Ep. 104: Why Liberty is Actually a Spiritual Responsibility, Not Just a Political Preference

BAP – Ep. 104 – Why Libertarianism Matters_edt1
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[00:00:00] Jacob Winograd: [00:00:00] We live in a world saturated with force laws piled on laws and yet most people never paused to ask, what is a government and what is the state? What is a law even? What does it mean to say that something should be illegal? You see, too often we ize our faith and politicize our ethics, creating a kind of double standard between what we believe and advocate for in the pews and what we believe and advocate for in the public or in politics.

[00:00:30] Jacob Winograd: We’re quick to say, of course, that Jesus is Lord, but when it comes to how we govern our neighbors, we often speak as if Caesar still runs the place. But what if we took Jesus seriously? Not just in our private lives, but in economics and justice and the use of power. What if we stopped compartmentalizing and started asking, what does it truly mean to be salt and light, even when it comes to politics?

[00:00:58] Jacob Winograd: What if liberty isn’t just a political preference, but a spiritual responsibility? If Christ is king, how should the Christian consider the kingdoms of this world? What does the Bible teach us about human authority and what it means to love our neighbors and our enemies before we render unto Caesar?

[00:01:19] Jacob Winograd: What is Caesar’s? Let’s know what it means to render unto God. What is God’s? This is the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, the modern, prophetic voice against war and. Empire. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Biblical Anarchy Podcast Project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of our Christian for Liberty network.

[00:01:40] Jacob Winograd: I am your host, Jacob Warn grad. So today we’re gonna zoom out a bit and ask a foundational question. Why does libertarianism matter? For Christians, I know on my show I, we usually tackle specific objections or get deep into theology or economics or current events, but sometimes I think it’s important to take a step back and sort of reconnect to the why behind what we’re doing here, because this isn’t just about political theory and it’s not even about political outcomes.

[00:02:14] Jacob Winograd: Alone, even though we’re going to get into that in this episode. But ultimately, the reason I talk about both theology and politics is because of integrity. It’s about living in alignment with the values that we ca we claim to believe in all aspects of our lives. It’s about how we walk in the light and in truth, and to be salt and light to the world.

[00:02:37] Jacob Winograd: How we. Engage with power and people and with truth. And if the way we do those things is shaped by our love and obedience to Christ. ’cause if Christ is Lord and he is, are we making him Lord over all of our habits and all of our relationships and beliefs and affiliations? And this connects to why I talk about libertarianism and anarchism.

[00:03:04] Jacob Winograd: I am often asked Jacob, is it hard or even, is it necessary to have two different focuses on your show? And I think it, it is absolutely true that politics and the affairs of this world can become idols and distractions if even if we are approaching those things with good intentions. I actually recently discussed this with my friend Chris Spanel, who is a podcast host over at the We Are Libertarians Podcast Network which is also the founder of Chris, is a fellow believer, and he has lived through what happens if you get this balance wrong, that being too tied to or focused on politics can become not only idolatry, but that the fruit of that can be poisonous to our marriages, our careers, and our faith.

[00:03:54] Jacob Winograd: So I actually really recommend listening to that episode and we discuss what Chris calls the grill pill. Which I think is a really clever rapper for what ultimately I think is a Christ-centered approach to engaging with the world and with politics to avoid the excesses of both complete Christian retreatism from the culture and society.

[00:04:17] Jacob Winograd: And on the flip side, becoming too focused on politics to the point where we either compromise our values or we place our hope and faith, not in Christ, but in our own efforts and activism or in politicians or movements. But for today, I want to talk about why politics, and consequently, why I think libertarianism in the rightful place in our focus and our aspirations are important to us as Christians in our pursuit for living lives that are fully devoted to God and being radically transformed by the gospel.

[00:04:54] Jacob Winograd: My meta claim or thesis you could say is this. Libertarianism makes us better Christians, or to say it another way. Libertarianism properly understood as a political philosophy of law and economics is a tool that when properly utilized, enables us as Christians to live out our faith and to faithfully pursue the different callings and command that we are told to pursue as followers of Jesus and to do these things better.

[00:05:26] Jacob Winograd: So we’re gonna unpack that. In three different ways, we’re gonna make three different sort of points to, to back up this thesis. I’m presenting here first why libertarianism helps us to better steward creation and that which God has given us. Two, why libertarianism gives us better tools for balancing love and justice.

[00:05:51] Jacob Winograd: And then three, why it matters because it fo forces us to confront truth. Without compartmentalizing things. But we’re gonna start out [00:06:00] by talking about stewardship and caring for creation. In Genesis two, the Lord puts man in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. And so from the start, man is sort of given a position over the rest of creation, but not to.

[00:06:18] Jacob Winograd: Subdue it in a negative way, but to be caretakers of it, to be stewards of God’s creation, not exploiters of or to be tyrants. Psalm 24 reminds us that the earth is the lord’s and the fullness thereof the world and those who dwell therein. So. It’s not ours. Ultimately, we’re caretakers of God’s creation.

