A frequent refrain among the religious right is that the United States of America is a "Christian nation", or that this country was founded on Christian principles. However, I've never seen any religious apologist explain what exactly this is supposed to mean beyond making the mere statement. If this nation was founded on Christian principles, which principles are those? If Christianity played such a major role in our nation's founding, then what specific contributions did it make?

In an attempt to help the religious right answer this key question, I'll list some of America's core defining principles as given in the Constitution, and examine whether any of them could plausibly be said to come from Christianity or the Bible:

Republican democracy. Through a public ballot open to all adult citizens, Americans elect candidates who will represent them at the local, state and federal levels. All officials of the American government are either directly elected by the people or are appointed by others who are elected.

Separation of powers. The American government is divided into legislative, executive and judicial branches. Through various mechanisms, these three branches can check each other's power - the president can issue pardons and veto legislation, Congress can override vetoes and pass constitutional amendments, and the courts can rule laws and executive actions unconstitutional - which prevents too much power from accumulating in the hands of any one individual or group.

Federalism. The U.S. is set up as a series of states with a limited degree of autonomy, united together and overseen by a central, federal government. Power is shared between the two, with some areas being the province of the states and others set by the federal authority.

The process of amendment. The U.S. Constitution can be changed in any way, either to pass new clauses or to repeal existing ones, if the proposed amendment is approved by a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states.

Religious freedom. The Constitution explicitly provides that no religious test shall ever be required for any public office in the United States, nor shall the government officially establish any religion. No law which infringes on the free exercise of religion is permitted.

Freedom of speech, assembly, press and petition. The First Amendment to the Constitution provides that no law shall be passed which abridges the citizens' freedom of speech, nor their right to protest and petition the government, nor the right of the press to report information on the events of the day.

Protection from search and seizure. The police force in America may not enter a person's home or search their possessions without proving reasonable suspicion and obtaining the consent of an independent magistrate, in the form of a search warrant.

Trial by jury. Americans accused of crimes can only be convicted by a jury made up of people living in the area where the crime has taken place. In addition, people on trial have the right to confront witnesses against them and may not be compelled to testify against themselves.

Protection from cruel or unusual punishment. Cruel, degrading, or torturous punishments are constitutionally forbidden.

Equality of all people under the law. Most fundamental to the American experiment is the idea that all people have equal protection under the law, that no one group has any more or fewer legal rights than any other. This more than anything else is the idea that defines us, and though we have not always lived up to it, throughout our history we have steadily been making strides toward expanding the boundaries of liberty to include all Americans.

Now, let's see what Biblical equivalents, if any, these principles have:

Republican democracy: Explicitly denied by the Bible. Rather than democracy, the Bible's preferred model of government is a divine-right kingship, where one individual is hereditarily chosen and wields supreme power. This is what America's founders were rebelling against when they brought forth this nation.

Separation of powers: Explicitly denied by the Bible. As above, in the Bible's divine-right monarchy, a single individual wields supreme power over all functions of government. Some apologists seek to find an equivalent in a verse from Isaiah 33 - "For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king" - but what they overlook is that this verse explicitly envisions all three of these powers as being held by the same person.

Federalism: Partial equivalent in the Bible. The Old Testament's society, where each of the twelve tribes of Israel has partial autonomy over its own region, is similar to the American model of states. However, there is a notable dissimilarity as well: the Bible envisions membership in a tribe as hereditary, whereas states are made up of free collections of individuals who can move around at will. In any case, some sort of hierarchy is unavoidable in any organization too large for a single person to directly oversee.

The process of amendment: Explicitly denied by the Bible. Rather than creating a living, dynamic system of laws that can be improved and mended as society sees fit, the Bible claims that its laws are eternal and immutable, literally set in stone, and can neither be added to nor changed. The Old Testament says that each of its laws "shall be a statute forever" (Leviticus 23:41), and the New Testament says that anyone who suggests a different gospel should be accursed (Galatians 1:8-9).

