A liberal God?

Nothing seems to scare the populist Left more than the people.  Protest the Obama administration’s big spending, pervasive centralizing, expansive regulating policies, and you must be an enemy of all that is good and true.  Attend a Tea Party rally and you’re probably a racist and certainly not a Christian.

At least that is the view of the leading left-wing evangelical Jim Wallis.  Indeed, he sees the Tea Party as an essentially libertarian movement, which makes it doubly suspect.  He declares:  “Libertarianism has never been much of a multi-cultural movement.  Need I say that racism—overt, implied, or even subtle—is not a Christian virtue.”

So Tea Party activists aren’t good Christians.  And many of them are racists.  Of course.

Wallis is a devout and well-intentioned Christian believer, but his political understanding is less impressive.  The Tea Party movement incorporates several philosophical influences.  Polls show adherents split between Sarah Palin and Ron Paul, suggesting philosophical confusion if not schizophrenia.

Moreover, 57 percent of Tea Party activists indicated a favorable view of President George W. Bush—the big spender who centralized power in Washington and the executive branch, and who embarked on a remarkably foolish program of international social engineering through war.  Whatever he was, it wasn’t libertarian.

Nor is it obvious that most Tea Party activists share the libertarian vision of radically smaller government.  But the two groups have united to oppose the Obama administration’s program of ever-expanding government spending and regulation in most every sphere.

Does opposing the “Obama Revolution” put them, these Wallis-certified “libertarians,” on God’s naughty list?

Wallis expresses a number of objections to libertarianism.  The first is the belief in individual choice:  “Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good.”  Indeed, “Loving your neighbor is a better Christian response than telling your neighbor to leave you alone.”

But what does one have to do with another?  If one’s neighbor is in need—assume anything from collecting mail to watching kids to providing food or even money—then a good person, irrespective of ideology, will help.  It has nothing to do with the government.  Indeed, AEI’s Arthur Brooks made the inconvenient discovery that people on the Right give more of their incomes to charity than people on the Left.  And not just a little more.  By one measure those who oppose forcible income redistribution give ten times as much as fans of Uncle Sam acting like Santa Claus.  It seems that Wallis’s Big Government allies really believe their rhetoric:  poverty is government’s problem to solve rather than their responsibility to alleviate.

Now assume this same neighbor wants to call in the authorities to stop you from smoking, seize more of your income, appropriate half of your back yard, prevent you from owning a firearm, force you to send your kid to an awful government school, or bail out the failing businesses in which he or she invested.  You should tell your neighbor to leave you alone—even as you show love by helping him or her.