The Evangelical Tradition And The 2012 Election

In Election Month at Patheos , the latest question of the week is: What are the key issues at stake in this election for people of your tradition?

Evangelicals could talk about a number of things in trying to answer this question. But I believe the core issue for evangelicals this year is one of the biggest issues of all: What kind of nation will the United States of America be? What will be our concept of governance? Will we continue to prize liberty, and limit the scope of government accordingly? Or will we decide that our government should be able to do pretty much whatever it wants to the citizens, in pursuit of universalist goals?

The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act of 2010 , or ObamaCare, is undoubtedly the best known of the hot-button issues in this regard. The Supreme Court decided, in a 5-4 ruling, that nothing in the Constitution prevents the U.S. federal government from requiring the people to purchase commercial health insurance.

But for many Americans, conservative evangelicals among them, this is an unacceptable encroachment on liberty. The people, acting through Congress, may always overrule the Supreme Court. The U.S. Constitution was designed to ensure that. It is difficult, but it is not impossible, for the people to declare a standard to which the courts are obliged to adhere. The Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of what our law means; the people are. This, at least, was the principle on which the Republic was founded.

The contraception mandate levied by the Department of Health and Human Services in implementing ObamaCare has generated at least as much concern about coercion by the government. This mandate directly violates the consciences of those, like Catholics, with religious objections. But the religious aspect of the matter inevitably implies a larger question, which is why anyone, regardless of the nature of his objection, should be compelled to purchase contraception coverage—or any other kind of health-insurance coverage, for that matter.

The more mandates the government levies, the less discretion we have over every aspect of our lives. It is a serious question what Catholic institutions will do, for example, if the contraception mandate stands in its current form, which requires even self-insuring institutions—those that manage their own insurance funds rather than purchasing insurance commercially—to provide contraception services for employees. Why should government make it impossible for these institutions to operate lawfully while adhering to their beliefs? What will their employees do if the institutions have to be shuttered? Which people—the poor, the vulnerable, the weak—will lose the services these institutions have been providing?

ObamaCare and its ramifications are only some of the liberty issues we will be dealing with, however, if there is a second term for President Obama. Federal implementation of the "Common Core" curriculum for the public schools will effectively eliminate parents' freedom to choose schools that offer a better education based on objective standards rather than the grading of students' attitudes. A national testing program focused on the Common Core curriculum will ensure that it is taught, and students will be tracked through state records, which will be available to the federal Department of Education.

There is considerable detail about what the Common Core curriculum will look like at the link above and here . Here's one example:

[A] sample exercise about Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address threw teachers into confusion when they were instructed to refrain from providing background and to read the speech without feeling. In this way, this pivotal document is stripped of its historical significance and eloquence. Nor are the religious references, so important to Lincoln's speeches, to be mentioned. The strategy puts the Gettysburg Address on the same plane as other "informational texts," say about frogs or snakes.

School districts that prefer not to teach in this manner will have difficulty remaining functional, because the Obama education plan comes with federally-overseen revenue shifting between districts and even across county lines. In the forty-eight states that signed up for "Race to the Top" in order to get 2009 stimulus funds, schools will not have the option of disregarding—or, indeed, surpassing—the Common Core.

Implementing a program of regional revenue-shifting undercuts the role of cities, counties, and school districts—the levels of government closest to the people—and forms an important but little understood facet of the Obama administration's objectives. Journalist Stanley Kurtz has written extensively about this, particularly in his 2012 book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities .

The ultimate purpose of the "regionalism" initiative is literally to inhibit or prevent the development of traditional suburbs, which attract people because they are safe and affordable, with plentiful single-family housing and good schools. The method for preventing the desirable-suburbs phenomenon is to plunder the suburbs' tax base through revenue shifting to the urban cores.

Regionalism is not merely theoretical; it has been implemented in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, it has been introduced in a different way in Portland, Oregon, and it is being pushed hard in Ohio . If the area you live in has a regional "council of governments"—and it probably does—the infrastructure is in place for the federal government to largely control how your area develops by issuing grants under Obama's Sustainable Communities Initiative.

Unquestionably, many of the states have, on their own initiative, fostered the infrastructure for regional planning (such as California, where I live). But putting the federal government behind it, and focusing a laser beam on shifting tax revenues within regions, raises the stakes considerably. If the federal government is actively discouraging the development of affordable, desirable suburbs—the kind young families have flocked to for nearly a century—it will be deliberately eliminating options the people have long shown a preference for. If this is a national policy, can there be any appeal from it?

Is that what we want our government doing? Do we elect governments to tell us we won't be allowed to live the way we want to? Many evangelicals, recognizing the broader perils of giving that much power to the government, would say no.

One of the least-known but most effective federal programs for eliminating options for the people is land conservation, which since 1964 has quadrupled the amount of land under no-use or limited-use restrictions to nearly 700 million acres, or 30 percent of America's total land base . In 2010, a Congressional inquiry turned up a Bureau of Land Management plan to put another 213 million acres under federal management by designating them "national monuments."

Most of us no doubt agree with the idea of national parks and even some level of conservation. But the cost of federal decisions to drastically expand government's land holdings has been the ejection of millions of rural Americans from their land. The federal government requires landowners to sell when their land is designated for conservation, and it typically wins by holding over them the threat of condemning the property, blocking their access to water, or denying them longstanding grazing rights.

Calculations presented by journalist Elizabeth Nickson and Matthew S. Watters indicate that since 1980, nearly 40 million rural Americans have been "cleared" from lands placed under federal conservation or land-trust management (the latter being the preferred vehicle of environmental groups). Some 25 million of those "cleared" were in ranching or related businesses; 1.4 million ranches and livestock operations have been shut down since 1980, principally because of changes in federal land policies.

Government does have a proper role in setting policies for land use, but should the government be systematically overriding citizens' property rights in this way? In each of the cases I have cited—the insurance purchase mandate under ObamaCare; the contraception-coverage mandate; enforcement of the Common Core curriculum for every student, regardless of what school districts or parents want; the regionalist approach to curtailing suburban options for families; and systematic federal campaigns to take land from citizens—the important issue is the implied relationship between the government and the people. It is not the respectful relationship envisioned by America's Founders. It is something else: something that cannot sustain liberty.

It's hard to rank the importance of liberties. Most Christians would probably say the freedom to love Jesus Christ and obey the Lord God is the most precious—but that doesn't imply that general intellectual freedom, economic freedom, and respect from the government for our rights really matter less to a rewarding life. Governmental respect for the people is in fact a Christian principle, and where it is eroded, Christianity is less at work. It is precisely the freedom to love and proclaim Jesus Christ, without hindrance or punishment, that will not withstand an erosion of respect for the people on the part of our government.

When God judges governments, He will look at how they treated their people. Outcomes are in God's hands; what we control is the attitudes of our hearts. Assuming the mantle of government doesn't give anyone an "out" from that reality. A government that casually overrides the people's rights looks far more like the regimes of the despots we despise than like the Republic crafted by the Founders. Manifestly, a concern about governmental encroachments on liberty is not theoretical for Americans in 2012. It is real, it is tangible, and it is upon us.

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The Evangelical Tradition and the 2012 Election