Religious freedom: Explicitly denied by the Bible. Far from granting people the right to worship as they see fit, the Bible says that anyone who encourages believers to serve other gods, or anyone who speaks "blasphemy", should be killed (Deuteronomy 13:6-9, Leviticus 24:16). God himself joins in on many occasions by slaughtering people who worship different gods (Exodus 22:20). Although Jesus does say that people should "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (Mark 12:17), there is no indication that any non-Christian should enjoy the same freedom of worship as believers.

Freedom of speech, assembly, press and petition: Explicitly denied by the Bible. As above, the Bible does not grant freedom of speech, but rather threatens death for those who speak in unapproved ways. Ancient Israel had no concept of the press, but there are also many cases in which people were killed for unapproved assemblies or for questioning their leaders (Numbers 16:35).

Protection from search and seizure: No equivalent in the Bible. Lacking a judicial system or separation of powers, ancient Israel had no notion of search warrants or of protection from arbitrary seizure.

Trial by jury: No equivalent in the Bible. Again, the Bible has nothing like our custom of the legal or judicial system. It does say that a man who suspects his wife of committing adultery can bring her before the priests and force her to drink "bitter water" which will cause her belly to swell and her thighs to rot if she is guilty (Numbers 5). If anything, this is most similar to the barbaric concept of trial by ordeal. It also says that anyone who accidentally kills someone may be killed without consequence by a relative of the deceased (whom it calls the "avenger of blood") (Joshua 20). Again, no mention is made of convening a jury to determine the guilt of the accused. Finally, it says that any person may be convicted of a crime on the testimony of just two witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15), which is a far cry from the American legal system.

Protection from cruel or unusual punishment: Explicitly denied by the Bible. One of the most common punishments prescribed by the Bible is stoning - bludgeoning a person to death by smashing in his head and face with rocks. This penalty is prescribed for crimes such as disobeying one's parents (Deuteronomy 21:21), picking up sticks on Sunday (Numbers 15:36), or being gay (Leviticus 20:13). This is "cruel and unusual" punishment by any rational definition of that term.

Equality of all people under the law: Explicitly denied by the Bible. The Bible makes it clear that the Israelites enjoyed special favor as compared to everybody else, and were treated differently by the Mosaic law code. For example, foreigners taken as slaves could be kept indefinitely, while Israelite slaves were freed every seven years during Jubilee (Leviticus 25:39-46). Even among Israelites, there were stark divisions: women are worth considerably less than men (Leviticus 27:1-7), and the handicapped are discriminated against (Leviticus 21:17-23). Even Jesus joins in by making statements comparing non-Jews to dogs (Mark 7:27).

In sum, the basic principles of American democracy cannot be found in either testament of the Bible. This is hardly surprising: America's founders drew their ideas from the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment, as well as from the English common law; they said so themselves.

And to this evidence, we must add the fact that many of America's most influential founders held notably unorthodox religious views. Far from being the monolithic group of pious, church-going, by-the-book fundamentalists that today's religious right imagines them as, the founders were a diverse, freethinking group, few of them strictly obedient to any creed. It is almost certainly no coincidence that, while divine-right monarchies across the world have ended in degeneration or destruction, the American system of government whose origins were based in reason and not hobbled by rigid dogma has survived and flourished.

Opportunity and Obligation

One of the driving notions behind libertarian political theory is that society should be a meritocracy. By removing all restraints on competition, we will create a system where the hardest-working, most talented, most creative people succeed. And this is a good idea which I agree with. We need to encourage effort and innovation to create a healthy society; we should not punish motivation, nor reward laziness. We should give people an incentive to work and to strive. However, where I think libertarians err is in assuming that if we eliminate all or most regulation, the most talented, motivated people will naturally and inevitably rise to the top. This is an oversimplified view of reality, which overlooks the institutional forces and natural barriers that can prevent individuals from succeeding through no fault of their own.

Libertarians often point to examples of people who overcame difficult circumstances to become successful as proof that no social safety net is needed, that the deserving will always stand out. But this conclusion does not follow from a few anecdotal cases. The fact that some people have escaped poverty does not mean that everyone has an equal opportunity to do the same. The few who did escape might simply have been lucky, or had opportunities not available to everyone, while even more talented or motivated people languish in circumstances they cannot escape.

