I have an article today at TGC on Christianity and the relationship between rich and poor:

Healing the relational estrangement between rich and poor is one of the most central elements of Christian living. James points to “partiality” among economic classes as a quality that demonstrates unbelief and leads to perdition (James 2). Paul identifies “contentment” with your economic position as a way of life that distinguishes true believers from false teachers (1 Timothy 6:3-10).

Check out the comment thread, where I’m accused of something (it’s not quite clear what) involving atheism and mind control.

Fascinating article on TGC this morning by Mike Cosper on The Hunger Games. I haven’t read the books but gave THG a try when it came out on Netflix, not expecting much. I was very pleasantly surprised by it. Cosper’s article is the first I’ve read (not that I spend lots of time reading articles about THG) that starts to unpack why there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

Many people are made uncomfortable by THG because, superficially, we are being invited to sit in the audience and be entertained by the sight of children killing each other for the entertainment of the audience. Cosper acknowledges that a person with a properly formed conscience should not participate in the Games, but he argues (correctly, I think) that the movie itself is aware of this. In the totalitarian environment where Katniss has been raised, “a properly formed conscience” becomes supremely difficult to develop. THG is following in the footsteps of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley – with less intellectual ambition of course, but still showing us how the institutions of culture can be used to manipulate our perceptions of reality and make good seem evil, evil seem good.

I think a close reading of the movie would bear this out. The filmmakers clearly put a lot of thought into designing the propaganda videos, the media interviews, etc. by which murder for entertainment is framed as an act of virtue, patriotism, and even love of life and peace. As the story unfolds, a super-slick talk show host/sports announcer character played by Stanley Tucci effortlessly spins everything we see and hear into conformity with the regime’s ideology. Those who are worried about the moral impact of THG are missing the point – the filmmakers (and no doubt the novels as well) are subtly deconstructing the very glamorization of evil they’re worried about.

The contrast with the remake of Robocop is instructive. Paul Verhoeven was doing much the same thing in 1987 that THG is doing now – deconstructing the system’s manipulation of reality, showing how we are all being invited to live as domesticated animals (“I’d buy that for a dollar!”) rather than men and women. Like Katniss, Officer Murphy is fighting for justice as best he knows how, but he’s a pawn in a game that’s under the control of bigger people. The bad guys who destroyed his life are brought down, but the bigger bad guys – the whole rotten system itself – remains standing. In the climactic finale, Murphy saves the life of the heartless tycoon who has been using him like a tool. It’s the right thing to do, and Murphy reclaims his humanity by doing it (“Nice shooting, son – what’s your name?”) but the rotten system that dehumanized him grinds on. The Robocop remake is pretty obviously not interested in such things; no doubt they’ll feel obligated to have some social satire in there as a nod to the original, but it won’t work because the people making the movie obviously have nothing to say.

Yes, a fully ethical person would not participate in the Games; perhaps a fully ethical Officer Murphy would have resigned from the police force. But these are stories of people struggling to become fully ethical people in the midst of cultures where such formation can only come slowly, as the result of great struggle, and with enormous sacrifice.

Prudence depicted as a martial virtue (HT)

When I wrote last week about how the president’s monarchical attempts to “fix” his health care law raise the question of just prerogative, I knew that to illustrate my point fully I really ought to provide an example of the just use of prerogative, preferably from the same president’s administration. But I was writing in a hurry and couldn’t think of one off the top of my head. I have just found the perfect example in this article on the topic of the president’s contempt for the law, by the always-interesting Kevin Williamson.

In a similar vein, President Obama refused to cut off foreign-aid funds to the Egyptian government, though he is required by law to do so in the event of a coup d’état, which is precisely what happened in July in Egypt. It might be embarrassing for the president to punish the Egyptian military and the grand mufti of al-Azhar for their overthrow of the unpopular Mohamed Morsi, but the law does not make exceptions for presidential embarrassment.

Three points:

1) Williamson seems to suggest that the president was wrong to continue aid to Egypt after the coup, even though the new regime is actually preferable to us compared with the Muslim Brotherhood, solely for the sake of adhering to the law. This strikes me as precisely the sort of case where just exercise of prerogative is warranted. The law that we must cut off aid after a coup is a good and useful law as applied to most circumstances, because we want to reward just and legitimate governments while distancing ourselves from tyrants. However, in this case the coup was actually overthrowing a tyrant; applying the law here would undermine its very purpose.

2) If the decision to keep aid flowing to Egypt had been announced transparently as an exercise of prerogative, rather than by engaging in some legerdemain over the definition of what counts as a coup, we would all have been better off. The legislature would have had to take that as a clear occasion to either back the president (if only implicitly by doing nothing) or pass a law to overrule him. Either way, the exercise of prerogative would have been more clearly reconciled with the rule of law, because the legislature would have been put in the position of making the final decision. And the public would have gotten an education in the just power and limits of prerogative, which might have come in handy right about now.

3) Most importantly, Williamson’s article demonstrates Locke’s point that the consistent abuse of executive authority delegitimizes the prerogative power even when rightly used. Williamson chronicles a long list of monarchical power grabs by the executive branch under this administration. It is no wonder he is not inclined to trust the administration to exercise its judgment about when to apply the law and when not to. Executives need that trust; bad executives forfeit it, to everyone’s detriment.

