State Control

"'Relativism' is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view."
Richard Rorty

A humorous and thought provoking quote, to be sure.

There are others, but let’s think about this one for now. ‘Every belief is as good as every other’. It sounds like modern Christian America, and that feels comfortable.

No one really holds this view. Richard Rorty is right. People tend to stick with their own beliefs, and they hold, share, amplify and validate those beliefs, even in the face of reality.

Put another way, we hold strong convictions, although we might not express them openly. In our social settings we express our beliefs in a variety of ways: conversations with friends, individual choices such as which books we read or TV shows we watch. These choices are personal, normally made out of habit and certainly not controversial.

Choice is something that most of us take for granted. We chose to buy a certain product, or support a certain candidate or cause based on a belief we hold. We come to hold these beliefs based on a mix personal experience, recommendations of respected friends and, occasionally, the deep desire to go along with our peers.

It’s easy to make a choice or hold a viewpoint when you are surrounded by those who share your values, viewpoints and background. It’s easy to agree when those around you are in agreement.



It’s all relative. To the farm family struggling to make ends meet, crop set aside programs are a blessing. To a school teacher in Chicago they are an unfair subsidy that drains tax revenue from bringing their salaries into line with their peers. The real estate developer sees a tract of land as a way to profit and raise the local tax base, supporting the local community. The application of the principle of eminent domain, or the forced sale of that property, robs a local citizen of land that had been held in their family for generations. State and federal governments enact laws to secure liberty, and occasionally those laws have the unintended effect of denying freedoms to citizens.

That’s the rub. We try to do good things by making choices based on what we think is right. The trouble is we usually offend someone when choosing, because the very act of making a choice of one thing over another leaves one side empty handed. We choose to support farmers through crop set-aside programs, and in doing so we create the effect (unintended or not) of taking money from a school-teacher’s salary. We choose to support the development of a golf course and children’s park and thereby deny a family’s legacy. The constitution’s separation clause keeps our religious life free of interference, or worse, by our elected leaders.

So why is it ok to control smoking? Or limit the intake of transfats in our diet? Or regulate driving habits?

These are all contentious issues, to be sure. Let’s include abortion, public school curricula, bedroom legislation, treasonous speech, and others. Religion could be included in the group, as could the social clubs you belong to, the people you associate with, and the very things you say in public.

But wait. Somewhere in the back of your mind a little bell just rang. Religion? Opinion? State? Association? Speech? Property? Liberty? Didn’t we already deal with these issues in high school civics class?

Right. We talked about the Constitution, freedoms, styles of government. We talked about funny Latin words like habeus corpus, caveat emptor, credit mobilier, laissez faire and a lot of other things that most of us probable forgot, or, more aptly put, trusted to the care of those whom we have elected. Shoot, we could even include the electoral process and representation in our little list of concepts that make up our society.

The trouble is we have moved away from civil and democratic representation. Remember when we were taught that the ‘majority rules’? Remember when civil disobedience was loosely defined as standing on a street corner with a sign supporting this or that cause? Perhaps the extreme example in that not-so-distant American past was the occasional activist Catholic priest being arrested in front of an abortion clinic.

Not now. Now we have major news networks selling opinion (usually biased and politicized) as fact. Senators and other elected officials engaged in televised shouting matches; an animal rights group justifying the destruction of a legal business because they had the audacity to correctly function as a business in an openly capitalist society completely within the law.

Isolated examples? Not really. You see it is indeed relative, more so now than ever. The news organizations serve their viewers’ interests with what sells; politicians serve their constituencies a steady diet of what they want to say, not what must be said. And national organizations in their attempt at political change commit no less than treason, libeling one of America’s finest in one of the most visible flagship newspapers in the nation, if not the world.

