Ayn Rand is like Vaseline

In the movie Striptease, Burt Reynolds plays congressman David Dilbeck, a political caricature obsessed with Demi Moore, a struggling single mom working as a stripper.  Dilbeck’s hypocrisy as a politician knows no bounds. At one point in the movie he transitions from a sordid situation where he is covered in Vaseline to a political rally with a group called the “Young Christians.” Unable to get himself fully cleaned up in time, he walks with a squishing noise and a gooey handshake into the meeting.  “Family Values!” he proclaims loudly as he steps onto the stage. The audience cheers.

Something similar to this happens every election cycle in the United States. Conservative politicians, some of them covered in Vaseline, recite shibboleths about abortion and gay marriage, invoke Christian values, and once again win the evangelical vote. And then they proceed to push an agenda that is certainly “anti-Jesus” but, alas, no longer anti-Christian, at least in the United States.

This situation mystifies me. I know this is a controversial topic, based on some lively conversations I have had on Facebook; I know being a Canadian shapes my political views; and I know lots of Christians whose lives put me to shame disagree with me on this. But I have some real problems with how evangelicals function in the political arena.

Take Ayn Rand. I encountered the infamous “philosopher of selfishness” decades ago in college. We studied her briefly in philosophy class as an unambiguously anti-Christian thinker who celebrated selfishness and condemned charity.  She wasn’t deep or profound; her thought was not “nuanced” or “important as a balance.” She was merely clear in her willingness to say, and write long novels about how, “Jesus got it all wrong.” “If any civilization is to survive,” she wrote, in a typical comment, “it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.”

So when Paul Ryan appeared on the political scene with a Bible in one hand and Ayn Rand in the other I sat upright. This seemed crazy to me, as absurd as if he was using strippers to promote his campaign. This man will be laughed off the stage I thought. But no: He ran for VP on the Republican ticket and most evangelicals voted for him!

It troubles me greatly that evangelicals, despite their commitment to the authority of scripture, have never developed a Christian view of economics in the way that Catholics have. But it’s actually worse than that:  Most evangelicals have an anti-Christian view of economics.

The clearest lesson in the entire Bible—clearer than proper marriage, clearer than salvation, clearer than keeping the Sabbath—is concern for the poor. It’s in almost every book of the Bible. It was Jesus’s central concern. Almost every reformer in the history of the Church embraced it as a central concern. So how was it that a political theorist who argued that we must reject the “morality of altruism” met with the approval of millions of Christians?

It seems to me that many evangelicals have traded their biblical birthright for a mess of Ayn Rand pottage. Powerful interests, many who care nothing about faith, have managed to make abortion and gay marriage the only truly important issues for Christians. And then, somehow, they have mysteriously attached the following issues and most evangelicals have signed on, thinking the whole package is uniformly Christian:

1)    Growing wealth inquality is fine.

2)    The free market allocates wealth fairly.

3)    Taxes are bad.

4)    Government is bad, except for waging war.

5)    Social justice is stealing money from “makers” and giving it to “takers.”

6)    Universal healthcare is bad.

7)    Poverty is acceptable since Jesus said there will “always” be poor people

8)    Massive wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people is not a problem.

9)    Corporations are good and don’t need government regulations to make them behave in socially responsible ways.

These issues do not look “subtle” to me.  I don’t think we can say that “People of good will disagree” when it comes to biblical teaching on the poor. If Christians think Ayn Rand comports with their faith that can only be because they are not thinking; they are blindly following a pied piper—probably hired by a Super Pac—leading them away from their faith.