Apologies if this post is both shorter and grouchier than the majority of my posts, but I have the flu. I know it’s that time of year for most of the anglophone world, so good luck to you all in staying well.

If you do happen to get the flu, though, and you get bored, you can always entertain yourself during your quarantine the way I do: trying to dig up the justifications Christians claim for supporting patently un-Christian politics.

One of the themes I run into again and again is the notion that there’s a sharp distinction between individual justice and collective justice. See ‘Tea Party for Christians‘, a website truly forged in hell, drawing that bright line here:

The U.S. Constitution was written to ensure and protect those rights for individuals (not the collective), placing the ultimate power in America with its people rather than its government (which merely represents the people). The Founders understood that we live in a fallen world and that granting politicians too much power would ultimately lead to the oppression of individuals under their authority. So the Founders wrote a Constitution that severely limited governmental power, spreading it across three branches, the states, and the people. This should be of the utmost importance to Christians, as God’s stance on oppression is clear…

Neat sleight of hand. See how they conflate the ‘collective’ with the ‘fallen’ world? Their suggestion is that: a) the rights of individuals are separable from the rights of the ‘collective’ (a word I guess they use since it sounds like something the Borg would use, though ‘group’ or ‘whole’ would serve just as well); and b) that the collective is suspect because people in general are corrupt and grouping them together empowers them to inflict their corruption upon others. This is usually the kind of nonsense rhetoric you find surrounding Tea Party/libertarian-minded moves like the recent cuts to SNAP and the rabid opposition to Obamacare, which would extend healthcare to many poor Americans. Of course, the slicing of SNAP and opposition to greater access to healthcare are both thoroughly un-Christian, and their rooting in the individualist notion of justice is only one reason why, which I’ll address here.

Because I’m not feeling well, I’ll spare you the prose. Here are the multitude of reasons this line of thought doesn’t work within the frame of Christian ethics:

1.) You are owed ‘rights’, speaking in Christian terms, as a member of the class ‘humanity.’ God has a special relationship with various classes of people, including specific nations and families. He also has a special relationship with ‘humanity’, which is a massive class of creatures separate, ethically, from other classes of creatures. So the Bible isn’t actually that interested in individual rights. This makes sense, as:

2.) Justice, in the Biblical sense, can’t even be conceived of in individual terms. Even with a conception like Augustine’s, in which the first step to justice is for a person to be rightly oriented toward God (thereby just within), a person having a just disposition has only that: a single just disposition. But justice in the world actually occurs when people engage with others in a just way. To inhabit a just world, people must not only maintain a just disposition, but must behave justly toward each other. Justice can only be understood in terms of equality, and equality can only be understood in terms of comparison, which can only take place among collectives, not individuals. So even the notion of ‘justice’ doesn’t make much sense in a frame in which the individual is the sole unit of moral interest, unless you buy a negative rights frame, in which case:

3.) Following that point, there’s no negative conception of justice that makes sense in a Christian framework. That is to say: it’s flatly un-Christian to say that ‘not’ doing something amounts to justice, so libertarian notions of justice occurring when we’re all following the non-aggression principle are ridiculous. This is for two reasons: first, Jesus distributes a variety of positive commandments in the NT; secondly, the very principle of individualism suggests a shrinking away from engagement with others, which Pope Francis addressed pretty well here:

We find Jesus’ wounds in carrying out works of mercy, giving to the body – the body – and also to the soul, but the body, I stress, of your wounded brother…Because he is hungry, because he is thirsty, because he is naked, because he is humiliated, because he is a slave, because he is in jail, because he is in hospital. Those are the wounds of Jesus today.

Francis’ warning is not to stop at welfare; that is, just because we have distributed to everyone their just due doesn’t mean we should consider our engagement with them finished. But your Tea Party and libertarian Christians actually take two steps back from that: they neither want to distribute everyone their just due nor to engage with them, or at least, there would be no moral imperative for them to in their system. Within the framework of Christianity, though, the imperative is there: this is just one more way that Christian ethics are fundamentally unsuited for compatibility with libertarian ethics. Augustine, of course, agrees, via the amazing Mary T. Clark:

Those who tend to call the contribution made to another’s basic need, by someone better off, a work of charity or liberality need to be reminded that the social function of private property in this case obliges them to a work that is directed toward the common good, and therefore a work of social justice, which obliges in charity. Since love is naturally a free act, there is a tendency to think of it as something untouched by obligation. By firmly grounding justice upon the motivation of love, however, Augustine teaches us that all the commandments of God require of us that which is most our own. And that is why the New Law is one of Love. “And Love is the fulfillment of the Law” (Romans XIII, 10.)

For the new law to be fulfilled and justice to be achieved through that law, we must reach out ceaselessly toward each other in love and aid, and must not stop at the meeting of basic needs, but must engage constantly as friends and neighbors. This is is the vision of the NT, and it’s a great one. It’s also one that is thoroughly averse to the anti-healthcare, anti-SNAP Republican/libertarian ethic of individualism and property-hoarding.