some autobiography in which I recount
several factors in the development of my political views
Text originally published here: https://libertarianchristians.com/2025/02/19/a-reformed-path-to-libertarian-anarchism/
[ I'm an independent researcher and writer in philosophy, and co-host of the Reformed Libertarians Podcast. My primary interest is in developing and promoting the Neo-Calvinist philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, the Reformed covenant theology of Meredith Kline, and a Reformed Christian perspective on libertarian-anarchism. ]
Unlike religion, politics was not a consciously prominent feature of my childhood. Nevertheless, without much reflection, I absorbed the political attitudes and opinions of my parents. In the home of my youth, from my birth in the early 70s through the 80s, it was largely treated as a given that the less government interference in society, particularly in the economy, the better.
A central idea was that the United States Federal Government had
gone fundamentally astray during FDR’s administration (1933-1945) with
its economic interventionism. Constitutionally conservative political
reform was necessary to restore the Republic, and to defeat domestic
commies and all their pinko enablers. All this was obvious (so it seemed
at the time), and so I didn’t think about it much.
However, in
high school, I took up the anti-abortion cause, handing out pro-life
pregnancy center info and evangelizing outside murder clinics, and so
on. In my own minority religious community, and in the broader Christian
community, abortion was considered (not wrongly, if myopically) the
great societal evil of our day. Whatever the immorality of economic
interventionism, legally permitting the mass slaughter of babies was a
greater crisis, comparable to the enormity of Southern slavery, but
worse. This was my political awakening. And, in a striking way, it
brought personal and societal morality, politics, religion, and science,
all together in a heady and revolutionary mixture. Abortion, or the
anti-abortion cause, became a force that dragged me deep into my own
religion and its civilizationally-significant philosophical meaning.
The
minority religious community in which I was raised (largely in
Baltimore, Maryland) was the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, within the
camp of “traditional” confessionally-Reformed churches
in the U.S. and Canada. The Reformed religion was once held by a
majority of Americans, from colonial times until the early 1800s.
However, today, there are only about half a million of us. That’s less
than fifteen-hundredths of one percent of the U.S. population. There are
about as many Amish and Old Order Mennonites in the U.S. as there are
confessionally-Reformed Christians.
Despite our vanishingly-small
numbers, we possess a rich and fruitful devotional and intellectual
religious heritage. And it was this religious heritage that I came to
embrace, consciously and fervently, in my teen years, and that deeply
shaped my philosophical and political development. (For those interested
in an introduction to this form of Christianity, see “Recommended
Reading” at the end of this essay.)
During high school, I read a
number of Reformed theological classics, and books by more recent
Reformed thinkers. Among the more recent, I read several books by
Francis Schaeffer, who significantly helped build the pro-life movement
among conservative Protestants. I was particularly inspired by his book The God Who Is There and by A Christian Manifesto. In Manifesto, one of the things that stood out to me was the confessionally-Reformed teaching on Romans 13:1-7.
The view of that passage (and others like it, such as 1 Peter 2:13-17)
held by the majority of Reformers, was that God only prescriptively
ordains civil governance to use “the sword” or coercion against
wrongdoing.
When those who claim civil power create and enforce laws
that do otherwise than punish actual wrongdoing, then they are unjust
and tyrannical, and no one is required to submit to unjust or tyrannical
power. Schaeffer particularly highlighted the book Lex, Rex
by Samuel Rutherford who said, for example, “[While civil rulers act]
against God’s law, and all good laws of men, they do not the things that
appertain to their charge and the execution of their office; therefore,
by our Confession, to resist them in tyrannical acts is not to resist
the ordinance of God.”
The year after high school, I took a gap
year teaching English in Japan. Besides exposing me to a substantially
unfamiliar culture and social context, strange beliefs, values,
institutions, and customs, and so broadening my sense of human
experience, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and
significance of religious belief for history. That year one book that
shaped my reflections was The Two Empires
in Japan by John M. L. Young. This book helpfully recounts the history
of conflict between a largely compromised Christianity with the
predominant Shinto-Fascist Nationalism in Japan.
