Christianity and collectivism

To a great extent, Christianity, somewhat like Buddhism, has traditionally evaded the issue of just political behaviour by simply counselling obedience to government under almost all circumstances. (Luther advised that Christians should not even revolt against an Islamic ruler.) Unfortunately, this tradition leaves a gaping hole in Christian doctrine under the present circumstances, where we have democratic governments which tend to regulate life ever more closely. This means that the scope for the exercise of personal morality tends to shrink to a sphere of unimportant matters, somewhat as in a Jane Austen novel, in which the women characters intensively focus their moral attention on the rather impoverished field of action left to them by the men. Instead, the important questions come to be decided collectively. Our most important moral decisions thus tend to shift from personal to political life.

Yet there is much confusion over what Christian political ethics is, or whether such a thing exists at all. For Luther, if I remember correctly, politics should simply be governed by "reason", which seems to amount to utilitarianism. On the Catholic side, the Scholastics would, I think, recommend that political rulers adopt a minimal level of morality without attempting to impose supererogatory virtues on their subjects (I hasten to add that I am not an expert on this subject). In both cases one probably ends up with a government that, at best, follows basic pre-Christian ethics, the "natural law". Such Christianity claims to bring no more than any other traditional ethical system to political decisionmaking. Collectivization then implies that specifically Christian ethics become irrelevant.

In recent times, many people have held that our collective decisions should be made on a more elevated, specifically Christian plane. But this is, in my opinion, a disastrous mistake, since it amounts to forcing individual citizens to adopt an outward show of "supererogatory" ethical standards (at least with regard to some limited set of decisions; even collectives cannot implement these superlative standards systematically). There may be no more effective way of abolishing genuine, freely chosen virtue than this denial of free will by a pseudo-ethical collective. Those who have reacted against oppressive "Christian" family environments will recognize how this works.