I CAN'T VOTE FOR MITT ROMNEY (3 of 6)

by Frank Turk 

1. I can't vote for Romney because he's a Mormon

Some have actually reasoned a saner version of this argument: they say electing Romney to President assists Mormonism in becoming a mainstream religious option.  The less-cogent versions of this range from claiming to shun idolaters to disbelief that a non-Christian can actually make reasonable judgments about justice and law.

Well, first of all, this sort of reasoning ignores the meat of Romans 13 almost as if it was never written.  There Paul says this:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

You know: the first thing this passage deals with is whether or not a non-Christian person is capable of being a sound ruler.  Paul, writing about the Roman Government under Caesar, says, "yes."  Yes: even Caesar and his functionaries were able to approve of good conduct and strike terror into those who have bad conduct.  In Paul's mind, being an unbeliever does not disqualify anyone from being a political ruler.

But it actually gets worse for those who are worrying about legitimizing any other theology or religion or way of life: in Paul's view, God has instituted the governments we find ourselves subject to, and he says they serve God.  Let's stipulate right away that they may serve God poorly, but in this case this is not Paul's point at all.  Paul's point is that the institution of government is actually God's ordinary means of looking out for justice and judgment -- and that one doesn't need to be a believer to make one into a decent magistrate.

Paul says that explicitly about the Roman government -- which, let's face it, is barbaric by our standards.  The kind of morality the average Roman would ascribe to would be absolutely wanton by our post-Christian standards.  Yet somehow the Mormon view of morality is not going to work for an American magistrate?  You know: it was the Mormons who were the major backers for the California initiative known as Prop 8 a few years ago.  And the official teaching of Mormonism on the 10 commandments is easily summed up: "Obedience to these commandments paves the way for obedience to other gospel principles."  That's pretty lousy Christian theology, but for a civil authority I think we would probably rather have someone who is a matter-of-fact works-righteousness guy than someone who thinks it ain't what you do but the way that you do it.

If a Roman could be someone about whom Paul could say what he said in Rom 13, don't you think a Mormon would be a more-likely minister to do what is right in the face of justice?

That deals with the question of whether or not an unbeliever is capable of being a sound ruler.  What about the question of assisting a cult in becoming more mainstream?  Listen: that sounds very high-minded and God-glorifying -- until we start to think about all the things we have to give up which, frankly, make things that are non-Christian into socially-acceptable practices.  We'd have to give up the internet, for starters; we'd have to give up our iPhones.  We'd have to give up books.  We'd have to give up Capitalism and Democracy.

Let's be as clear as possible here: maybe it wouldn't really be a loss to give up all the things which are not explicitly Christian for the sake of making sure we are not accidentally endorsing things that are false gospels.  Maybe that is what we are actually called to do as Christian.  That's what the Anabaptists believe, and that's not generally seen as a strike against them until we start talking about medicine or electricity.  Maybe that is what we're actually called to live like.

This, therefore, needs to be said: if that's what you mean by your objection, let's do that and not simply whip out this as a moral precept like a formidable doily to cover this part of our lives as Americans while we are, in every other way, utterly unconcerned about this matter.  But if we can rightly, theologically justify all the other ways we cooperate with non-believers on the secular stage, ignoring the means of doing so now to maintain your alleged holiness is, at best, evidence which ought to be used to convict you of greater transgressions.

That's two or three good theological reasons that this objection doesn't work out.  There is one "America" reason this doesn't work out, a reason from political philosophy.  Most of you reading this are baptists, and as baptists of some sort, you gladly, gratefully embrace the idea of freedom of religion.  You may or may not remember the history and results of the Half-Way Covenant among the Puritans, but you know that one of the reasons it was a flop is because it confused the necessity of the church to be filled with believers with the necessity of the civil government to act justly toward men.  The foundations of it didn't understand Rom 13 at all -- and it made church membership the necessary condition of civil rights (particularly voting).

Because that attempt to maintain the unity of church and state failed (as the prime example, but not the only one), our political heritage inherited the right to freedom of religion -- that a man can practice his free expression of religion without the Government telling him what he must or must not believe, and that the Church cannot dictate whether or not a man is rightly seen as a citizen.