This is why I support social welfare programs created through taxation. The point of redistribution, in the classical liberal philosophy, is not to create equal distribution of wealth, but rather equal distribution of opportunity. Where nature has created an inequality, we should use the power of society to remedy that inequality. By guaranteeing universal access to basic goods like health care and education, differences in natural ability and talent have the best chance to manifest and are less likely to be cut short by bad luck. In this sense, a classic liberal society, rather than a libertarian society, is the truest form of meritocracy.

Inevitably, programs like these will be funded primarily by tax contributions from the wealthy. To fund them most equitably, I advocate a progressive tax code where the percentage of taxed income rises with the individual's level of income.

This is not, as many libertarians seem to think, a desire to punish the wealthy for their success. Again, this is the wrong paradigm by which to approach the issue: a better view is as the repayment of an obligation. All people who live in a society owe that society a debt in exchange for the services it provides and the standard of living it makes possible. And the wealthy, who have been able to achieve so much more than most thanks to the resources society provides, owe society a particularly significant debt which it is right that they repay.

The resources which society provides go beyond basic goods like public utilities, police and national defense, laws against force and fraud, and a system of free speech and free enterprise - although it does provide those. More fundamentally, society institutes and maintains the very economic systems that are arranged so as to reward people who have certain skills and abilities. Except in very rare cases, "talent" is not a universal currency, convertable into wealth in any system in which the bearer happens to live. On the contrary, people are generally talented at certain things, and our society is structured so as to highly reward certain things. When those two overlap, the people who succeed rightfully owe society a debt of gratitude for that.

Even members of the super-rich classes acknowledge this. Warren Buffett has said the following (quoted from p.164 of Janet Lowe's Warren Buffett Speaks: Wit and Wisdom from the World's Greatest Investor):

I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. ...I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well - disproportionately well... I do think that when you're treated enormously well by this market system, where in effect the market system showers the ability to buy goods and services on you because of some peculiar talent - maybe your adenoids are a certain way, so you can sing and everybody will pay you enormous sums to be on television or whatever - I think society has a big claim on that.

Or Robert Crandall, former chief executive of American Airlines, as quoted in a recent New York Times article "The Richest of the Rich":

The nation's corporate chiefs would be living far less affluent lives, Mr. Crandall said, if fate had put them in, say, Uzbekistan instead of the United States, "where they are the beneficiaries of a market system that rewards a few people in extraordinary ways and leaves others behind."

Or, from the same article, American industrialist and steel titan Andrew Carnegie:

"Carnegie made it abundantly clear that the centerpiece of his gospel of wealth philosophy was that individuals do not create wealth by themselves," said David Nasaw, a historian at City University of New York and the author of "Andrew Carnegie" (Penguin Press). "The creator of wealth in his view was the community, and individuals like himself were trustees of that wealth."

Again, this is not to say that innovative, hard-working individuals should not be able to reap the rewards of their effort. We should have a society based on merit; I find no fault with that. What I do find fault with a system where a few people are given the enormous opportunity needed to become successful, while billions more have little or no access to the same opportunity. People who do become wealthy have a moral obligation to reinvest some of that wealth back into the system so that other people can enjoy the same opportunities it has given to them.

The great insight of capitalism is that wealth, unlike matter and energy, is not a constant but can be created. Ironically, it is libertarians who have forgotten this, implicitly assuming that the amount of wealth in society is fixed and that taxation is a zero-sum game, that one person must lose for another to prosper. On the contrary, by wisely reinvesting the proceeds of taxation, we can create a more prosperous society in which everyone is healthier and happier. This sums up my core objection to libertarianism: its central ethic is "every man for himself", while I believe the superior ethic is "we're all in this together".

Other posts in this series:

• Why I Am Not a Libertarian I: The Dilemma of the Commons
• Why I Am Not a Libertarian II: Positive and Negative Liberty

Positive and Negative Liberty

The second major reason why I am not a libertarian has to do with the social safety net - programs like public education, universal health care, food stamps or unemployment pay - that are funded by redistributive taxation. Hard-core libertarians decry these programs as theft or even slavery, arguing that it is unfair to tax them to fund programs from which they derive no direct benefit.

