Rejecting the Empire: Why My Faith Led Me to Liberty

I became a Christian when I was 15. Born and baptized Catholic, my parents went to church out of a sense of obligation. We were, in the purest sense of the phrase, a ‘nominally Christian’ family. That began to change when I was eight. My grandfather on my mother’s side passed away that year, and it marked a decidedly spiritual shift in her life. Dissatisfied with the Catholic church we were attending (for non-theological reasons), my mom returned to her Methodist roots. The rest of the family naturally followed. After a few years we wound up attending a Lutheran church that was near our home, and it was here where I would spend my formative years of spiritual development. After a summer of transformational experiences, I decided that I wanted to take my faith seriously and began reading the Bible. Coming of age in a Lutheran church taught me that the Bible, and nothing else, should be the standard by which we measure all doctrines and practice.

One of the passages that immediately stuck with me was the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds in Matthew 13, where Jesus discusses how bad weeds must grow among good wheat in the Kingdom of God, and that the two must not be separated until the end of the age, lest the wheat is pulled up with the weeds (Matthew 13:24-43). Jesus also gives the commandment at the end of Matthew’s gospel to “go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). I drew two conclusions from passages like this: first, faith is a personal choice and shouldn’t be forced upon anyone, and second, we have an obligation to proclaim the gospel. Following these insights, I realized my job was to convince others, not coerce them, to believe in the gospel, and my practice also needed to reflect my message. This was at a time when many conservative Christians openly advocated for banning drugs, pornography, and same-sex marriage. Even then, without any knowledge of political philosophy, I thought the best approach Christians could take regarding these complex issues was to simply avoid participating in them and lovingly attempt to convince those who did that the gospel offered a better way to live. Christians should be respectful, thoughtful, and compassionate towards outsiders and not try to uproot the “weeds,” a posture that is wholeheartedly endorsed by the apostle Paul: “Conduct yourselves with wisdom towards outsiders…let your speech always be with grace…so that you will know how you should respond to each person” (Colossians 4:5-6).

After high school, I went to a Christian university and began working on my degree in Biblical studies. This was at a time in Biblical scholarship when so-called “anti-imperial” readings of the New Testament were extremely popular. If Jesus is king, and if the Kingdom of God is a present reality, then our posture towards earthly authorities should be one of natural skepticism. I poured over books and articles written by scholars such as N.T. Wright, Richard Horsley, Neil Elliot, Scot McKnight, and others who proposed that the gospel of Jesus was opposed to the empire of Caesar. As I studied Christology, ecclesiology, and eschatology, I became even more aware that the identity of the church was distinct from that of the world (1 Peter 2:9, Revelation 5:10), and that putting our faith in the messiah meant all other identities were relativized (Galatians 3:28). How could I, as a Christian, put my faith in government to solve the world’s problems when the writers of the Bible clearly laid that responsibility at the feet of God’s church?

At the same time I began thinking independently about my political commitments. Having been raised in a politically conservative home but by parents who weren’t fundamentalists, I was open to exploring how particular political ideas corresponded to my faith. Working bi-vocationally in ministry and the private sector helped me to think about the relationship between public policy and human flourishing. I saw how taxation and regulation made it difficult for my company to turn a profit, which had a negative impact on the hourly wages of our employees. The ironically-named “Affordable Care Act” penalized lower-income coworkers who had no desire to hold an insurance plan, and an attempt to reform my state’s broken public pension system resulted in higher taxes being arbitrarily levied on our industry, which forced us to raise prices and forgo wage increases. There were several people we hired, however, who were on some form of public assistance, and I saw firsthand the laziness and irresponsibility that entitlement programs fostered. I came to believe that we needed fewer taxes, fewer regulations, and targeted entitlement programs. I strongly believed that charity, first and foremost, should be provided by Christian organizations and churches at the local level, and then maybe with the government covering only the small gaps. My experience in ministry only further convinced me that it was the church, and no one else, who could solve the very real problems being faced by ordinary people. It was up to us to save the world, and we should take that responsibility seriously.