My first year in
college (at a Reformed, Liberal Arts school in Georgia), when I was old
enough to vote, I met and conversed with a visiting speaker on campus,
Howard Phillips. He convinced me of the crucial importance of the 10th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the political philosophy of
strictly limited government (classical liberalism) that served as its
foundation. I became a member of the political party, of which he was a
key founder, which came to be known as the Constitution Party. I wasn’t
really politically active. However, believing that the U.S. government
(not to mention most, if not all, local and particular state
governments), as a matter of established policy, persistently violated
the supposed “rule of law,” and so was in practice, if not in principle,
illegitimate, provided plenty of opportunity to share my increasingly
anti-government views.
In the years following, I began to realize that
the U.S. government had not only started to go wrong with FDR, but
progressively violated its own Constitution and the principles of
liberty from the beginning (e.g. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1794),
and that the Constitution itself was an unlawful power-grab, against which the anti-federalists had warned.
In
college I also read, and was strongly influenced by, the writings of
Neo-Calvinist theologians Abraham Kuyper, particularly his famous Lectures On Calvinism as a worldview, and Meredith G. Kline, particularly his book Kingdom Prologue. I also discovered the writings of Neo-Calvinist (or “Reformational”) philosophers Herman Dooyeweerd, for example, his book Roots Of Western Culture among others, and Roy Clouser, and his book The Myth Of Religious Neutrality
that superbly explains key elements of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. These
and other writings that articulated a Reformed worldview, a view of
redemptive-historical Reformed covenant theology in Scripture, and a
Reformed philosophical view of the basic nature of reality, continue to
represent the biblical and theoretical perspectives from which I view
life, religion, culture, society, and politics.
My fourth year of
college, I took only one semester, and another single semester in a
fifth year. Then I dropped out of school in 1997, not having finished my
Bachelor’s, feeling frustrated and disillusioned with, among many other
things, the college’s inability to provide deeper instruction in
Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. After five difficult years of working numerous
odd jobs and personal struggle (with a two year sojourn in southern
California, where I also audited some evening courses at a Reformed
seminary), I was able to enroll for a final year at a different
Reformed, Liberal Arts college (in Ontario, Canada) that had a much
stronger emphasis in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy, and finished my BA.
The
infamous 9/11 attacks had occurred only a few years before. And the U.S.
government’s tyrannical response in the so-called Patriot Act and
unjust invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, served to thoroughly undermine
what remained of any naive “benefit-of-the-doubt” assumptions I had
concerning the state’s supposed interest in protecting and promoting
liberty and justice in domestic or foreign affairs.
Around 2003, I
also became aware of Ron Paul, a medical doctor, who at the time was a
U.S. representative for the 14th congressional district in Texas (that
covered a coastal area southeast of Houston). Mostly through a friend
who worked in his D.C. office, I became familiar with Paul’s long-time,
solitary effort in the Federal Congress, standing for actual
constitutional limits on government and for the political and economic
liberty envisioned by many of the U.S. Founders.
Two years later,
I enrolled at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in a philosophy
Master’s program. In the year and a-half I studied there, I focused on
the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (who had been a professor at that
university from 1926-1965). I especially focused on his so-called
transcendental critique of theoretical thought, political and societal
philosophy, and theory of what is called societal “sphere sovereignty.”
Better understanding Dooyeweerd’s view of sphere sovereignty (a theory
of the normative natures of, and relations between, distinct kinds of
societal communities) significantly contributed to my eventual
conversion to full-fledged libertarian-anarchism. However, during that
same period, I also began an independent study in economics.