Voting for any man does not affirm that you accept his religious expression, or his systematic theology: it affirms that you accept his right as a citizen to run for office.  If you forget that, you might need a refresher course on basic American civics.

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Making it up on Volume

by Frank Turk

I admit this is not a very theologically-driven post this week.

Watch this video:



If you click over to youTube to scan the comments (which is, of course, usually like reading the restroom walls at a dilapidated bus station) you find that people there are afraid that the National Debt is too high to ever be repaid -- we're doomed.

OK: fair enough.  I admit that I think the national debt is too high by a factor of about 100, and that if it was only $140 billion (you know: "only") I'd be somewhat unfazed by it because $140 billion is really only about 3 days float for a global operation doing all sorts of things, and it's healthy to have enough cash reserve to fend off three days of banking glitches. (and true enough: we could really be well-off to have three days cash on-hand for the same purpose)

Now, that said, is the analogy given by the good doctor Davies really all that sound?  Some say, "no," because a government is really nothing like a household, and the way it spends money is not analogous to household spending.  Meh -- I think that objection overlooks the way analogies work, and it's also a little thick when it comes to recognizing that a budget is a budget whether the budget pays for food and socks and internet access or it pays for tanks and roads and policemen and a court system and so on.  The analogy is established to make the numbers into dollar avlues which we really deal with every day -- and to show that by scale, the problem is rather disastrous.

That is: if the government can be seen as a self-sustaining entity.  And I think that's where this analogy actually goes off the rails.

See: the government is, instead, a service provider in the economy at large.  Now, I'll grant a few things here: I didn't ask for, and don't really want, a lot of the services it provides.  I think for all the good it does, the harm it does to (for example) families and economic liberty are pretty serious if not actually severe.  But as a service provider, the question is only who has chartered it and do they have the resources to pay off the debit it has incurred.

Think about this with me for a second.  The right analogy here is that our society -- our nation -- is the household, and the national debt is sort of like our mortgage.  Right now it clocks at about 100% of our national income, and we have to ask ourselves, "is that too much for a mortgage?"

By comparison, in 2005 the average household mortgage was about $167,000 and the average household income was between $46,000 and $56,000 (the lower number being "households," and the higher number being "families").  For the sake of this comparison, if we take the higher number as the baseline for calculating the ratio of income-to-mortgage, the average mortgage was 2.982 times the average annual household income (it's 3.63 times if you use the lower income number).  So most households -- even in this day and age when about 3-4% of homes go into foreclosure due to financial hardship -- carry a debt someplace north of 2.5 times their annual income and generally survive it.

But here, I admit, the analogy really does fall apart.  For the mortgage holder, at the end of the mortgage term, they own an asset which will usually appreciate at the rate of inflation.  For the United States as a nation, what we get is a larger debt every year with little or no assets to show for it and no headway after we pay billions in interest only against debt service.  The come-back from the investment as a nation is practically nil versus the household buying a house over the long run.  But my actual point here is sound enough: a debt even the double the size of one's current annual income can be paid back (with interest) if one is disciplined enough to actually pay it back on a schedule.

Thus: So what?  My point is very simple: the US Government is not like a house that lives outside of its means.  It is rather like a department of a larger operation which is running without a budget, leeching resources from other more necessary and more profitable operations.  What the Government needs is not actually to be shut down but to be scaled back to the right size for what it ought to be doing -- rather than continually growing every time some new manager comes in with big ideas about all the new customers he can sell below cost to and then somehow "make it up on volume."

Let's not elect somebody who sees it otherwise this year -- either at the local level, the state level, or the national level in all races.  I really don't care who you vote for as long as he or she understands that the Government is spending too much money, and that has to stop.  Immediately.  And they have to have a commitment to pay back what we owe right now because, on principle, borrowing money for things that aren't assets which cannot be resold and cannot generate a quantifiable return on investment is wasteful at best -- and a kind of stealing at worst.

Pray about that, and we'll be more theologicaly-minded next week.

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