Welcome to Episode 84 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will work to bury an ideological fiction. In a sense, intellectually, I will be burying a corpse, given that that fiction has been dead for a long time – no one who believes in that ideology has been capable of producing a single piece of theological, philosophical, or logical (that is, presuppositional) evidence in favor of it. Every single line of support for it has been simply an instinctive irrational reaction, never a consistent logical conclusion. Over the years, I have asked many questions about that ideology, pointing to its inconsistency and lack of intellectual life in it. I have never gotten answers to my questions. I have pointed to Biblical examples and doctrines that refute it. I have pointed to books and articles by theologians who refute it, and give the Biblical presuppositions that refute it. The thing is dead and has never been alive. But it has its worshipers. So I will try to bury it with this episode.

The ideological fiction I want to bury is this: Libertarianism is antithetical to theocracy. Or, to put it differently, that no Biblically consistent Christian can be a libertarian. Or, that if you follow the Bible to the tee, you can’t end up with a libertarian social order. Or, that a libertarian social order can’t be Christian. Or, that if we do not have a state that intervenes in people’s lives to prevent sin, we will eventually have chaos and destruction. Or, that in order for a society to prosper in righteousness and justice, we need a civil government empowered to tax and control and regulate its subjects for the higher purposes of God.

Now, there are two sides to this ideology. One side is the secular libertarians who are committed to libertarianism – or so they say – but want to keep God and the Bible out of it. Von Mises was such, Murray Rothbard was such, Ayn Rand had some not so friendly things to say about Christianity (although, she agreed with it that liberty and capitalism can be only based on a system of ethics, which von Mises and Rothbard denied). Such secular libertarians have the concept that in order for a society to be free, it needs to be atheist, or, at the very least, any faith in God must remain at a personal level, while the society must be conceptually atheist or at least agnostic concerning any deities. Those are not my opponents in this episode. I have pointed out many times before that secularism and libertarianism can’t work together, and secular libertarianism inevitably has to end up in some form of mild statism, or some other form of institutional control of some men over others. See, for example, Lew Rockwell’s, Hermann Hoppe’s, and other secular libertarians’ belief in government control over immigration, which is nothing more than just another form of socialism. I have talked about it in my article, “Lew Rockwell and the Mild Statism of Secular Libertarianism” on the ChristendomRestored.com website. We will see a little bit later why all secularism or paganism inevitably has to produce some form of statism or power religion.

My target in this episode is the other side of that ideology, those Christians who claim to be “conservative” and “Bible-believing” and “Reformed” and what-not, who claim to take all of their ideas from Scripture, and yet, they continue denouncing libertarianism, and continue supporting one or another form of statism with the claim that it is “according to the Bible.” And they continue declaring that libertarianism is antithetical to the Bible and ridicule everyone who proposes libertarian solutions to the problems of today’s world. Those same Christians who take the text of Romans 13 and defend modern political theories and practices whose origin is not Romans 13 but rather Revelation 13; but because they have adopted a religious faith in the right of the state to control people’s lives, they never stop to figure out the difference.

To such professing Christians I want to present the evidence that Biblical theocracy is not antithetical to libertarianism, but, contrary to their assertions, libertarianism is the only logical political system that can be consistently based on a Biblical worldview; and also, that a Christian consistent with his Bible can arrive to only one possible political and social system: libertarianism. What we call today libertarianism is simply the political theory of the Bible. It is rooted in the Bible, and there is no other possible root for it. Granted, some secularists have taken the fruit and have abandoned the root, but that doesn’t mean we as Christians should be blind to the true origin of libertarianism as a political philosophy. After all, the same applies to science: some secularists have claimed that science must be separate from the Bible, but we don’t say that science is antithetical to the Bible, right? In the same way, a presuppositional analysis of the Biblical worldview and its application to political science and social theory leads us to the conclusion that the only righteous society that the Bible describes and prescribes is a libertarian society, free of any government control, and only subject to some very limited instances of human institutional judgment (not control but judgment). The rest of this episode will be such presuppositional analysis based on several fundamental points of the Biblical worldview, namely, the Biblical views of the nature of God and reality, of the nature of man and his purpose in God’s Covenant, and the meaning and nature of God’s law. In all of them, as we develop the antithesis between the Biblical and the pagan/secular worldviews, we will see that libertarianism as a political philosophy stems directly from the Biblical teachings about society; and we will also see that, as Rushdoony has pointed many times, paganism and secularism are inescapably statist in their views, and there is no chance of ever constructing a consistent secular or pagan society without having at least some degree of statism, that is, institutional control of some men by other men.

Before we start, however, let me first lay the foundation with definitions for the two main terms we are using here: theocracy and libertarianism.

Theocracy is, quite simply, a society under the rule of God. In a sense, every society is under the rule of God, of course, even those who oppose God and are under His judgment in history.(Being under God’s judgment is still being under His rule, right?) But the term here denotes a society that is self-consciously and deliberately submitted to God in everything it does: from its foundational premises and publicly accepted religious and intellectual principles, through the personal conduct of its members and its economic structure, all the way to its systems of justice and public trust and stewardship. A theocratic society is a society where, when its people are asked, “who is the ruler of your society?” or “what is the foundational principle of your society?, respond, “Jesus Christ and His Gospel.” It is important to understand that a theocratic society is not a society where church ministers rule (as is the commonly accepted mythology about the term). That would be a priestocracy, not a theocracy. It is not where the state controls and regulates people based on officially religious principles; that would be religious socialism. (Read the book The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich.) Theocracy is pure and simple, “God rules,” as the term signifies, and it has to do only with God’s direct rule over His creation and over mankind, not with men ruling over other men.

Libertarianism, on the other hand, is a political philosophy that establishes the freedom of the individual to act as the highest value and the highest priority of all political and social endeavor. When we say “the individual,” we mean the individual vs. any sort of collective or any sort of power, whether family, church, or state. That means that in any single case where a decision must be made between the individual acting out of his own free will, and a collective or another sort of power forcing its will upon the individual under some threat of punishment or compulsion, libertarianism takes the side of the individual and denies the collective any moral authority to act or to force the individual to comply. Thus, libertarianism is about the liberty of the individual to act. Remember, libertarianism is just a political philosophy and its exclusive area of interest is the balance of power in the society between individuals and collectives. It is not a moral philosophy; it doesn’t declare declare what acts are moral and permissible by the individual. It still acknowledges that there are immoral acts committed by individuals that should be stopped, and some even recompensed and punished; but within the limits of acceptable personal behavior, libertarianism denies any collective or any government the moral ground to control or regulate the life of the individual. Whether it is what the individual will put in his body, where he will live, what arbitrary geographical border he will cross, who he will be hired by and who he will hire, what kind of business he will engage in, what prices he will attach to the product of his labor or to his property, what he will do with the money he earns and at what price, etc., all these should remain entirely within the sphere of self-government, and no other human government should be allowed to make any decisions for the individual himself. If there are any governments, their business should be to protect the individual against immoral acts by other individuals, not become immoral themselves.

So, with these definitions, how do we proceed? How do we prove that libertarianism as a political philosophy follows from the Bib...