diminishes. As freedom diminishes, humans become dependent upon the state and cease to flourish.

Freedom, then, is not something to be pursued for its own sake. Rather, freedom is a by-product of keeping the spheres of sovereignty in proper balance. Freedom -- not autonomy, or licentiousness, or toleration -- promotes human flourishing as a constituent aspect of a society in which the state cooperates with, rather than usurps, other cultural institutions.