I have many new readers because I plugged the blog at the recent Mises University. So first, let me explain my policy: I blog on secular matters 6 days a week, but on Sundays I only post on religious themes. I am a born-again Christian and do not shy away from this, but I also understand that many readers don’t want to wade through that type of discussion. So, if the J-word makes you uncomfortable, then don’t read this blog on Sundays.

At Mises University, one student asked me to comment on the relationship between my extreme libertarian views and my Christianity. After all, there is an undeniable streak in the latter that says we should obey the ruling authorities. (The most famous example is from Paul.)

So here are some of my thoughts, some of which I have gleaned from deeper theological thinkers:

* Paul spent a good deal of time in prison himself, and so did Jesus (and John the Baptist, a bunch of prophets, etc.). So there is also a strong tradition in Judeo-Christianity of speaking truth to power and defying the authorities when they oppose the will of God. According to my views on property rights (derived from Austro-libertarianism), I think State officials in our modern world are a gang of robbers and murderers. Therefore, I oppose them.

* Having said that, I do NOT advocate violent rebellion. I am NOT trying to overthrow the government. I am merely trying to persuade anyone who will listen, to withhold his or her consent from the State. I still pay my taxes, for example, and pull over when a cop turns on his lights. So in that respect, I am not directly defying the ruling power structure, just as Jesus didn’t attack Rome the way many thought He would/should.

* Even though I call myself a philosophical anarchist, I do not “reject authority.” I have submitted to Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. I serve a King. (I never was fond of Paul’s language of being a “slave to Christ,” because what type of slave has the master’s permission to leave? God doesn’t force you to serve Him, He asks you to and teaches you that it is in your long-run interest to do so.)

* As far as American evangelicals, most of them are inconsistent when they lecture radical libertarians by saying the governing authorities are put there by God, and so you have a duty to obey them. If they really thought that, then why did so many of them support the invasion of Iraq? After all, if Saddam’s political opponents had behaved correctly, he wouldn’t have needed to kill them, right? Saddam was just God’s arm of justice in Iraq, right? (To belabor the point: Once the typical American evangelical starts explaining why it was just for Iraqis to disobey Saddam, then we’re back on secular political grounds: The libertarian and the evangelical are now disagreeing on what a just government is, not on what God wants us to do with respect to political leaders.)

* To switch focus: I know a lot of atheist libertarians think the idea of spontaneous order shows how wrong-headed Christians are. I can summarize their frustration like this: “After all, we don’t need a central planner in the economy, and we don’t need an intelligent designer in biology, so how in the world can libertarians of all people cling to the irrational belief in a God??”

But I view these things the way (I believe) that the Scottish moral philosophers originally did. The reason we have spontaneous orders is that an orderly, benevolent Creator designed the structure of the universe and the human mind. If the world is just a big coincidence, then there is no reason to expect all of the beauty we see in higher mathematics, cell biology, or international trade.

Let me put it like this: What capitalism does, is take the most greedy, power-hungry people–if only they will respect the Ten Commandments and don’t steal or kill–and lead them to unwittingly serve their fellow men. Isn’t that just the kind of world the Christian God would design? The Bible is full of examples where God takes sin and transforms it into salvation. An obvious example is Joseph being sold by his brothers into slavery, and of course the prime example is the murder of Jesus being, at the same time, the defeat of Satan.