Just to ensure clarity, I’ll get a little more didactic in this post. The image is nothing more than a summary of the political and economic theories common in the West. Steal a copy of it; click on it to enlarge. You can also CTRL+click to open the image in a new browser tab. The vertical scale plots more or less personal freedom in terms of government control. The horizontal scale plots more or less economic freedom in terms of government control. Each quadrant offers typical labels of how different theories place on the scale of freedom from regulation.
This has nothing to do with the motivations for regulation, so several popular labels are lumped together under low freedom in both economic and personal choices. However, you should notice that the underlying assumption of all of this is regulating behavior (personal freedom) in favor of economic gain, with varying assumptions about what produces good economic gains.
Every one of these theoretical positions starts with rejecting the Fall. Thus, none of them work out as the theories assert. As noted yesterday, communism pretends that humans can be conditioned to remain proletarian in their thinking. It ignores how anyone elevated for the sake of organizational efficiency automatically loses any reason for proletarian thinking, and now has a vested interest in keeping their position and privileges. In other words, communist is virtually always defacto fascist to some degree. The bulk of Americans have a critical failure, a false concept of what “fascist” means, both in theory and in real terms. The differences among the lower left quadrant groups is merely the mythology of who is supposed to control and benefit from the control. Ask: What is the source of policy? Not a one of these theories allows for a mystical approach to anything.
So it should be obvious the biblical approach is not on this grid at all. Every one of them denies the dire human necessity of tribal social structure. At most, you’ll notice the lower half substitutes the state for the tribe, which is the whole point. If we encourage humans to maintain a tribal sense of identity, the state cannot exist. The secular state is inherently evil, as it stands in rejection of God’s revelation. Every word in the Bible assumes the necessity of tribal social structure in order to serve God. The whole meaning of “church” is a faith community living as a clan, as if they were all the same extended family household. This is simply not up for debate; you cannot obey Christ without that.
This is why we reject all Western governments. Not in the sense of refusing to live under their control, but in the sense we will never allow any secular state to claim they are in God’s favor. We will always reject the mythology that any Western government could be compliant with Scripture. They are all founded on rejecting revelation, never mind what rhetoric they use to contrary. Genuine Christlike politics starts with tribalism.
