(Please read previous post before diving into this one . . . )
My response to Doug Wilson’s manifesto in response to the Supreme Court’s upholding Obamacare got me so riled up I accidentally posted it as a finished piece — but here I am a week later, still gobsmacked at the impertinence of a pastor’s insistence that his flock not only agree with him that Obamacare represents a top-down “F-you” to the liberties of American citizens, but also that they just say “no” to the individual mandate required in the Affordable Healthcare Act in order, he says, to show government how far it may or may not go in usurping the prerogatives of a Holy God. You can read Wilson’s spittle-flecked screed of contempt on Blog and Mablog; it was posted June 29 and my response here was June 30.
So consider this Part 2, and extra points for you if you consider my premature posting of Part 1 a symptom of passionate dismay and energetic dispute rather than sloppy editing. But, as I wrote earlier, it’s astounding to me that Wilson — who says and writes and does a lot of things that, over the years, have required me to resurrect the word “astounding” from my vocabulary — would consider Obamacare, with the individual health insurance purchase mandate that Republicans initially proposed, embraced, and promoted, something so egregious that it, above countless examples of other governmental wrongs, requires an act of civil disobedience on the part of the Christian to stand up for Biblical norms of liberty, responsibility, and taxation. There simply is no other way to read his post-Supreme Court argument than to conclude that he is calling for Christians to opt out of the individual mandate — the only way, other than not voting for either Obama or Romney in November, to refuse to participate in this presumed intrusion by the State and thereby obey what the bloviating bishop barks. In reading his post, you’ll agree with me, I’m sure, that I’m not only NOT taking his words out of context or practicing unfair eisegesis in analyzing them, but that not voting for Obama and not voting for Romney were lesser points — foregone conclusions that underscored, in his argument, the gross unrighteousness that got past SCOTUS goalie John Roberts, who, to Wilson, has become more than an enigma and (barely) less than a sinister double agent.
And why the hue and cry?
Because, starting in 2014, unless the GOP overturns it and, to Wilson’s bipartisanly-reflected horror, “replaces” it with something else, the “invisible hand of the market” Austrian-school Libertarians so worship will be revealed and restricted in the area of healthcare. Access to healthcare will be extended to millions of Americans who now don’t have it and to people with chronic health issues and pre-existing conditions, who won’t be booted out of the market by profit-driven insurers currently allowed to exercise the full measure of their ruthlessness on poor people, sick people, once-sick people, and uninsured people once the Act takes effect. The insurers will still be profit-driven, but harnessed by those presumably God-awful-in-the-literal-sense regulations Wilson so despises in what he confidently asserts is the only Biblical point of view. More sick people and people trying to stay healthy will be able to afford healthcare, and Wilson not only just hates it, but finds this remedy to a problem of monstrous moral and economic proportions both unConstitutional and unBiblical.
It’s a real knee-slapper AND a true head-scratcher, this line of reasoning, to Christians in all of the other countries in the world — that is, nearly all of the First World, industrialized nations — that provide the care to its citizens that Wilson decries as unConstitutional and unBiblical.
Which of those is most offensive to him is unclear. Roberts, et al, have made it clear that he can’t judge it unConstitutional; Rand Paul notwithstanding, the determination of what is and what is not Constitutional is the sole job of the Supreme Court. While honest debate about the Court’s decision can and should continue, the finality of its determination is unlikely to be much affected by a self-ordained, self-published ministry mogul in North Central Idaho. So now that he’s unable to pronounce Obamacare unConstitutional, Wilson must now turn to Scripture to craft a theology that elevates Libertarian selfishness and unquestioning embrace of an injustice-perpetuating, Godless free market to the status of mature Christian virtue firmly in line with both the Biblical assertion that government is given to us by God for the good and order of society and the Gospel mandate to care for the poor. That ad-hoc theology, fine-tuned and common as it is in a sin-soaked world, does exist, but it has its origin in rock-hard hearts and the sandiest, slipperiest of doctrinal foundations. It speaks nothing of Christ Jesus; it testifies not of the Gospel but, instead, of why humankind needed one. We are a sinful people, ineffably given, without the Holy Spirit, to great acts of selfishness and immorality and, minus the blood of Christ, irredeemably sinful in our indifference to the poor and to the Word that liberates them — and us. Wilson believes he has combed through and pored over Scripture to justify his hatred of Obamacare and many other examples of progressivism and social welfare, and indeed he has. It’s just that the theology — the picture he’s drawn from it — looks nothing at all like that of Christ. It bears a remarkable resemblance, though, to himself. If Christ came to us as a privileged, socially powerful, belly-full and bellicose man intent on exercising mockery of the poor during the week and mere indifference to them on the Sabbath, Wilson would be on to something. But He didn’t, and he isn’t.
In my previous post, I mentioned a few examples of government wrongs and societal evils that I believe the Christian could make a solid Biblical case for responding to by acts of civil disobedience, and those things — slavery was the first — were so clearly wrong that even comparing them to Obamacare, in effect or in civilly-disobedient response, felt ridiculous. But to highlight my point that Wilson is so taken by some inherent evil in Obamacare that, above and beyond other social and governmental wrongs past and present, he calls on his flock to actively resist the governing authorities — engage in civil disobedience — I’ll end with an example chilling in its relevance.
Wilson, I know, is a Navy man; he’s made much of his “evangelism” of his shipmates and has never, in the ten years I’ve been focused on his writing, expressed grief or regret that he was involved in that branch of the service. I know he was opposed to the Iraq War, although in the spring of 2003, when the U.S. was beginning its offense against Baghdad and virtually every other church was organizing prayer meetings to oppose the war, support the war, or ask God for the protection of our servicemen, Christ Church organized a boxing match — with categories for kids weighing as little as 60 lbs. A fighting contest for men and boys on the eve of a war that was to take roughly 4,000 American lives and countless thousands of Iraqi lives seemed then, and now, to be more than a little out of step with Christian conscience. But to be fair to Wilson, I understand that despite his Navy background, he was not a supporter, for whatever reason, of the war.
It was, I believe, in the early 1980s when the U.S. government proposed naming a Navy carrier — a warship — the USS Corpus Christi, or, as the Latin scholars among us know, the USS Body of Christ. Many Christians and many other women and men of goodwill and sentient conscience protested the official linking of the Body of Christ — the Body whose resurrection guarantees our peace, our reconciliation, our life, and our righteousness in God’s eyes — with a ship whose sole purpose was the furtherance of war. It was then and is now a blasphemy and a stench; I can think of no other governmental action so utterly clear in its evil intent than to propose naming a warship after the crucified Prince of Peace. Wilson was young then, and I was even younger. What I’d love to know — what, in light of his call for civil disobedience in response to Obamacare, I feel a profound NEED to know –is how young, Christian Douglas Wilson felt about the USS Corpus Christi then and how he would feel about it now. I pray he responded in outrage, perhaps even in civil disobedience, then. Because if he didn’t then call for protest and civil disobedience (like the nuns who chained themselves to the gates of military facilities in protest not only of the Corpus Christi, but all offensive military actions), or if he wouldn’t do it now, then he reveals himself to be a man of whom the kindest possible assessment would be the suggestion that his moral compass is, what with the demands of business and travel and family and such, more than just slightly askew.
What it would really say is that he is a man in urgent need of evangelism, a man crumbling morally under the weight of immense privilege and power, sin and satiation, who desperately needs a saving knowledge of the One who is our peace and who is our righteousness — and who is neither impressed nor fooled by any man’s ascension to the pastorate.