How I Became A Reformed-Christian Libertarian-Anarchist, by Gregory Baus
Originally published by the Libertarian Christian Institute
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yMh52HKHt5o
[ I'm an independent researcher and writer in philosophy, and co-host of the Reformed Libertarians Podcast. My primary interest is in developing and promoting the Neo-Calvinist philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, the Reformed covenant theology of Meredith Kline, and a Reformed Christian perspective on libertarian-anarchism. ]
Unlike religion, politics was not a consciously prominent feature of my childhood. Nevertheless, without much reflection, I absorbed the political attitudes and opinions of my parents. In the home of my youth, from my birth in the early 70s through the 80s, it was largely treated as a given that the less government interference in society, particularly in the economy, the better. A central idea was that the United States Federal Government had gone fundamentally astray during FDR’s administration (1933-1945) with its economic interventionism. Constitutionally conservative political reform was necessary to restore the Republic, and to defeat domestic commies and all their pinko enablers. All this was obvious (so it seemed at the time), and so I didn’t think about it much.
However, in high school, I took up the anti-abortion cause, handing out pro-life pregnancy center info and evangelizing outside murder clinics, and so on. In my own minority religious community, and in the broader Christian community, abortion was considered (not wrongly, if myopically) the great societal evil of our day. Whatever the immorality of economic interventionism, legally permitting the mass slaughter of babies was a greater crisis, comparable to the enormity of Southern slavery, but worse. This was my political awakening. And, in a striking way, it brought personal and societal morality, politics, religion, and science, all together in a heady and revolutionary mixture. Abortion, or the anti-abortion cause, became a force that dragged me deep into my own religion and its civilizationally-significant philosophical meaning.
The minority religious community in which I was raised (largely in Baltimore, Maryland) was the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, within the camp of “traditional” confessionally-Reformed churches in the U.S. and Canada. The Reformed religion was once held by a majority of Americans, from colonial times until the early 1800s. However, today, there are only about half a million of us. That’s less than fifteen-hundredths of one percent of the U.S. population. There are about as many Amish and Old Order Mennonites in the U.S. as there are confessionally-Reformed Christians. Despite our vanishingly-small numbers, we possess a rich and fruitful devotional and intellectual religious heritage. And it was this religious heritage that I came to embrace, consciously and fervently, in my teen years, and that deeply shaped my philosophical and political development. (For those interested in an introduction to this form of Christianity, see “Recommended Reading” at the end of this essay.)
During high school, I read a number of Reformed theological classics, and books by more recent Reformed thinkers. Among the more recent, I read several books by Francis Schaeffer, who significantly helped build the pro-life movement among conservative Protestants. I was particularly inspired by his book The God Who Is There and by A Christian Manifesto. In Manifesto, one of the things that stood out to me was the confessionally-Reformed teaching on Romans 13:1-7. The view of that passage (and others like it, such as 1 Peter 2:13-17) held by the majority of Reformers, was that God only prescriptively ordains civil governance to use “the sword” or coercion against wrongdoing. When those who claim civil power create and enforce laws that do otherwise than punish actual wrongdoing, then they are unjust and tyrannical, and no one is required to submit to unjust or tyrannical power. Schaeffer particularly highlighted the book Lex, Rex by Samuel Rutherford who said, for example, “[While civil rulers act] against God’s law, and all good laws of men, they do not the things that appertain to their charge and the execution of their office; therefore, by our Confession, to resist them in tyrannical acts is not to resist the ordinance of God.”
The year after high school, I took a gap year teaching English in Japan. Besides exposing me to a substantially unfamiliar culture and social context, strange beliefs, values, institutions, and customs, and so broadening my sense of human experience, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and significance of religious belief for history. That year one book that shaped my reflections was The Two Empires in Japan by John M. L. Young. This book helpfully recounts the history of conflict between a largely compromised Christianity with the predominant Shinto-Fascist Nationalism in Japan.
My first year in college (at a Reformed, Liberal Arts school in Georgia), when I was old enough to vote, I met and conversed with a visiting speaker on campus, Howard Phillips. He convinced me of the crucial importance of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the political philosophy of strictly limited government (classical liberalism) that served as its foundation. I became a member of the political party, of which he was a key founder, which came to be known as the Constitution Party. I wasn’t really politically active. However, believing that the U.S. government (not to mention most, if not all, local and particular state governments), as a matter of established policy, persistently violated the supposed “rule of law,” and so was in practice, if not in principle, illegitimate, provided plenty of opportunity to share my increasingly anti-government views. In the years following, I began to realize that the U.S. government had not only started to go wrong with FDR, but progressively violated its own Constitution and the principles of liberty from the beginning (e.g. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1794), and that the Constitution itself was an unlawful power-grab, against which the anti-federalists had warned.
In college I also read, and was strongly influenced by, the writings of Neo-Calvinist theologians Abraham Kuyper, particularly his famous Lectures On Calvinism as a worldview, and Meredith G. Kline, particularly his book Kingdom Prologue. I also discovered the writings of Neo-Calvinist (or “Reformational”) philosophers Herman Dooyeweerd, for example, his book Roots Of Western Culture among others, and Roy Clouser, and his book The Myth Of Religious Neutrality that superbly explains key elements of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. These and other writings that articulated a Reformed worldview, a view of redemptive-historical Reformed covenant theology in Scripture, and a Reformed philosophical view of the basic nature of reality, continue to represent the biblical and theoretical perspectives from which I view life, religion, culture, society, and politics.
