On Sending Your Children into a Meatgrinder
The Christian colleges have been captured in the theology classrooms and the social science classrooms by the new social gospel. This began almost 40 years ago.
The good news is that the people who promote this position are intellectually incompetent. The bad news is that they get a free ride from the pastors and donors.
These people mislead decent people. They are incompetent, but they have a captive audience: students. That is what bothers me. It is not just that they are incompetent. It is not just that they misrepresent the Bible. Is it this: they mislead Christian young people who have been educated in these third-rate institutions, staffed by third-rate welfare state socialists, and are told that the welfare state is Christian. The parents pay $150,000 for the privilege of sending their kids to these places, and their kids get brainwashed. It has gone on for 40 years, and I suppose it will go on for as long as Christian parents are naïve enough to send their children into these meatgrinder institutions without paying any attention to what is actually taught in classrooms.
MANNA FROM HEAVEN
A week ago, someone I had never heard of, who is the editor of the scholarly journal I had never heard of, sent me an email. He invited me to write a refutation of an article which he had decided to run in the next issue.
This was manna from heaven. The author of the article is an incomparably incompetent promoter of the new social gospel.
Over a decade ago, this woman wrote an article with the following thesis. The Bible mandates a system of graduated taxation, with poor people paying nothing, with people at the top end paying a great deal more. She was vague as to how much more. Five years later, she upped the ante. This time, she put numbers to it. She said that the top income tax rate should be 50%. This does not count state and local taxes. Adding state and local taxes to the 50% figure, you get close to 70%. This, she said, is the Christian way of taxation. At the bottom, poor people should pay nothing. They should be the beneficiaries of the money paid by the rich.
This is of course Robin Hood economics. You rob from the rich and give to the poor, minus 50% for handling. This is Robin Hood as filtered through Washington D.C.
The initial article got more publicity than a scholarly article ever gets. Every major TV network interviewed this woman. She spoke across the United States in over half the states. Everybody wanted to hear this message: "Soak the rich for Jesus' sake."
The editor of the journal sent me a copy of her latest article. The woman is long-winded. Her first article was over 100 pages. Most of it was footnotes, and the footnotes absorbed about two-thirds of every page. The second article was about 50 pages. The latest one is close to 60 pages. As far as I know, nobody in any scholarly journal has ever gone into print against her. Yet she is an incompetent beyond your wildest imagination. I have dealt with incompetent professors for a long time. This woman abuses the privilege of being incompetent.
I of course immediately accepted the offer. I am not sure how long the article took to write, but it must have been about 35 hours. I had it finished on Wednesday. I hate to devote that much time to answering incompetents. But some things are really fun. This woman deserved an answer over a decade ago, and I probably should have written it. I I did not realize the extent to which the media had given her carte blanche. She became a brief celebrity, but I do not watch the networks, so I was unaware of this.
When I say incompetent, I mean the following. She cannot follow the logic of her own arguments. She cannot see the implications, either religiously or economically, of her proposals. She has no idea that a tax rate of 70% would be a disincentive for investing. She insists, literally, that taxation does not affect investment decisions. You get the idea.
The problem is this. The humanist media grabbed this woman as if she were the second coming of Eleanor Roosevelt. Then the new social gospel crowd hailed her as a major scholar. This is the first time that anybody from those circles had sat down and looked at taxes. She seemed to have the footnotes about taxes.
Here is what she did not have. She had not one reference to any of the Bible's texts on taxation. She also completely ignored the biblical principle of the rule of law (Ex. 12:49). She ignored Leviticus 19:15, which says that the courts must judge all cases before it without any consideration of either rich or poor. The proper foundation of biblical civil law is neutrality with respect to a person's income. This totally negates every proposal for a graduated income tax. She never referred to this passage. None of these people ever refers to it. I keep hammering on this, and they keep ignoring it. They have to ignore it. It completely destroys their theology.
These people are apologists for state confiscation. They baptize the welfare state, and the graduated tax system necessary to fund it, by telling us that Jesus required it, Moses required it, and to believe them on this, despite the fact that they never cite any texts in which such a requirement is mandated.
A LACK OF SCHOLARSHIP
The appalling lack of scholarship within the social gospel community is remarkable. It is not that these people are stupid. It is that these people are blind. They cannot understand biblical texts. They cannot understand the logic of economics. They cannot understand the relationship between economics and the biblical texts.
I knew this a quarter of a century ago. I have told this story before. I was approached by a Christian scholar to participate in a book on four Christian views of wealth and poverty. Initially, I decided not to do it. But David Chilton, who was on my staff at the time, begged me to do it. I told him that they would simply reject the article. He said I still had to do it. So, I sat down and wrote the article. They did not reject the article. They published the book, and then a year later suppressed it. No reason was ever given for the suppression.
I have my suspicions. The general editor of the publishing company was a socialist. A year ago, my son-in-law spoke to a meeting in Bulgaria. On the podium with him was this man. My son-in-law had never heard of him. I had heard of him a long time ago. In a private discussion, he admitted to my son-in-law that he is a socialist. This man was in charge of a major Christian publishing house for decades. He filtered the materials accordingly.
The scholarship in the new social gospel crowd really is appalling. I know who the heavy hitters are in the world of socialism. I know who the heavy hitters are in the world of Keynesianism. These people at least can conduct an argument. They can assemble data to support their arguments. They are sloppy to the extent that they never really do get challenged. A guy like Krugman is terrified to meet in open debate against Robert Murphy. It is not because Krugman is stupid. It is because Krugman really is terrified of open debate. He beats up people in print, but he knows he cannot debate in public, because he really is terrified. That is a personality quirk. But I am talking about intellectual incompetence.
Fortunately, the people on the Christian Left really are incompetent intellectually. They always have been. They are intellectual lightweights. They cannot follow the logic of their arguments. Most of them cannot write very well. Their position is simply untenable biblically.
They ignore anybody who challenges them. They do not admit that such a person exists. They are terrified of letting their followers find out that they cannot conduct public debate. The obvious case of this is Jim Wallis. I have been hammering on Wallis for years, but he has never admitted that I exist. The other classic case is Ronald Sider. For 15 years, 1981 to 1996, he pretended that David Chilton had never written Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators, a line-by-line refutation of Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. He revised his book 3 times, and never admitted the existence of Chilton's book. He was terrified of Chilton.
In the 1981 debate I had with him publicly, which I am going to be posting online pretty soon free of charge, he finally came up against somebody who could argue. He knew his audience, which was neo-evangelical, and which was the product of the Christian college community. They were on his side. But that was in 1981. These days, probably two-thirds of them vote for Republican Party candidates.
THE GOOD NEWS
This cheers me up. The nice thing about all this is that those of us who work with the biblical texts, and who are committed to the logic of the free market, are not in any way intellectually threatened by our opponents in the new social gospel community. That is why I wrote my refutation. I wanted to let that woman know, at least once, that she had finally dealt with somebody who understands both theology and economics. She understands neither. Yet her first article was a master's thesis at a Baptist seminary which is supposedly conservative. They gave her a clean bill of health on her thesis. She says they praised her article. Yet her article, both theologically and economically, is imbecilic. This is the state of Christian scholarship today. That is depressing, but in the long run, it is optimistic. It means that it is not that difficult to deal with these people.
I do not want to go into too much detail about who the woman is, because she is going to have a surprise on her hand when my article is published. She has never faced anybody in her life who understood both theology and economics. I also used a bit of rhetoric, which she has also not seen before.
I hope a PDF will be available for the printed version.
I hope the editor does not wimp out and decide not to publish it. If he wimps out, I will post it on this site.