Through
my acquaintance with the efforts of Ron Paul, I became aware of the
Mises Institute, a research and educational non-profit dedicated to
promoting (among other things) understanding of the Austrian school of
economics. I found a large quantity of academic sources from the Mises
Institute for my independent study. I became persuaded of an Austrian
view of praxeology (the study of necessary pre-conditions for human
action), its premise of “methodological individualism,” the importance
of these for a proper understanding of economics, and of a
thorough-going free market view. The central idea of methodological
individualism is that only individuals intentionally or purposefully
act. And this fact is not at odds or in tension with ideas important to
sphere sovereignty, such as the reality of communities that cannot be
reduced to inter-individual relations, and a non-individualistic
conception of society.
Worth mentioning here is that my study in
economics and praxeology also led to discovery of ideas that
significantly helped me understand other areas of Dooyeweerd’s
philosophy. Often enough, discoveries in one field of study or even
within a given school of thought can illuminate problems or ideas in
another. This is a fact I believe many Christian libertarians have
discovered in recognizing the mutually supporting beliefs of their
religion and political and economic views.
My study of economics
led me to the writings of Murray Rothbard, an Austrian economist and
historian who also wrote on political theory. Two works crucial to my
conversion to libertarian-anarchism were Rothbard’s books For A New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty (text here; audio here).
Alongside those and many of Rothbard’s other writings, I was also
influenced significantly by articles and lectures by Roderick Long, who
is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University. In particular, I was
helped by “Rothbard’s ‘Left And Right’: 40 Years Later” (text here; video here), “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses To Ten Objections” (text here; audio here), and his ten-lecture series “Foundations Of Libertarian Ethics” (audio here; video here).
I remember very distinctly, one day in October 2008, while listening to
the final lecture of the Foundations series, “An Anarchist Legal
Order,” the proverbial light turned on in my mind. It took a few months,
as I remember, to get used to the idea that I was now a convinced
anarchist. At first, I didn’t dare admit it to anyone. The very notion
seemed almost too shocking, even while I was fully persuaded of it.
However, being able to see how the total rejection of aggression (or the
initiation of coercion, and threat of it) against another’s person or
property, and therefore, a total rejection of the monopoly state as an
inherently unjust and illegitimate distortion of God-ordained civil
governance, was not only entirely compatible with, but in fact,
supported by my religious and philosophical convictions, reassured me
that (however shocking), it was right to hold to libertarian-anarchism.
A
few years after becoming a libertarian-anarchist, I moved outside the
U.S. and taught English until mid-2018. During those years, I had begun
sketching-out how to articulate the Reformed religious perspective on
libertarian anarchism. In 2019, my friend Kerry Baldwin and I had begun
brainstorming about creating a podcast devoted to explaining and
promoting our shared views. By the end of 2020, we had written The Reformed Libertarianism Statement (and Principles), and in late 2022 we began recording episodes of the Reformed Libertarians Podcast as part of the Christians for Liberty Network.
If you want to find out more about the Reformed Faith, the Reformed
view of libertarian-anarchism, and why we believe them, you may find the
podcast helpful.
Politics (including the politics of
libertarian-anarchists) is by no means the solution to all of life’s
problems. And on this side of Christ’s return in glory to judge the
living and the dead, and to establish the new heavens and earth, even
salvation doesn’t solve all our personal and societal woes.
Nevertheless, as those who trust in Christ alone for our salvation,
growing in our knowledge of Him, we can also grow in our understanding
of what the Christian Faith means for our whole lives, including
politics, in service to Him. The Lord does not promise that “it gets
better” in this life, and that is not our ultimate hope. But it is our
great privilege and joy, insofar as we may, to work for a politics that
is more in keeping with the ordinances He has revealed.
Recommended Readings for an introduction to confessionally Reformed Christianity
- Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, by Michael Horton
- The Study Guide to The Westminster Shorter Catechism, by G. I. Williamson
- The Study Guide to The Heidelberg Catechism, by G. I. Williamson
- With Reverence And Awe, by Darryl Hart and John Muether
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