Prudence, by Piero del Pollaiuolo (HT)

Lots of digital ink being spilled over Obama once again “fixing” (i.e. altering) the law simply by decreeing that it shall be so. He does this a lot, and his critics are right that this is an essentially monarchical exercise of power. As Montesquieu argued, the essence of monarchical and aristocratic government is the discretion of the rulers to act differently in different cases, both because they are trusted to do so (that is the presupposition of this type of government, after all) and because they are restrained by a predominant “spirit of honor” in the culture, which limits the socially acceptable exercise of their discretionary powers. By contrast, the essence of democratic and republican government is precisely the expectation that officials will not have a broad latitude to judge what justice requires in each case; to preserve the nature of this type of government they must make decisions in accordance with fixed, stable and transparent rules. This is made possible because a “spirit of virtue” in the culture restrains public behavior sufficiently that officials need not exercise moral formation over the public quite so proactively. In the one case officials are moral tutors to the public; in the latter case the public is the moral tutor of the officials.

But it does not therefore follow that all such acts are wrong case by case, even in our republican government. In fact, government officials informally rewrite the law every day through the way they interpret and apply the law; in a surprising number of these cases they actually avoid doing what the law plainly requires, simply because doing what the law requires in that particular case would be dumb. And far from being challenged, when the result of these decisions is that dumb applications of the law are avoided, people praise the officials for their “common sense.”

John Locke – who was nobody’s squish when it comes to watching like a hawk against abuses of executive authority – makes a powerful case for this discretion, which he calls “prerogative power.” In fact, the written law cannot anticipate every exigency. Rigid enforcement of the law without prerogative tends to create dysfunctional systems of behavior that grow over time, ultimately overwhelming the original law itself. (Locke points to the problem of “rotten boroughs” as an example; interestingly, the authors of the Federalist cite the same example.) And while Locke was a constitutional monarchist, I think this case establishes the necessity of prerogative power for republican and democratic government as well. As all the great constitutionalists have observed since Aristotle, a well designed government cannot be purely of one form, but must mix institutions of both democratic and aristocratic tendencies to succeed.

Ah, but for anyone who wanted to rely on this to justify the president, there’s a catch. Locke argued that prerogative could only be legitimate where it is “manifestly for the good of the people.” That is, it must be clear to the public that you are deviating from the letter of the law for the public’s own good. Locke seems to think that the public will not have difficulty discerning when the executive is acting for the public good (and thus using his just prerogative) and when the executive is substituting his own will for the law, putting himself at war with his people.

In this way, prerogative is much like civil disobedience. You are sticking your neck out by defying the law and claiming that it is legitimate to do so. The only way to do this and maintain the rule of law is if you agree to abide by the consequences. For the civilly disobedient, this means submitting to punishment. For the executive using prerogative, it means abiding the judgment of the community. If your defiance of the law is not clearly for the public good, the community has every right to take corrective action.

One of the most important barometers of sincerity is whether the executive is willing to work with the legislature to craft a remedy in the law, so that prerogative power will no longer need to be exercised. The president’s unilateral rewriting of the heath care law looks particularly bad in this regard, because even as he is purporting to “fix” the law by fiat, he is openly opposing all efforts in the legislature to actually fix the law.

Thankfully, the American founders have bequeathed us a constitutional republic in which we have many options for reining in a willful executive without resorting to the armed rebellion that was, too often, the only practical recourse against kings. I predict we will be needing these options more and more in the coming generation.

Which approach should be used: rifle or shotgun? From an idealistic perspective, a rifle is a single focused shot while a shotgun spreads out the focus of the blast. From a skeptical point of view, a rifle shot is often pictured as being ‘narrow minded’ while a shotgun is seen as ‘unfocused.’ What does any of this have to do with the church? When it comes to the church’s work of evangelism and cultural transformation, there are those who argue for and against each perspective. Some argue for a blast that allows for a greater spread of impact. Others say that this lacks focus and instead a more rifle-like approach should be taken. The broad perspective responds with accusations that this is too narrow. Which is correct? The answer is what any hunter will tell you: Pick the one that fits the target.

The key factor behind the choice of shotgun or rifle is distance. A shot that is too focused will miss at short distances. A hunter once missed a shot at deer only thirty feet in front of him because the scope on his rifle was set for 100 yards. On the other hand, a shotgun is perfect for short distances. But, if the target is 100 yards a way, a shotgun blast’s power will have spread out to such a degree that any target at that distance will be more harassed than seriously harmed.

So, what’s the target for the church? This very question came to my mind as I sat at the Mission to the World Global Mission Conference this weekend in Greenville. If the goal is to reach my next door neighbor with the gospel, it’s silly to have a rifled approach. What would be far more effective would be a shotgun blast, where multiple believers spread out into their spheres of influence to each reach their neighbor. As one seminar speaker from Berlin suggested, imagine the effectiveness of a group of believers each focusing on three close friends. In Berlin, the results of this approach have been astounding.

On the other hand, if a group of believers in Berlin want to make an impact in Brussels, a shotgun approach will simply fail to have an impact. Multiple approaches may actually weaken any efforts at that distance. Instead, it will take a rifle, a focusing of resources along with strategic planning to create an effective means of reaching those at a distance in Brussels. To push the analogy further, perhaps the target is not Brussels but a cultural institution of a particular country. In order to use a close-up shotgun blast, one would need people in that part of culture. If this is not the case, a single strategy backed by great resources may work much better, such as a media campaign or thought-provoking advertising.

The key factor for the church then is to determine the target and choose the appropriate approach. In my church, the challenge is to tell members to start thinking of shotgun approaches, of everyone reaching those nearby with the gospel and not just a rifled focused strategic approach. At the same time, the church as a whole can not rely only upon the shotgun approach but must also focus upon rifle-like strategy for larger scale impact at a distance, for instance, how to address poverty on a large community scale. In this way, used properly, both the broad approach of many engaging neighbors and the narrow approach of one larger focus become effective. Let us pray that the church has the wisdom to choose and encourage the correct approach for each scenario.