In reality, however, these programs do benefit all members of society. Consider universal health care. Though libertarians regularly decry such programs as wasteful government giveaways, there is a sound self-interest argument for establishing a social safety net. Even if a libertarian, through hard work and intelligent economic decisions, has guaranteed their own access to quality medical care for life, what will happen to people who lack that access? Since the poor aren't under regular medical supervision, any new infectious disease that appears will be likely to flourish among them. By the time it spreads out of the have-nots and begins to infect the rest of society, it may have become far more virulent and dangerous, putting many more people at risk. On the other hand, if an epidemic is detected early, it is far easier to stop it. This is not a hypothetical scenario: we see it happening around the world right now with diseases like tuberculosis or avian flu, where virulent, drug-resistant strains emerge first among society's underclass.

A similar argument holds true for anti-poverty social programs, such as welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing and job training. Certainly we should not indefinitely support people who refuse to work, and the emphasis should be on helping recipients return to the workforce as soon as possible. But eliminating these programs entirely would be a foolish idea. Eliminating these programs would not make the need for them go away. If people cannot support themselves through legitimate channels, they are far more likely to turn to crime and the black market, again posing a risk to the rest of society, as well as imposing the greater costs of police and incarceration.

Finally, consider public education. Any rational libertarian would value science, since it produces a great number of inventions and discoveries that directly benefit every member of the public. Therefore, it's in everyone's interest to live in a society where science is valued and supported by the public, as opposed to, for example, a society where powerful religious groups block scientific advances that are contrary to their beliefs. But to create a society of the former type, rather than the latter, we must commit to educating the public. Abdicating that responsibility creates a vacuum where all types of superstition and pseudoscience can rush in.

All of these social programs benefit us in one further way. By committing to educate people, giving them job training and housing, and providing medical care when they are ill, we help them to become productive, valuable citizens - people who contribute to society, rather than being a drain on it. A study by Columbia University, for example, found that an increase of $82,000 per student in public school spending would actually provide a $127,000 net gain to the economy over the lifetime of that student. Again, by helping people live up to their full potential for productivity and innovation, we can create a wealthier, more prosperous society than would otherwise exist, and this directly benefits everyone.

It is wrong to think of these programs as free giveaways to the undeserving. Instead, the proper paradigm is to think of them as investments. Like any investment, the spending for these programs can and will be repaid with interest if distributed wisely. Education is one example; here is another:

The US spent $32 million to fight smallpox over ten years, achieving eradication in 1977. Now we save that sum every two and a half months in reduced spending on vaccines and health care. Total savings have been $17 billion, plus 45 million lives around the world, and as an investment that $32 million has yielded a return of 45 percent per year.

The notion of social programs as an investment in society leads into an important point. There are two different types of freedom which any society must trade off between. One type is negative liberty, the absence of external restraint or coercion. But there's a far more important type, positive liberty, which is the ability to do what one wants to do. For example, I may want to secure an influential, high-paying job, and no one will actively stop me from doing this (negative liberty). Yet I may still be unable to get that job, because I lack access to the education and other resources I would need to pursue it (positive liberty).

Negative liberty is a necessary prerequisite for positive liberty, but is not sufficient for it. Any reasonable person, I think, would agree that positive liberty is the more important of the two. It does me no good to be free of restraint if I still lack the ability to achieve what I desire. Yet a libertarian state, where private property is the most fundamental right and there are no redistributive schemes such as taxation, goes too far in maximizing mere negative liberty at the expense of positive liberty. Rather than seeking to boost one at the expense of the other, we should want to combine the two in the highest proportion. Often, the best way to do this is to pass laws that somewhat decrease negative liberty, but produce a greater, more-than-compensating gain in positive liberty, both for the individual and for society in general.