[00:06:40] Jacob Winograd: We’ve been given a stewardship, which functions like an ownership, but we have to treat that with the respect that it is due to God, because ultimately, just as we belong to God, creation belongs to God as well. Now libertarianism, especially when grounded in property rights and voluntary exchange, aligned beautifully with this biblical call.

[00:07:03] Jacob Winograd: Because if something is yours or you’ve been in entrusted a sort of stewardship or guardianship over something then you have a responsibility. To care for it. You have an incentive to take care of it to improve upon it. You don’t waste or squander what you’ve been entrusted with.

[00:07:20] Jacob Winograd: As Murray Rothbard put it, pollution and overuse of resources stem directly from the failure of government to defend private property. Private enterprise and modern technology would come not as a curse to mankind, but as its salvation. Now, I wouldn’t use the word salvation as a Christian, but certainly these things are beneficial towards our ability as human beings.

[00:07:45] Jacob Winograd: And human societies to be able to preserve God’s creation. And even when things go wrong, when there is pollution and environmental damage, markets often provide us with solutions to fix that damage and to even sometimes leave things better than when we found it. In other words though, when to get to Murray’s point, when people bear responsibility for their own land their own choices and their own resources, they will act like stewards.

[00:08:15] Jacob Winograd: But when we collectivize everything, if we shift responsibility and the idea of the stewardship and ownership to let bureaucrats. Right? Or does the state, broadly speaking, play God with what belongs to God? We get destruction, waste, and injustice. We also see this principle of the importance of stewardship in the parable of the talents, which is in Matthew 25.

[00:08:41] Jacob Winograd: Now from a historic redemptive Christ of centric reading, this parable primarily teaches us about the nature of Christ’s kingdom during the church age. Jesus is the master who goes on a journey. His ascension and the talents represent the spiritual gifts, the gospel opportunities and responsibilities he entrusts to his servants the church until his return and glory.

[00:09:06] Jacob Winograd: The faithful servants are those who take what they’ve been given and use it to advance the kingdom, multiplying its impact. For the master, the unfaithful servant who buries what was entrusted to him is not condemned for theft or fraud, but for an action for failing to act in faith and obedience to his Lord.

[00:09:26] Jacob Winograd: The warning is clear. Mere outward association with the master is not enough. What matters is a heart that responds with faithfulness. Action and fruitfulness, that’s the primary meaning of the text. But by implication, the parable also affirms the vital truth that Christians are called to be good stewards.

[00:09:44] Jacob Winograd: But what we do with what we’re given matters, our lives, our gifts, our opportunities, and yes, even the resources. We come into possession of, these are ultimately not our own, but entrusted to us by the master. And in that sense, we see the dominion mandate of Genesis. Come full circle. We’re still called to cultivate, to build, to grow, and to bless and it won’t be perfectly, but we do these things by faith.

[00:10:11] Jacob Winograd: What we cannot. Fully fulfill the dominion mandate from Genesis. In a fallen world, we are still commanded to live out its principles as a sign of God’s rule and reign. And so there’s this secondary layer here, a pattern that speaks to how God has ordered the world and the wisdom of applying biblical principles to how we.

[00:10:33] Jacob Winograd: Order and live in society. This is where a theologically informed Christian of Christian theory of economics and governance would find its foundation in roots in that light. The parable here affirms the principle of ownership and accountability. Each person is expected to act responsibly.

[00:10:53] Jacob Winograd: What they’ve been entrusted with. And Libertarian ethics, as I’ve talked about, reflects this, that when people are free to own and manage resources without coercion, that they have a natural incentive to preserve and grow them. Whereas coercive systems like the state rewards, sloth and punish, and risk and obscure accountability.

[00:11:15] Jacob Winograd: And so this is gonna actually bring us to a deeper economic observation from the Libertarian Austria school. One that explains not only just the moral failure of coercive systems, and this is what I’ve talked about more so, the issue of proportionality, which is important and that’ll come up.

[00:11:34] Jacob Winograd: But there’s also the issue of just the practical dysfunction of. State intervention into the co economy. In the world of economics and libertarianism, there is an economic analysis that is referred to as the problem of economic calculation. The lube mes an Austrian economist and kind of. He’s not the exact founder of the Austrian school, but he is kind of the one who [00:12:00] put it on the map, and it’s one of the most famous historic Austrian economists.

[00:12:04] Jacob Winograd: He famously demonstrated that without market prices. Which emerge only through voluntary exchange. In a free market, central planners cannot know how to allocate resources efficiently. And so this isn’t just a moral problem, it’s a knowledge problem. Bureaucrats can’t possibly know the needs and preferences and values of millions of people across a complex society and economy.

[00:12:30] Jacob Winograd: That knowledge is decentralized. Necessarily, it exists only in the minds and experiences of individuals. When the state takes over economic planning, it severs the feedback loop that markets provide. Prices are no longer signals, they’re just guesses. Little anecdote, but when this was , I think back during George Bush senior, or before that I forget, but when the USSR was still existing, I think, and you had, a diplomat from China travel here, and they were also communist at the time, kind of still are a name, but it’s more comp. They’re not exactly a command economy anymore. At least not entirely, but they had a position for someone who basically, their job in the government was to determine the cost of everything.

