As a set, these letters [to the editor in response to my piece on Ayn Rand] reminded me again how odd and troubling a country America frequently is. Where else could one find a substantial minority who think it possible to be both a practicing Christian and an ardent admirer of a woman whose entire intellectual project was the perfect negation of all Christian values? It confirms me in my conviction that, for all the oceans of Christians that have flooded our shores over the centuries, somehow Christianity has remained strangely alien to our national temperament and to our spiritual tendency toward a bizarre and implausible materialist Gnosticism.
–David Bentley Hart, First Things (August/September 2011), page 19
I read Hart’s article and the letters in the following issue. It always amazes me how even many devout Christians can so fiercely defend ideas/practices/causes that fly in the face of the Gospel.
Meh — I expect that most Christians who identify with Rand don’t have any specifics about her philosophy; they don’t even know what she believed about human beings and the Other.
Most likely they are mistaking her philosophy with a plain vanilla interest in the values of a Constitutional Republic, a free market, private property rights, individual liberty, and limited government.
That’s what I was getting at, but wasn’t clear enough. So many will accept things uncritically without ever holding it up to the Light of Christ, i.e. seriously looking at it along side the teachings of Scripture.
I agree with Sarah.
Sarah: Ayn Rand was a clear defender of the free market, private property rights and individual liberty, and thought that any attempt to stilfe such was coercive. And that Christianity posed a real threat to the market, property rights, and the liberty of the selfish.
She wasn’t Adam Smith, who while skeptical of Christianity, believed that a commercial economy was much more productive and free than its mercantilist and feudalist alternatives – and better for society as a whole because it built trust among people, especially merchants. Adam Smith thought the market could create more sympathy as people got to know the persons they traded with. Rand scoffed that sympathy would be a virtue at all.
RE: “Ayn Rand was a clear defender of the free market, private property rights and individual liberty, and thought that any attempt to stilfe such was coercive.”
NO!!!! [gasp] . . . You’re kiddin’ me!!!!
Heh.
See what I mean, everybody else?
As I said “Most likely they are mistaking her philosophy with a plain vanilla interest in the values of a Constitutional Republic, a free market, private property rights, individual liberty, and limited government.”
And of course, in the case of those with a raw lack of integrity, they’re not “mistaken” — they’re [i]quite deliberately[/i] conflating Rand’s philosophies about human beings and the Other with the plain vanilla interests listed above.
It’s rankly dishonest [though fortunately, transparently so]. But one knows what to expect when dealing with those sorts of people anyway.
So here’s what we’ve got with the latest rhetorical maneuvers from the desperate and the manipulative.
You’ve got a bunch of political libs who loathe the Constitution, the free market, private property rights, individual liberty, and limited government.
Then you’ve got a cultural recovery at the grass roots level of an interest in the Constitution, the free market, private property rights, individual liberty and limited government. Along with that cultural recovery comes an interest in various philosophers who either primarily [Hayek, etc.] or tangentially [due to their particular secular foundational worldview — Rand, etc.] touted those particular values.
The rhetorical maneuver — and it’s amusing to observe — is the political libs attempting to claim that the recovery of the values of the Constitution, the free market, private property rights, individual liberty and limited government is actually a wholesale capitulation to Rand’s secular foundational worldview. They’re gonna “rip off the false whiskers” and reveal the true perfidy and evil of those values by taking a bunch of clueless Christians and revealing that Rand held a dreadful godless secular worldview. In order to be [i]Truly Christian[/i], one must reject not only Rand’s foundational worldview, but one must also reject the values of the Constitution, the free market, private property rights, individual liberty, and limited government.
The conservatives who have been vaguely interested in Rand then are supposed to either be convinced to scuttle away from those values [after all, the Wicked Secular Rand approved of those values] or be embarrassed over those values.
And — if possible — it’d be nice if they could also learn to conflate the notion of charity and mercy and generosity with “let’s give money to the State and let the Central Planners offer lots of goodies to the bureaucrats’ notions of ‘the impoverished.'”
What a sham rhetorical ploy on the part of the political libs. And how desperate too! And it all depends on ignorant conservatives being muddled and conflating Rand’s foundational worldview with the values of standard plain-vanilla political conservatives.
The left-wing apologists have made a ‘propaganda art’ of twisting words that favor their agendas and creating or exploiting what they see as ‘contradictions’ in the belief systems of those with whom they disagree.
They are also very good at creating ‘facts.’
Well, some of us think that the constitution was a “liberal” document and that property rights and individual liberty is what the government is supposed to protect.
What some of us are rightfully worried about is that the claim to be ideologically for political liberty by some, is just a pretense for creating a plutocracy, where the banks get to run the system and the central planning is done by international corporations rather than those who are elected by the citizens of the republic. Ayn Rand who deeply influenced Alan Greenspan (and not exactly Tangentially) and Paul Ryan cannot be incidental. It is completely legitimate, and moral, to critique the selfishness and individualism that characterizes the impulse that demonizes public institutions. Deregulation sounds great, but its also a way of ensuring actions that harm the public bear no consequences.
Some accuse those of us who value equal opportunity, fairness, and helping others via the institutions of republic have been accused of “marxist” and “collectivist,” even though our views are only tangentially related to the authoritarianism of a few communist regimes. It’s a familiar ploy: we’re interested in reducing injustice, and we’re considered anti-freedom, because we don’t think it’s right for people to take advantage of others.
I would note that plenty of people are selective about Hayek. He did once write, for example, “Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.”
Granted, I’m sure some would argue that he was “collectivist” and hated liberty as well.
John Wilkins,
The Constitution and its Bill of Rights are liberal documents, in the classical sense of lliberalism.
The Constitution was expected to function well when it was implemented by people of Judeo-Christian beliefs, ethics and charity.
Collectivists tend to believe that the ‘state,’ whatever that is, guided by some sort of self-selected morally elite individuals (by whose measure?) , can do a better job running things.
And the most radical of these collectivists, over the past hundred years, have been guilty of some of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated by human beings. And they committed these crimes in the name of ‘doing good for others.’ And they have convinced many people that the wrongs that they committed are totally mitigated by the ‘good’ that they were supposedly trying to do.