Urban Onramps

Was Jesus a libertarian?

Michael Gerson says no:

The argument that government is often a flawed instrument to improve social conditions has merit. There are limits to take-a-number-and-wait bureaucratic compassion — and tremendous advantages to the commitment and sacrificial love of volunteers. Which is precisely why compassionate conservatism looks first to the expansion of private, community responses to poverty and need.

But the scale of these needs is sometimes overwhelming. Private compassion cannot replace Medicaid or provide AIDS drugs to millions of people in Africa for the rest of their lives. In these cases, a role for government is necessary and compassionate — the expression of conservative commitments to the general welfare and the value of every human life.

For millennia, artists, thinkers and politicians have shaped their image of Jesus, often into a mirror image of themselves. But the goal of Christianity is to allow Him to shape us, not the other way around. And just as Jesus the leftist revolutionary is a distortion, so is Jesus the libertarian.

posted May 30, 2008, 8:00pm by Rodolpho Carrasco