[00:13:19] Jacob Winograd: Because without, in free markets, what determines that is the market, right? Businesses and individuals trading there’s no price controls, the market sets the prices. But if you don’t have a free market, you have a command economy and you’re deciding where everything goes, well, then how do you determine the right way to use those resources without having an understanding of their value and their cost?

[00:13:41] Jacob Winograd: And so. The way that they would centrally plan is that they would arbitrarily assign things value and they would try to make, educated guesses and models and whatnot. But anyway when they traveled here, he wanted to meet up with Amer, his American counterpart, and we didn’t have that here.

[00:13:56] Jacob Winograd: Right. But so that’s total central planning, right? Where it’s you have. Prices are just guesses and resources are no longer stewarded by those who know and care for them. They’re just allocated by fiat, by decree. And this just doesn’t work. We saw this in China. We saw this in the USSR. We saw this in other.

[00:14:16] Jacob Winograd: Failed communist states that when they’re allocated by decree in fiat the prices and how much resources to allocate where in the economy, this just leads to waste shortages, famines, inefficiencies. It’s just a mess. It doesn’t work. And so this theory of economic planning, it explains why it fails and it fails practically, and it fails morally.

[00:14:40] Jacob Winograd: It undermines biblical principles of stewardship and accountability because it, it takes that responsibility and wisdom. And it basically socializes it across the entire nation to be decided based on the guesses or the whims of just a few people. And the state in general, and in its varying degrees of economic interventionism or full-blown seizure of economic planning.

[00:15:05] Jacob Winograd: So mixed economy versus total command economy. Obviously the total command economy is worse, but even when you have a mixed economy, to the extent that the government is intervening, it is now distorting that price system and it is at least engaging in, sort of half measures and part partly.

[00:15:24] Jacob Winograd: Doing some sort of economic central planning. And so this is, it. It’s part of the reason why we have so many problems and instabilities in our, western economies today. And this will get into, we could do a full episode on this, on the Austrian theory of the boom bust cycle and how muddy printing fiat currency and, the Federal Reserve’s ability to set interest rates are massive distortions on the economy, which take what would be normal fluctuations in the market and exaggerate them to these, what’s called the boom bust, where you have these giant bubbles in the economy. You, people will think about this mostly in, in our lifetime with the oh eight financial crisis, where you had the housing market where prices just kept going up and up and up.

[00:16:08] Jacob Winograd: And then there’s this big giant crash, right? That’s not a market outcome, that is a direct outcome of state intervention. You could do whole books and episodes on this , But the underlying issue is the fiat currency system and the ability to artificially set interest rates.

[00:16:25] Jacob Winograd: That’s central planning, at least in that feature of the economy, to decide the interest rates are going to be this percent across the board, and we’re gonna print this much money. This is how much money the country needs. So. And they get that wrong and they, the interest rates are too low and they print too much money.

[00:16:42] Jacob Winograd: And this causes improper signaling to the market, to the people who are investing and lending money. And then they invest in things they otherwise shouldn’t and they. Lend money they otherwise shouldn’t. And then because the banks are backed by the federal government, this creates all sorts of moral hazards and dilemmas.

[00:17:02] Jacob Winograd: And so this is just not a kingdom way of running a society. It’s not based in proper. Stewardship of resources, right? And so this is very important I think, as Christians, that we think about how to be good stewards of that which has been given to us, and that when we have. Any degree of economic interventionism or central planning.

[00:17:26] Jacob Winograd: This perverts God’s order, and it fosters an environment where people do not pursue and cannot effectively pursue the work of the kingdom in a way that aligns with the teachings of a properly godly stewardship. Now. I just gave a very quick summary of Austrian economic business theory and the Federal Reserve and all that.

[00:17:51] Jacob Winograd: I’m not here to do a full expository on that, but I have had, he’s a Christian and a libertarian and an Austrian economist. I’ve had Bob [00:18:00] Murphy on the show several times, and we’ve gone deep into this. So I will have my episodes with him linked in the show notes for this description linked in the description for this episode on the show notes page so that if you guys, who are maybe not as up to speed with this as my libertarian audience are, you can go listen to those episodes and get a full explanation for the, this sort of Austrian critique of the economic models of Keens and mixed economies and things like that. So. This naturally then leads to the next vital dimension of our discussion. How our treatment of others and our pursuit of justice and our care for the vulnerable must also reflect the heart of God.

[00:18:39] Jacob Winograd: Because stewardship is not only about what we do with the land and the resources entrusted to us, it’s also about how we steward our relationships and responsibilities to our fellow image bearers. So this is going to. Lead right into our second point, how Libertarianism equips us to love well, and to pursue justice with both wisdom and restraint.