My fourth year of college, I took only one semester, and another single semester in a fifth year. Then I dropped out of school in 1997, not having finished my Bachelor’s, feeling frustrated and disillusioned with, among many other things, the college’s inability to provide deeper instruction in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. After five difficult years of working numerous odd jobs and personal struggle (with a two year sojourn in southern California, where I also audited some evening courses at a Reformed seminary), I was able to enroll for a final year at a different Reformed, Liberal Arts college (in Ontario, Canada) that had a much stronger emphasis in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy, and finished my BA. The infamous 9/11 attacks had occurred only a few years before. And the U.S. government’s tyrannical response in the so-called Patriot Act and unjust invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, served to thoroughly undermine what remained of any naive “benefit-of-the-doubt” assumptions I had concerning the state’s supposed interest in protecting and promoting liberty and justice in domestic or foreign affairs.
Around 2003, I also became aware of Ron Paul, a medical doctor, who at the time was a U.S. representative for the 14th congressional district in Texas (that covered a coastal area southeast of Houston). Mostly through a friend who worked in his D.C. office, I became familiar with Paul’s long-time, solitary effort in the Federal Congress, standing for actual constitutional limits on government and for the political and economic liberty envisioned by many of the U.S. Founders.
Two years later, I enrolled at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in a philosophy Master’s program. In the year and a-half I studied there, I focused on the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (who had been a professor at that university from 1926-1965). I especially focused on his so-called transcendental critique of theoretical thought, political and societal philosophy, and theory of what is called societal “sphere sovereignty.” Better understanding Dooyeweerd’s view of sphere sovereignty (a theory of the normative natures of, and relations between, distinct kinds of societal communities) significantly contributed to my eventual conversion to full-fledged libertarian-anarchism. However, during that same period, I also began an independent study in economics.
Through my acquaintance with the efforts of Ron Paul, I became aware of the Mises Institute, a research and educational non-profit dedicated to promoting (among other things) understanding of the Austrian school of economics. I found a large quantity of academic sources from the Mises Institute for my independent study. I became persuaded of an Austrian view of praxeology (the study of necessary pre-conditions for human action), its premise of “methodological individualism,” the importance of these for a proper understanding of economics, and of a thorough-going free market view. The central idea of methodological individualism is that only individuals intentionally or purposefully act. And this fact is not at odds or in tension with ideas important to sphere sovereignty, such as the reality of communities that cannot be reduced to inter-individual relations, and a non-individualistic conception of society. Worth mentioning here is that my study in economics and praxeology also led to discovery of ideas that significantly helped me understand other areas of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. Often enough, discoveries in one field of study or even within a given school of thought can illuminate problems or ideas in another. This is a fact I believe many Christian libertarians have discovered in recognizing the mutually supporting beliefs of their religion and political and economic views.
My study of economics led me to the writings of Murray Rothbard, an Austrian economist and historian who also wrote on political theory. Two works crucial to my conversion to libertarian-anarchism were Rothbard’s books For A New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty (text here; audio here). Alongside those and many of Rothbard’s other writings, I was also influenced significantly by articles and lectures by Roderick Long, who is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University. In particular, I was helped by “Rothbard’s ‘Left And Right’: 40 Years Later” (text here; video here), “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses To Ten Objections” (text here; audio here), and his ten-lecture series “Foundations Of Libertarian Ethics” (audio here; video here). I remember very distinctly, one day in October 2008, while listening to the final lecture of the Foundations series, “An Anarchist Legal Order,” the proverbial light turned on in my mind. It took a few months, as I remember, to get used to the idea that I was now a convinced anarchist. At first, I didn’t dare admit it to anyone. The very notion seemed almost too shocking, even while I was fully persuaded of it. However, being able to see how the total rejection of aggression (or the initiation of coercion, and threat of it) against another’s person or property, and therefore, a total rejection of the monopoly state as an inherently unjust and illegitimate distortion of God-ordained civil governance, was not only entirely compatible with, but in fact, supported by my religious and philosophical convictions, reassured me that (however shocking), it was right to hold to libertarian-anarchism.
A few years after becoming a libertarian-anarchist, I moved outside the U.S. and taught English until mid-2018. During those years, I had begun sketching-out how to articulate the Reformed religious perspective on libertarian anarchism. In 2019, my friend Kerry Baldwin and I had begun brainstorming about creating a podcast devoted to explaining and promoting our shared views. By the end of 2020, we had written The Reformed Libertarianism Statement (and Principles), and in late 2022 we began recording episodes of the Reformed Libertarians Podcast as part of the Christians for Liberty Network. If you want to find out more about the Reformed Faith, the Reformed view of libertarian-anarchism, and why we believe them, you may find the podcast helpful.
Politics (including the politics of libertarian-anarchists) is by no means the solution to all of life’s problems. And on this side of Christ’s return in glory to judge the living and the dead, and to establish the new heavens and earth, even salvation doesn’t solve all our personal and societal woes. Nevertheless, as those who trust in Christ alone for our salvation, growing in our knowledge of Him, we can also grow in our understanding of what the Christian Faith means for our whole lives, including politics, in service to Him. The Lord does not promise that “it gets better” in this life, and that is not our ultimate hope. But it is our great privilege and joy, insofar as we may, to work for a politics that is more in keeping with the ordinances He has revealed.
Recommended Readings for an introduction to confessionally Reformed Christianity
- Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, by Michael Horton
- The Study Guide to The Westminster Shorter Catechism, by G. I. Williamson
- The Study Guide to The Heidelberg Catechism, by G. I. Williamson
- With Reverence And Awe, by Darryl Hart and John Muether
