Leave it to Douglas Wilson, a much better writer than I am, to sum up the whole theme of this blog in just a few paragraphs.

Frederic Bastiat put it well — “Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and his works.” Flip this around and we see that no society can or will have economic liberty unless there is a robust faith in God pervasive throughout that society. If there is no faith in God, we want to get in there and manage what everybody else is doing, and liberty dies. When we have faith, we let go. When we don’t believe, we clutch, preferably through our elected representatives.

And what’s truly sickening about it all is that it is the Christians who are so quick to kill liberty and clutch to their elected representatives. As Wilson shows, however, this is simply motivated by fear, and shows a supreme lack of faith.

You cannot have genuinely free markets without free men, and you cannot have free men without the gospel. If you do not have the gospel, then man will get in there somehow in order to try to save himself and others. He will try to save himself by using taxes, redistribution, lobbying influence, stimulus packages, environmental regulations, land reform, cozy deals with the government, and so on, ad infinitum.

In other words, he will try to save himself through violence and theft, which is nothing but base animal instinct.

We try to imagine life without our precious [government], and then we panic — and our panic chases us back into what we call prudence. We don’t know what liberty is, and so it scares us. We don’t know what liberty is because we don’t know what the gospel is, and we don’t know what the gospel is intended to do. Peter can’t walk on the water so long as he is holding on to the side of the boat.

It’s time to test the waters and let go of the boat.

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