[00:19:00] Jacob Winograd: Libertarianism equips the Christian for loving others well, not only because it minimizes violence and coercion, but because it actually empowers prosperity and peace. So to make this concrete, we need to recognize that there’s two key ways that libertarianism gives us practical tools. For loving out our, for loving our neighbors, and for living out the tension of justice and mercy in a broken world.

[00:19:27] Jacob Winograd: First, free markets create abundance when people are free to innovate, exchange, and serve one another through voluntary transactions. It generates wealth, and this is just even the status. Economists agree that to the extent by which. Nations employ free markets that this has done more to combat poverty than anything, than anyone else.

[00:19:49] Jacob Winograd: Even all the charity in the world, even modern charity, you have to give some sort of asterisk by it because the extent to which we can give charity is somewhat a product of how much there is to give. Think about the, if you’ve ever heard the pie analogy.

[00:20:05] Jacob Winograd: A lot of the times we’re thinking about the right way to divide up the pie, right? The, or the pizza, whatever, that it’s fair and everyone gets a slice but free markets are not about making sure everyone gets the same amount of pie. It’s about making a bigger pie. You’re making more pies, right?

[00:20:22] Jacob Winograd: And it doesn’t matter if everyone has the same amount, if everyone has enough or there’s, for people who don’t have enough. Know, if you’re making more, you’re more able to, then give the access to those who need it. So, and that wealth isn’t just about we’re not just talking about like luxuries and comforts here.

[00:20:39] Jacob Winograd: Again, it’s about capability. We’re as believers, we’re commanded to love our neighbor and to care for the poor support and support our churches and plant new ones and send out missionaries and just none of this happens. A vacuum, it takes resources and it take, it takes surplus in many cases to do a lot of these things.

[00:20:57] Jacob Winograd: I mean, people aren’t gonna build churches or support missionaries if they can’t even feed their families, right? So. Libertarianism and free markets, they create the conditions where Godly productivity can flourish where stewardship of scarce resources leads not only to material provision, but then spiritual and kingdom opportunity.

[00:21:16] Jacob Winograd: The early church was known for its radical generosity, but they had to have something to give. A free society that’s marked by peaceful commerce in the protection of property, the church thrives and ministries multiply and needs are met, and missions go forth. Now, this isn’t to say that in times or places where resources are more scarce that God doesn’t provide through divine providence, he absolutely does.

[00:21:43] Jacob Winograd: Scripture is full of stories where God miraculously meets needs, but trusting in God’s provision. Doesn’t mean we should resign ourselves to a mindset of stagnation or intentional poverty or worse to just act as if we don’t have a responsibility to take care of ourselves and those around us, and that we’re just gonna be passive, Christians who sit back and wait for God to do it, right?

[00:22:08] Jacob Winograd: No. We’re to be participants in going out there and caring for the least of these. So again, faith isn’t a passive thing. It’s an active thing. And throughout scripture we’re called to work diligently, to plan wisely and to build for the good of others. Money is a tool, right? It’s a, it’s an exchange.

[00:22:27] Jacob Winograd: It’s a it denotation of a certain amount of value that can be used as a medium for exchange, and in the hand of the fruitful it can. Wealth and money can serve the kingdom for everything I just said. Funding, churches, feeding the poor, supporting families for missions. So as long as we’re not idolizing money, as long as we’re not serving money, pursuing wealth, but for the sake of the kingdom of.

[00:22:49] Jacob Winograd: For the kingdom of God and for kingdom impact. That’s not just permissible that’s like commendable. It’s I think, wise stewardship, seeking to increase our wealth and the wealth of the church and our communities when done with humility and purpose is an expression of faith, not a contradiction of it.

[00:23:08] Jacob Winograd: Loving our neighbors is more than just. How we serve the world in our communities throughout the church. However, it’s also how, sorry. It’s also how we live out our call to be peacemakers and ambassadors of God’s kingdom and the kingdom values and libertarianism, I would say also helps us to resolve the difficult and often misunderstood tension between justice and mercy.

[00:23:30] Jacob Winograd: Some Christian theological and political traditions emphasize love for enemy to the exclusion of justice. Drifting into a form of pacifism that fails to protect the innocent or to restrain evil. Now, others, overcorrect in my view, by focusing so much on law and punishment and retribution for sin that mercy and grace and restoration are sidelined or dismissed completely.

[00:23:57] Jacob Winograd: But what we see in scripture [00:24:00] over and over is a God who embodies and upholds both. He is the defender of the weak and the just judge of the wicked. Yet he also is slow to anger and abounding of steadfast love that the cross itself is the greatest example of justice and mercy meeting, not in contradiction, but in perfect unity.

[00:24:21] Jacob Winograd: Christ bears the full weight of justice in our place so that we may receive mercy. Libertarianism provides a unique and consistent framework that reflects. These biblical principles, it recognizes the necessity of a restrained, proportionate, and rights-based use of force not to control or dominate, but to defend and restore.