And it all goes largely un-noticed. After my home church in Iowa went through doctrinal turmoil last year I took some time to reflect on what had happened to them. The very short version is that the rank and file (read: quiet, non-confrontational, etc…) were usurped. The pastoral team led a small but vocal group into territory far outside Disciple doctrine, pushing a literal biblical interpretation; a black-and-white view of a normally grey and confusing world. It reminded me of Orwell’s work Animal Farm. Here is a little of that story, with apologies to George:

I like Orwell. I like him because he told us about all of this a hundred years ago. Remember ‘1984’? No? How about ‘Animal Farm’? Let’s talk about that one. The farmer dies, or moves to Florida, or whatever, and the farm is left on it’s own. So the animals begin to starve. And that adversity forces them to all pull together, planting crops, gathering firewood, fetching water. All the animals on the farm, a socialist paradise, producing, providing, living, loving. All of the animals except for the pigs.

See, the pigs were smart. Or they thought so anyway. It doesn’t matter, because this already happened, and now they have killed all of us and our dreams and besides, it’s better because they know best. But let me tell my story, because I have a little time to kill before I go.


And here we see finally the term ‘insipid’ used in it’s fullest and most vile sense. An evil change, slowly wrought from the inside, not unlike the decay of painted wood. One poke and the whole thing collapses. It is this insipid, unseen change in our daily lives, from school boards through local and state governments, and finally federalized, ratified in code and quietly forced on we, the royal we, the voters. We, the people. The ones who believe in the rule of the majority. The majority of whom fail to speak up, fail to fall in, fail to correct behavior and most egregiously fail to vote.

At this point I can’t remember if this article is about apathy, pigs or politics. But somehow all three are linked. You see, the topic of this rant is ‘state control of private gun ownership from a Christian perspective’. Bull.

Bull. It’s about state control of anything. Of you, of your children, of the way you drive, what you eat, how you behave and yes, whether or not you choose life, choose to wait, or even choose to own a gun.

It’s about apathy, and the vacuum we create when we choose to remain silent; the vacuum that is filled by activist groups who resort to slander and libel, intimidation, coercion and even violence. It’s about network television hosts who routinely engage in shouting matches with their ‘guests’. It’s about surrendering your life to work, your livelihood to taxation, your liberty to the ‘rights’ of the perceived victims.

It’s about polarity. The unpleasant reality that in our universe, functioning like the great jeweled movement of a galactic Rolex watch, ticking away the seconds of our lives according to fixed, non-relative natural laws. It’s about black and white, right and wrong. About winners and losers (yes, there are losers).

It’s also about those who choose to do the right thing. It’s about not surrendering your viewpoint, even in the face of bullies who stoop to violence. It’s about abstract concepts like liberty, fraternity and equality. About realizing that shouting doesn’t solve the problem.

Most importantly, it’s about the realization that each time we choose to reduce the freedoms and liberties of a group with which we don’t particularly agree, the door is open for the same to happen to us. The door opens for that same ubiquitous State to continue the erosion of our rights, the infringement by regulation and through bureaucratic fiat of our own cherished freedoms.

So anyway, the pigs were smarter. It was the pigs who came up with the idea that we should have a plan, a common goal uniting us in the struggle. So they talked, and we listened. They talked some more and we sat there and took it. We took them seriously as they took away our lives, one rule at a time. At night. While we were sleeping.

I will not quote scripture. I will not cite crime-reduction statistics to support or defend my views.
I simply believe in my heart that state control of gun ownership is wrong. I also believe that the majority rules in this country. I believe in the value of hard work, ethical behavior, and yes, the rights of all of us to drive to work, to play sports, talk on the phone, worship in the church of our choice (or, more importantly, not), go waterskiing and even own guns.

Because I believe instead in personal accountability, in the power of restraint, in the personal shame of guilt for those who choose to harm another person with a fist, a knife or even a gun. And I know in my gut that as much as we want to assign the guilt to the weapon, it is only truly assignable to the sinner, for only the sinner can ask and receive forgiveness for the sin.

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