(Part One)
It’s an unwieldy title for a blogpost, certainly, but I hope it begins to make part of my point for me.
The recent outrage by some Christians over Obamacare reveals something very, very wrong with the Church’s embrace of the rights, freedoms, and liberties granted by God and only affirmed by the Constitution that the individual, governed by the State, enjoys. The hue and cry over the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Affordable Care Act, which for the first time in U.S. history compels the individual to purchase a product from a vendor, centers on the idea that this individual mandate represents a grotesque overstepping of the bounds of Godly government and an egregious violation of the civil liberties given the citizen by God and guaranteed by the document the Court interprets. In this case, most conservatives say, the court got it wrong and sided with the Obama Presidency that crafted the Act and the Congress that voted for it — as well as, judging by the level of anger and hysteria directed at the Court, all manner of agents and agencies of government evil.
Now, I disagree with their take on Obamacare; I think that it’s reasonable that one hundred percent of those who ever need health care act responsibly and obtain it rather than spreading the costs of their insouciant rolling of the dice — that is, foregoing health insurance — on the rest of that society. The demand is not unlike requiring those who own and drive a car to buy automobile insurance, although I recognize that those who find that constraint on their “right” to act recklessly so unbearable that they may choose, then, to simply not drive. The choice to refrain from driving a car is a proper response to the State’s insistence that drivers obtain coverage, and the individual has to determine if his or her moral outrage over mandatory automobile insurance is greater than the inconvenience to them of not driving and, therefore, not being in that class of mandated individual purchasers of car insurance.
But people can and do go without driving, although their numbers are small. People cannot, however, live without some kind of access to healthcare, if not for them than for the people dependent on them. Life being what it is — that is, sinful and full of decay — every human being will, at some point in their life, ideally beginning in utero and unarguably continuing until death, need to see a nurse practitioner, dentist, doctor, surgeon, lab technician/phlebotomist, radiologist, OB/GYN, urologist, or ER doctor. To be alive is not only to be in the process of decay, but also, more obviously, to face acute or chronic conditions for which medical care is necessary or even simply a good idea. Denying it is like denying that you cannot receive all of your nutritional needs simply through basking in the sun — you may sincerely wish it to be so, but your unwavering devotion to your belief will result in the death that proves you to be terribly, irredeemably misguided.
Obamacare’s individual mandate, of course, is more objectionable to many conservatives because it’s part of an Act designed by him and his staff, and that fact, while uncomfortable to accept, is made clear by the mandate’s origin with the conservative Heritage Foundation, its embrace a decade ago by GOP conservatives, and its status as the health care blueprint for Republican Presidential contender Mitt Romney’s governorship in Massachusetts, a state that voted Romney out but professes to be pleased with his version of what now has been taken nationally. In a political world, and, more tragically, in an ecclesiastical one suffused with hatred and suspicion of this man as an African-born socialist, anti-colonialist agitator, and dangerous usurper, Obama’s declaration of support for lemonade in the summer would send millions into an anti-Country Time frenzy. Anti-Obamacare activists, of course, would deny this. It really IS just about freedom, they say, and it really IS part of standing up for the rights of the individual in the face of a dangerous and marauding government, and, further, it IS the only Christian response — defiance and outrage as twin chalices of worshipful offering to the Lord Jesus.
This is what’s desperately wrong with Christiandom in the United States — an insistence that the securing of those rights and liberties that affect me, no matter how it affects others around me and especially not the poor, sick, and outcast, is a primary Christian virtue in our private lives. This, of course, translates into millions of rights-defending believers who enter politics, influence politicians, and train millions more to honor Jesus by making sure that their liberties — their property rights, gun rights, their individual mandate-defying rights — be defended unto death in His name.
It’s an abomination, and one that, in the case of Obamacare, directly affects the wellbeing of millions of other souls for whom Christ died. The Christian insistence on the Christian man’s rights (the rights of women, of course, matter little here) is a direct and vile contradiction of the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and my next post will be a manifesto — because we seem to do a lot of manifestos around Moscow — for the gracious laying aside of our rights, when called for, in order for those around us to prosper. My declaration: I will hold my rights with a loose hand so I can better defend those of my neighbors. My thesis: Righteousness, not liberty, is the highest calling and most profound blessing humankind can strive for.
My hope? That Wilson, et al, will be called to repentance, and, on a larger scale, that the Church that calls Jesus Lord would obey Him in this and in every area. Not doing so in some areas, I suppose, causes little to change in the lives of others around us — but in our vehemence in securing our rights, we wreak enormous damage throughout the lives of those whose conditions plead for us to turn to them in the gracious humility Christ-followers must exhibit.