[00:24:46] Jacob Winograd: It insists that justice must be restorative, not merely punitive. So think like restitution over revenge. Peacemaking over just power politics, conflict resolution, grounded in truth and accountability, and rather than escalating conflict because of political ambition or partisan outrage by emphasizing voluntary interaction, the non-aggression principle.

[00:25:12] Jacob Winograd: The obligation to make victims whole. Libertarianism gives the church and civil society better tools to resolve conflict without even always having to resort to the sword. I would encourage you guys to read chaos Theory by Bob Murphy and some of his other writings where if, I’m not a pacifist and I don’t even think he’s a strict pacifist, but there, there’s a.

[00:25:36] Jacob Winograd: You can believe in the, just use of the sword, but there’s an argument to be made that a libertarian legal order tends towards that sword bearing to be so minimalized, it doesn’t even hardly look like law enforcement. The way we think about it today, where laws are enforced and people are, their rights are protected and they’re held to honor their contracts and obligations. And conflicts are resolved but they’re done, son, in a way that requires so little or zero amount of force that it almost is tending towards pacifism. It’s a very unique argument. I don’t wanna fully unpack it, pack it here, but, but again, e even if we have to use force, which there is a, sometimes force is necessary to resolve conflict, but Libertarianism puts that in a restrained role just like the Bible does, I would argue.

[00:26:22] Jacob Winograd: And it I. What force is used, it’s in defense and response, and it’s done to simply restore what was taken to protect the innocent. And it’s done with caution and humility and in proportionality, which is important. While the sword of the Civil Magistrate is a God ordained sphere of authority, that force authority must be used in accordance with the principle of proportionality, which.

[00:26:47] Jacob Winograd: I’ve discussed now twice on this episode. I’ve most definitively exhausted or not exhausted, but explained this principle in episode 89, which is the, what is biblical anarchy, Redux or second edition. But this is the biblical principle that is first expressed in Genesis nine after the flood, but it’s reaffirmed in the Mosaic covenant law and in the new Covenant, and in Romans 13, our efforts to uphold justice cannot create new.

[00:27:14] Jacob Winograd: Greater injustice and how we walk that narrow line is by being precise and how we define justice and how we enforce it. This is how justice and mercy love for neighbor and love for enemy can truly walk hand in hand. Not intention, but in harmony to be very precise here, libertarianism I’m not saying it’s something that we should read into scripture.

[00:27:38] Jacob Winograd: It’s not a filter that we impose. But it’s a tool that we apply after first grounding ourselves fully in the authority and teaching of scripture and the lordship of Jesus Christ. We begin in the Bible and we build from there, letting Christ in His word shape our understanding of church and family and economics, education and justice.

[00:27:57] Jacob Winograd: And yes the nature of law and government. So libertarianism is, if we think about it this way, it’s like a technical discipline, much like how someone might study architecture or engineering to build to better construct. Physical church buildings. The Bible calls us to build churches, but it doesn’t go into a, it doesn’t give us the blueprints and the exhaustive explanation for how to technically do that.

[00:28:19] Jacob Winograd: So, one, studies engineering and architecture in order to know how to carry out this biblical mandate to, go and spread the church, which will inquire, the building of new facilities and things like that. So. I think this is a good analogy that I’m making here because Libertarianism is the technical and philosophical study that enables us to carry out the biblical mandates of justice and mercy, as well as stewardship.

[00:28:43] Jacob Winograd: As we explained earlier in our case, we study economics, law, and political philosophy not to replace the theology. But to responsibly and effectively apply it in the public square, these tools help us to carry out the great commission more effectively by minimizing the barriers created by coercion and maximizing our reach because of peace and generosity and voluntary cooperation.

[00:29:10] Jacob Winograd: This matters because we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in communities and in nations. We raise families and we run businesses, and we plant churches and we feed the poor. And so the better we understand the mechanisms of markets and economics and we understand peace and human cooperation, and the more we understand.

[00:29:29] Jacob Winograd: Law and justice and how to properly en enforce those. The more we understand all of this, the more faithfully and effectively we can carry out our calling to be salt and light in the world, not just in Word, but indeed. Now, as we arrive at the conclusion here, this will be my final point.

[00:29:46] Jacob Winograd: We, we come to what I think is the most challenging and sobering part here. Because stewardship and justice and economics, this is all like, you know what we do. It’s the practical outworking of biblical teachings, but intellectual [00:30:00] consistency and then, integrity in our actions in our heart, that this is the third point here about libertarianism demand consistency, and this is gonna be pressing deeper and asking whether our hearts are aligned with the heart of the father.

[00:30:16] Jacob Winograd: It asks. Are we seeking the kingdom, not just with our minds, but with our habits and decisions and affections? Are we letting Christ transform our political views and our economics and our public witness, and not just our private morality? Are we seeking to view our neighbors and our enemies with the father’s heart and eyes and not just our own?

[00:30:39] Jacob Winograd: The integrity demands that I would say that our public actions. Convictions that are pri are private convictions. Should speak with one voice. I know there’s different ways of defining integrity. Some people say what you do when no one’s looking, but that’s kind of like an outward manifestation of integrity.

