Oct
27
Sleepwalking Toward Tyranny
“Like the proverbial frog slowly boiled to death for failing to detect the rising temperature of the water, we are sleepwalking toward tyranny.” — Joe Boot, Ruler of Kings
I have cited twice before from Ruler of Kings: Toward a Christian Vision of Government, written by apologist, pastor, and cultural theologian Rev. Dr. Joseph Boot. This particular citation is from the first few pages of the sixth chapter, in which Boot discusses state absolutism. Time how many seconds it takes before you are silently nodding in assent — or even muttering to yourself, “Ain’t it the truth…”. If you’re like me, it begins with the first paragraph and grows in intensity from there.
(Note: Boot is a fine communicator. Alas, though British-Canadian, he refuses to use the Oxford comma, thereby requiring an extra measure of patience, tolerance, and prayer from the rest of us.)
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One of the most remarkable features of the late modern era has been the strange coalescence of an incessant call for ‘total emancipation’ from the shackles of alleged oppression with an explicit totalitarian drift in political life. This initially seems contradictory. On one side there is an anarchistic demand for human life and activity, but it is tied to a totalitarian tendency which, in the name of freedom and radical democracy, allows civil government to pursue its task without any intrinsic limitations.
This perplexing element of life in the West manifests itself in a constant clamouring amongst the people for complete self-determination, equality and self-expression in the name of ‘justice’, whilst looking to the state as the appropriate organ to legislate the rights, entitlements and freedoms being demanded into existence. People increasingly require total equality, provision, safety and security to be delivered by the state, and it is taken practically for granted that the central government must act as the lord and coordinator of all society. The reformed philosopher Jan Dengerink is to the point:
“To [central government] is ascribed a clear supremacy over all other basically non-political groups. In this fashion, we land up squarely, under the banner of absolute freedom and equality, with a typical totalitarian conception of the state. This clearly shows its out-workings in the socio-political activities of various Western democracies, with all of the structural and spiritual leveling that follows from it… the result is always a heavy-handed bureaucracy, which in practice reduces the individual citizen to a nullity, one in which the technocrats and social planners get the final say….”
This political reality can be identified as a form of liberal democratic socialism and it trends totalitarian: “Abolishing in principle the unique, original responsibility of all kinds of other societal structures, it hands society over to the all-devouring state leviathan.” Put differently, the majority of people have become statist in their thinking, implicitly or explicitly. The central meaning of statism is important to note. The presence of an ‘-ism‘ should immediately alert the careful thinker to the possibility that there has been an exaggeration of a created and God-ordained structure (in this case the state) into something well beyond its intended function. Fundamentally statism is a political system in which the sphere of civil government exerts substantial, centralized control over much of society, including the economy and various other spheres.
The dominance of statism today means that few people question anymore progressive, redistributive taxation (including inheritance taxes), national minimum wage laws, market interventionism, the suspension of civil liberties by unelected bureaucrats in the name of public health, banking and big corporation bailouts, state control and funding of medicine, education, charity (through various regulations and incentives) and welfare, as well as a large share of the media such as the BBC and CBC. The British National Health Service alone is one of the world’s largest employers. The public sector has become so vast that most people have grown accustomed to the state’s omnipresence. Britain today is not a country that the famed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would have imagined emerging from a conflict against state absolutism.
In this brave new world, the church herself is increasingly treated as little more than another social club with no more significance in culture than a cinema or sports team — possibly less. It is easy to forget the fact that there is in our era a regulated state-church in officially communist countries like China, where some of the churches are authorized by the civil government to gather, worship, practice the rites of the church and even preach from (part of) the Bible. However, the apparent ‘liberties’ of those state-approved churches are emphatically constrained by government, including subjects they can address from Scripture. They must submit themselves unequivocally to every regulation, recognizing state authority as absolute. It has only been because of faithful pastors and leaders in China standing on the full authority of the Word of God and sovereignty of Christ the King, that an ‘underground’ church which refuses to recognize state control over it, has grown. Yet in the West we seem increasingly ready to allow the state to licence, control and regulate the churches, even to the point of locking them down indefinitely and at will if ‘public health’ functionaries of the state require it, and ceasing pastoral counseling in biblical truth for those struggling with their sexuality.
The explosion of the regulatory state in the last 70 years, and especially over the last 30, reaching into more and more areas of private life and civil society, is rooted in the idea of the omni-competence of the state and its bureaucracy. Neither Scripture nor Christian historical thought well into the early twentieth century ever envisions such a freedom-sapping behemoth overtaking life. Today, there is no end to the tens of thousands of state regulations to be obeyed in the anglosphere in numerous departments of life. As I found out after a recent move, there are permits required for almost every kind of renovation activity on private property (including the size and colour of garden sheds or moving a bathroom sink) as well as detailed regulations covering the uses of one’s property. There are permits and regulations for working from a home office, as well as onerous worksite and office regulations. In fact, the regulations in Western nations are so diverse they cover everything from the size and shape of bananas, the length of nails required in drywall and who is allowed to feed pigs. More regulations require permits for collecting rags and metal, and others control games on private premises. Various bylaws mandate the number of parking spaces required per seat in church sanctuaries (Toronto) and liquor stores are barred from selling refrigerated water or soda (Indiana). The list is literally endless and frequently absurd.
This “omni-competent” vision of the state has become so ubiquitous that many evangelical Christians have lost their cultural memory of God-given, pre-political institutions, rights and responsibilities that are to be protected, but are not created, controlled or governed by the state. As a consequence, believers have floundered in their response to unprecedented and illegal lockdowns on the church, the growing collapse of civil liberties, the total control of education, expanded abortion, euthanasia, no-fault divorce law, the redefinition of marriage and family, homosexuality and transgender issues, largely because a scriptural world and life view norming our understanding of these questions and the role of the state with respect to them has collapsed. Instead, we have a liberal democratic and statist worldview drilled into us by the various organs of cultural life, where Jesus and a hope of heaven is spread on top as a sort of spiritual condiment giving religious flavor to secularism via the ministry of the churches.
What has become increasingly clear in recent decades is that we are entering an era (likely protracted) of struggle for the freedom of the church in the West, not just with the state and its bureaucracy, but with various church movements themselves, some of whose leaders are emerging as committed apologists for statism. There has never been a shortage of cultural leaders ready to support and advise falling down before the image of the absolutist state when the music plays — to obey the state elites without question. It is always the Daniels and his three friends ready to pray despite the king’s edict, or refusing to bow down to overreaching political power, who are in short supply. As a result, when it comes to analysing threats to freedom from their own civil government, courts and bureaucracy, Christians are generally poorly equipped. Like the proverbial frog slowly boiled to death for failing to detect the rising temperature of the water, we are sleepwalking toward tyranny.
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Wow, so much of that rings true to me! What about you? Do you agree with Boot’s assessment, fully or in large part? If not, why not?
P.S. I’m not positive, but I think the “sleepwalking toward tyranny” line may have been riffing off of Robert Bork’s book title, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, which had a very similar theme and was itself influenced by the ending of “The Second Coming” — “… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” — by William Butler Yeats.
