I have been mulling this over for a while now. It seems appropriate that a Southern Baptist preacher and high school football great would be able to sum up American ideology so succinctly--so unselfconsciously. “You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.” ― Adrian Rogers, (1931-2005). The quotation comes from the website goodreads. Rogers served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention for three terms. He was also pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee. I read this passage with a sense of déjà vu. It is not just that I have seen this before, it is that I have lived it, not as a piece of my own identity, unless that identity be alienation, but as an atmosphere, a location in a dream that I keep returning to because I cannot leave and I cannot wake up. I have heard this sentiment expressed my whole life, and I know that it is older than I am. It will outlive me. Initially, I tried to approach this as a reasoned argument, but that is not what it is. It is a desire to dominate (libido dominandi) through a transcendent order that is invisible but known, but only to the communicant, only to the wise man, a transcendence realized in the everyday world of work and commodity exchange. It is an ego posture that lays claim to an insight into the order of the nation, an order rooted in a freedom that is already subject to the ideology of a particular economic system. Even more fundamentally the statement has a primate strength to it, the fundamental unreason of an insulted gorilla. I do not know if this is Christian or not. It probably is, but for psychological and not for theological reasons. I suspect that that is precisely the appeal across a seemingly diverse collection of beliefs: Libertarians, conservative Christians, Milton Friedman, Vince Lombardi, Ayn Rand, cowboys but not Indians. The argument is irrelevant because the appeal lies in the subordination of the self to an economic ideology that consecrates the expression of a lust for domination and an ordering and harmonization of the external and internal through disciplining the will; and in the disciplined self (disciplined by the experience of transcendence and by the pleasure of rewarded work) lies the secret ideological pleasure of enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. The bonus of the enjoyment of dominance. “A Christian with a testimony is never at the mercy of an unbeliever with an argument.”—Adrian Rogers. The quotation comes from “Proverbs of Pastor Adrian Rogers Illustrative of His Wit and Wisdom.”
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 12:59:46 +0000
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