[00:30:54] Jacob Winograd: Internal integrity means what you believe and what you advocate for has. Intellectual, moral and personal consistency. God has integrity, God is unchanging across time, across space, across people and nations. God doesn’t change yet. We are often duplicitous creatures changing on many different whims in holding many things in contradiction and holding some convictions at certain points, but dropping them when convenient and libertarianism doesn’t allow for that.

[00:31:26] Jacob Winograd: So this idea of integrity is a call to ensure that the way that we live and speak and vote and engage with authority, and with power, it reflects the same Christ we confess with our prayers and worship With integrity, our faith becomes fragmented. A matter of convenience almost rather than a true conviction.

[00:31:48] Jacob Winograd: Have we allowed certain areas of life, like politics to remain untouched by the lordship of Christ is the question that I think I’m often, not always explicitly asking, but that’s kinda like the question that sort of undergirds. Why I even do this podcast is because I do think, unfortunately it’s very easy for everyone but I’m speaking to my Christian brothers and sisters here that we are often content to affirm what is true in church settings, but then we will tolerate untruth and we’ll tolerate coercion and hypocrisy or favoritism or idolatry once we are engaging in things that we delegate to the public square.

[00:32:31] Jacob Winograd: This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the part that forces us to ask whether we’re building our lives on the Rock of Christ, or we’re just playing church while propping up systems of power that contradict our witness. I mean, I think of so many scripture passages in, in, in James chapter one.

[00:32:48] Jacob Winograd: He says, be doers of the word not hear is only deceiving yourselves. Matthew five says, let what you say, be simply yes or no, anything more than this. Anything more than this comes from evil. Galatians six says, do not be deceived. God is not mocked for whatever one sows that he will also reap. And these aren’t just individual warnings.

[00:33:10] Jacob Winograd: These are indictments of inconsistency. They are warnings that are beliefs and actions have consequences. They confront the gap between our confessions in our conduct. If we sow compromise and coercion, we will reap the fruits of that, which is mistrust and division and hypocrisy and injustice. But if we sow truth and love and integrity and peacemaking, even in the ways we think about law and government, we will cultivate peace and credibility and righteousness in the public square.

[00:33:44] Jacob Winograd: So what does Libertarianism have to do with all this? Well, libertarianism helps to strip away our ability to compartmentalize these things. It doesn’t let us say I love my neighbor and then vote to initiate evil against him. It doesn’t let us cheer for freedom on Sunday and then support coercion and aggression on Monday.

[00:34:05] Jacob Winograd: What are the most sobering things that Libertarianism does is it rips the mask off of state power. It removes the theater, all the window dressing, all the comforting illusions we often hide behind when we’re talking about policy and regulation and enforcement. And it forces us to look honestly at what the state is and how it operates as Roth.

[00:34:28] Jacob Winograd: As Rothbard famously said, it’s the anatomy of the state. In the anatomy of the state, what is it? It’s a monopoly on violent cloaked in legitimacy, tradition and procedure. Here’s the hard truth. We often ignore every law, every regulation, every government mandate is backed by the threat of force. Laws are not suggestions.

[00:34:52] Jacob Winograd: They’re commands enforced by who. By men with guns. That’s why it’s called the sword. Like they don’t bear the sword in vain. The civil authority is, the use of force to enforce law, to enforce justice. So to say that there ought to be a law is to say, I am willing to advocate for, if not outright commit and carry out violence against someone who disobeys this law.

[00:35:19] Jacob Winograd: I’m willing for violence to be used against someone if they do not follow this edict. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t support laws. We have to understand what it means and why it. It means to advocate for laws for or against something. We have to count the cost. We have to ask, is this worth threatening force over?

[00:35:41] Jacob Winograd: Is this a justified. Instance to justify force over is this worth caging a human being made in God’s image? Would I pick up the sword or a firearm and point it at someone to make them comply with this policy? Would I personally be willing to carry out the [00:36:00] consequences of what I’m supporting with my vote, my advocacy, or my silence?

[00:36:05] Jacob Winograd: And more than that, would I be prepared to stand before Christ on the day of judgment and justify that choice? That force, that threat in light of his grace. Teachings an example when Christians advocate for policies, whether well-meaning or not in terms of what we’re aimed at, because sometimes there are things where I understand that there are things in society we don’t like.

[00:36:29] Jacob Winograd: I might not like. And so we would prefer if society didn’t have that, we’d prefer if people weren’t, using certain, substances, right? Cer certain drugs that alter reality or, alter their mind state, or we think we’re not healthy for them. Right. We would rather people not be engaged in, in, sexual relationships that we think are a violation of God’s design for human sexuality.

[00:36:53] Jacob Winograd: There’s a, there’s just a long list of things that, me as a, lowercase o Orthodox, evangelical, reformed Christian. Would be like, yeah, these are things that are sinful or detrimental to society, but then we have to, before we, okay, we don’t like this, should there be a law against it should start should start by reckoning with what it means to have a law against that thing.