As I continued to read and study the Bible, I also began to see political contradictions in the work of anti-imperial scholars. They claimed that Christians ought to separate themselves from Caesar but supported every big-government entitlement program while advocating more economic power and personal liberty be handed over to political authorities. This was an obvious contradiction that I could not reconcile with either Scripture or my experience, and I sought out better ways of thinking about faith and politics.

A major turning point came in the late summer of 2016. Having skipped the 2012 election cycle all together, I realized that I couldn’t support Trump or Clinton and went searching for alternatives. Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld were featured in an Anderson Cooper town hall. Despite Johnson’s mixed legacy among libertarians, his explanation of a dramatically limited government and respect for individual liberties resonated with me. No one had ever explained libertarianism to me before, and I realized that it described my political philosophy perfectly. Less than a month later I began working on my master’s degree in education, and took an economics course as a prerequisite. Sadly my bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies never required any economics training, which is, in my view, a major reason why the anti-imperial school is so brazenly inconsistent. I learned the basic definition of “capitalism” and “socialism” for the first time, devoid of any moralizing judgements. Capitalism is simply a system where resources and capital are privately owned and all economic decision making is in the hands of property owners, while socialism is exactly its inverse: capital and resources are publicly (through the state) owned or regulated, and economic decision making is centralized. I had always heard that capitalism was about evil and greed and that socialism was about compassion and love. Turns out pretty much everybody was wrong. Who knew?

Over the next few years I became a public school teacher and worked through my master’s program. In my extremely limited free time I only read books on ancient and medieval history (my professional content area) or Biblical Studies. I had little time to explore economics or political philosophy. I found Reason magazine and listened to some conservative media and slowly became more convinced that human government was inherently inept. My experience working in a poor, urban school taught me that while the teachers and administrators in local schools really cared about students, the politicians and education bureaucrats were completely ignorant and usually made decisions that benefited themselves at the expense of the public. I decided that after I graduated in 2019 I was going to spend more time reading up on economics and political philosophy. Little did I know my government was about to give me a golden opportunity to do just that.

The world shut down on March 13, 2020. I told my students I would see them in two weeks, to “stop the spread,” of course, and that they needed to keep up with their schoolwork online. They didn’t return to school for another five months. Before the lockdowns went into effect, I was already skeptical about the inconsistencies I saw in the media’s Covid narrative (heavy emphasis on the singular), and by the end of April I realized it was almost entirely political propaganda. I needed to start studying, and I now had the time. I picked up a copy of Thomas Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies and lost all faith that the government could make rational economic decisions. In the late fall I read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Hayek confirmed my suspicion that the political and bureaucratic class were incompetent and self-interested. In the early spring of 2021, I read Scott Horton’s latest book Enough Already that detailed America’s barbaric “War on Terrorism.” The same lies and propaganda that were being used to push the Covid regime and divide the American public were also invoked to justify pointless wars of profit in which millions of completely innocent people that had nothing to do with those who died on September 11, 2001. The government wasn’t just inept, it was evil.

Not long after that I found “The Tom Woods Show,” where I was introduced to Austrian economics. From there I began to read Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, and I started a podcast in 2022 to explore the relationship between my new knowledge of economics and political philosophy and my Christian faith. The rest, as they say, is history.

As a matter of historical precision, the Bible does not teach libertarianism or capitalism. To argue that it does would be grossly anachronistic. Progressive Christians have long read insidious 19th-century ideas back into the biblical texts, claiming falsely that Jesus and his earliest followers were socialists. This betrays a massive misunderstanding of the Bible, history, and basic economics. Unfortunately, even libertarians sometimes fall into the same trap. Capitalism, socialism, conservatism, progressivism, and even libertarianism are all modern categories that were developed in response to the post-Enlightenment, industrialized world. The ancients weren’t dealing with our problems, and we shouldn’t expect them to answer questions that were not being posed in antiquity. The Bible is inherently culturally embedded, and there are no quick and easy analogues from the ancient mind and the modern. I do, however, believe that principles outlined in the Bible about the nature of the Church, the lordship of Christ, the Kingdom of God, and the world to come are deeply compatible with the modern political philosophy we call libertarianism. For those willing to take the Bible seriously in its historical context and open minded enough to think beyond facile, childish caricatures of economic and political concepts, they might just arrive at the same conclusion.