[00:37:19] Jacob Winograd: So I mean, let’s apply that reasoning to these topics that are commonly debated. Are we willing to imprison someone for growing or using the wrong plant? For choosing how to educate their children for freely trading with their neighbor without permission from the state for si or another controversial one for simply being in our country for existing in a landmass.

[00:37:41] Jacob Winograd: Without permission, which amount to just not having the right piece of paper signed by the right person, even when the act is clearly sinful. We have to ask, does this truly warrant a violent response from the state or anyone? Does a gay couple living together merit aggression? And if so, what about a straight couple cohabitating outside a marriage or someone watching pornography in private?

[00:38:02] Jacob Winograd: Does any of that justify the use of state enforced violence? And if so, where do we draw the line? What sins call for or justify coercion if our standard isn’t the one of proportionality which I offer, which, I think is the fateful biblical teaching, the lexxus, that proportionate force is used strictly in response to actual aggression.

[00:38:26] Jacob Winograd: What about skipping church on Sunday or gossip or gluttony? Would we jail someone for coveting? For dishonoring their parents or failing to love the Lord their God with all their heart and soul and mind? I mean, I don’t know where you guys come from in terms of, what you think about humans and our inherent.

[00:38:43] Jacob Winograd: Goodness. I tend to think that, as the Bible says, all have fallen short and none of us can measure up. None of us can obtain righteousness. The Bible says that our good works are like filthy rags. And so even when we do the right things, we do it for the wrong reasons.

[00:38:59] Jacob Winograd: None of us love, love the Lord with our hearts. The one mind, none of us even perfectly love our neighbor as ourselves. So when we hand that moral policing over to the state, when we blur the critical biblical distinction between sin and criminality, between sin and crime and more dangerously, when we replace the call to grace and for persuasion and repentance with a system of compulsion and punishment, we are, we’re not just blurring the lines at that point between.

[00:39:31] Jacob Winograd: Sin and crime we’re starting to blur our ability to articulate the gospel. ‘ cause the gospel teaches another way to confront sin. Not with the sword, but with the truth of God’s kingdom, with the truth of freedom from sin, which doesn’t come from the state, which comes from the work of Jesus Christ that we participate in not in terms of.

[00:39:54] Jacob Winograd: The actual act of salvation, but with discipleship and the spreading of that message, or the spread of that hope of redemption to people and letting the Holy Spirit work through those efforts and work through the church, that is how we confront sin. There are indeed situations. Again, I wanna be clear here where force is warranted, it’s to stop aggression, to protect the innocent.

[00:40:16] Jacob Winograd: Scripture does not demand pacifism. And I’ve done, the reason I think libertarianism is important is because it’s not pacifism. I’m not a pacifist. I think that we can have a restraint on the use of force that applies to a consistent standard. I think the Bible gives us a consistent standard, and libertarianism basically is a political philosophy that’s built on that consistent standard.

[00:40:38] Jacob Winograd: And again, it’s a technical sort of like expansion of that to then understand it more in how that plays out in civil society. I’ve done a whole debate on, if Christians should be pacifists or not, which touches on some of this, and I’ll have that linked in the description as well.

[00:40:53] Jacob Winograd: But yeah, scripture does not demand pacifism, but the sword is to be wielded narrowly, sparingly, and most importantly, justly. It’s not a tool of just enforcing, all morality of being able to use coercion against all sin. When every sin becomes fair game for state coercion, we have now abandoned the gospel’s vision of mission and we’ve traded the posture of mercy for the posture of judgment.

[00:41:22] Jacob Winograd: We’ve turned sinners into our enemies rather than seeing them as the mission field Christ died for. And yes, I am kind of ripping off the late John MacArthur, of whom I have a lot of strong disagreements with. But this quote of his could, could not be said any better. That sometimes what happens when Christians become engaged in politics, the worst version of that is that we turn sinners into the enemies to, to have violence be inflicted upon them rather than seeing them as the mission field that Christ died for.

[00:41:53] Jacob Winograd: This is not justice. This is not love of neighbor. This is Legalism baptized in [00:42:00] nationalism, and this is exactly where Libertarianism offers a kind of moral x-ray, a tool for seeing through the surface of our assumptions, it exposes what we often try to hide that behind nearly every government solution there is force by every bureaucracy.

[00:42:17] Jacob Winograd: There are people fallen, fallible, people who are wielding power. We often think of the state of so as something abstract, as if it’s a neutral machine or an detached authority, but it’s not. It’s made up of sinners just like you and me. Granted, monopolistic control over the use of violence. Hans Herman Hoppa once said, if no one can appeal to justice except to government justice will be perverted in favor of the government until ultimately, the notion of universal and immutable human rights.

[00:42:46] Jacob Winograd: Disappear Christian, that should convict us because it means that when we hand our moral responsibility to the state, when we trust it, to define right and wrong, to enforce our our ideals, we stop trusting God. We stop living as if the word applies across the board. We create sacred secular divides that Jesus never sanctioned and ha’s comment is a hundred percent correct As we see that when government is given this power, it always ends up abusing it and it actually inevitably ends up becoming an instrument that doesn’t even punish sin.

[00:43:19] Jacob Winograd: Instead punishes virtue and calls what is evil? Good. And it does this because in its own, it’s in its own interest to do so because the state itself is the greatest driver of sin and de degeneracy in society. And I’ve discussed this before, most recently in episodes episode 101. Drawing on the arguments of thinkers like hapa, that the state is a creature of what’s called high time preference.

[00:43:45] Jacob Winograd: It consumes present resources with little regard for long-term sustainability through inflationary policies, welfare programs, and public education. It incentivizes short-term thinking. Dependence and moral hazard by artificially removing the natural consequences of sin and distorting the market feedback loops, the state fosters environments where advice not only survives, it flourishes sexual degeneracy.

[00:44:13] Jacob Winograd: Economic recklessness, endless wars and social breakdown are not random societal failures. They’re not, bugs of the state. It’s the main feature. They’re the predictable fruit of a regime that undermines responsibility, undermines family, subverts the church, undermines discipline, and the moral order.

[00:44:32] Jacob Winograd: If we truly care about righteousness, we must start by dismantling the systems that most directly incentivize. It subsidize its opposite, and at the very least, we must draw a clear line between government and the definer of enforcement of morality. We must distinguish between morality and criminality between ethics and law because the perverse incentive structure of state power I’ve described, o tapa and rothbard and other libertarians, expose and describe so eloquently means that over time the state will inevitably promote behaviors and lifestyles that serve its own growth and preservation.

[00:45:10] Jacob Winograd: We’ve seen this dynamic play out repeatedly in biblical history as well. True Christianity becomes a threat to the state and totalitarian regimes precisely because the state often seeks to be the highest authority, demanding allegiance, and even worship. People are far easier to control when they’re numbed by indulgence, consumed with comfort, and distracted by the pleasures of the flesh more than they are.

[00:45:34] Jacob Winograd: Distracted by the pleasures of the flesh than when they are denying themselves and taking up their cross and living with eternity in view. Living not for their own treasures or kingdoms, but for the kingdom of heaven. A self-disciplined God-fearing kingdom-minded people, to not make obedient subjects to a state that thrives on compliance and coercion, and dependence and distraction.

[00:45:57] Jacob Winograd: Libertarianism highlights. The real nature of the state and these incentives and pushes us to address our ideological blind spots to de to demand consistency. If we oppose theft, we must oppose taxation. If we oppose violence, we must oppose, wars of aggression and coercive po policies. If we believe in grace, we must extend it not only to those we like, but to those we’re tempted to punish.

[00:46:23] Jacob Winograd: We can no longer pretend that loving our neighbor and endorsing their subjugation can coexist. And we must reckon with the empirical and historical and biblical reality that these earthly powers, if not greatly restrained, will become enemies seeking to undermine Christ’s dominion over the earth. So in conclusion, libertarianism isn’t a savior.

[00:46:46] Jacob Winograd: Only Christ can save. So Rothbard got that wrong. But libertarianism does matter because it gives us a clear lens for seeing the world as it really is, not as propaganda or tradition would have us see it. It removes these idols. It exposes the counterfeit gods of nationalism and statism and coercion, and it unearths the dangerous places where we’ve traded truth for convenience or tradition.

[00:47:14] Jacob Winograd: It helps us unmask false authority. It helps us as Christians to be reminded that Caesar is not Lord Christ is and because Christ is Lord, we must reject any system that claims divine authority, but traffics and compulsion and deception. We must insist on a politics that reflects God’s character, one of peace, personal responsibility, grace and truth.

[00:47:39] Jacob Winograd: And so libertarianism gives us the best earthly tools we have on hand to honor the image of God and others to reject domination and control, to say no to coercion, to say yes, to love, to treat others not as subjects, to be rules, but neighbors to be served. So when people ask me why libertarianism [00:48:00] matters for Christians, I say, because the kingdom of God doesn’t advance by the sword.

[00:48:04] Jacob Winograd: It advances by the spread of the gospel. It advances by truth because the ethics of Christ must apply not only to our private lives, but to our public witness, because the gospel isn’t just a comforting belief. It’s a calling to live radically transformed and different in every sphere of our life.

[00:48:26] Jacob Winograd: Thanks for listening, everyone. Until next time, as I always conclude by saying. Live at Peace Live for Christ. Take care. The Biblical Anarchy Podcast is a part of the Christians for Liberty network, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute. If you love this podcast, it helps us reach more with a message of freedom when you rate and review us on your favorite podcast apps and share with others.

[00:48:50] Jacob Winograd: If you want to support the production of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, please consider donating to the Libertarian Christian institute@biblicalanarchypodcast.com, where you can also sign up to receive special announcements and resources related to biblical anarchy. Thanks for tuning in.

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