Libertarians say that we should only concern ourselves with negative liberty - as long as people can choose freely, then everything is as it should be. But it does you no good that you can freely choose if all your options are bad ones. Consider the following horrible dilemma:

Nhem Yen's eldest daughter, who was twenty-four and pregnant with her second child, promptly caught malaria. There was no money to get medical treatment (effective drugs would have cost less than $10), and so she died a day after giving birth. That left Nhem Yen looking after five children of her own and two grandchildren.

The family had one mosquito net that could accommodate about three people. Such nets are quite effective against malaria, but they cost $5 — and Nhem Yen could not afford to buy any more. So every night, she agonized over which of the children to put under the net and which to leave out.

"It's very hard to choose," Nhem Yen told me. "But we have no money to buy another mosquito net. We have no choice."

This is not an isolated instance. As the Times article points out, impossible choices like this are very much the norm in conditions of extreme poverty. People become trapped in cycles of suffering that are all but impossible to escape because they cannot afford to provide for all their needs simultaneously. They have more than enough negative liberty; it is positive liberty they lack. A society that truly sought to maximize liberty would provide the help needed to lift people out of these cruel dilemmas.

It benefits no one for people to remain trapped in situations like this. Private investment and charity have a role to play in lifting people out of poverty, but they will not accomplish that task all by themselves - especially since many of these programs may not see a payoff within the lifetime of an individual investor. Public investment that is driven by moral considerations, rather than short-term profit, is also needed if we are to break the cycles of poverty and dependency. By doing this, we can create a society where the maximum amount of both prosperity and liberty is available to all.

Other posts in this series:

• Why I Am Not a Libertarian I: The Dilemma of the Commons
• Why I Am Not a Libertarian III: Opportunity and Obligation

I: The Dilemma of the Commons

I don't usually post purely political essays on Daylight Atheism, as opposed to posts that touch on religion in some way. But the new series beginning with this post is personally important to me, and deserves an exception.

Though I only have anecdotal evidence, it's my experience that the majority of atheists hold a politically liberal view. The second largest group, a substantial minority, takes a libertarian stance. (Classic conservativism is a distant third.) I know many members of the second group personally - some of them post comments on this site!

At its best, libertarianism is a noble affirmation of individual dignity and freedom in the face of tyranny; at its worst, it is a cynical and selfish excuse for the rich to exploit the poor and tell them that they deserve it. However, even in its best incarnations, I don't agree with it. Individualism is a fine thing, but so is community. Neither is solely good or solely bad, and terrible things can result from taking either one of them too far without the counterbalance of the other. I believe libertarianism has gone too far toward one of those ends, and in this series, I'll explain why.

The first and most important reason why I am not a libertarian is the dilemma of the commons. Akin to the famous Prisoner's Dilemma, this problem consists of a situation where everyone could potentially take more than their fair share, or pay less than their fair cost, for the use of a public resource. The usual solution to these problems is to introduce the notion of private property, which gives people an incentive to take care of their segment of the commons. This is feasible in some cases, but some things - some very important things - are public by their very nature and cannot be privatized. In such cases, the only way to solve the dilemma of the commons is to introduce an overarching authority that has the power to regulate the actions of the players.

In general, the things that cannot be privatized are natural phenomena that do not respect property lines. The abstraction of private property assumes that the actions and effects of a given person can be neatly partitioned off, separated from the rest of the world, so that it is easy to identify who is responsible. But nature itself cannot be divided into a set of hermetically sealed boxes. The world in which we all must live, and which we all depend upon, is composed of an enormously complex and intricate web of interdependencies. Any attempt by humans to draw clean lines through this tangle, identifying who is responsible for X and who is responsible for Y, is bound to end in illogic and futility.

Chief among these is the concept of environmental health. We cannot partition the environment. We all drink the same water; we all breathe the same air. Rivers, streams, aquifers and oceans cross property lines, and pollutants entering the water anywhere on the planet can cause problems almost anywhere else. Take the example of a farmer who lives upriver and a fisherman who lives downriver. The farmer may need to use nitrogen fertilizers to promote the growth of his crops; but runoff from those fertilizers that leaks into the river can lead to blooms of phytoplankton that suck all the oxygen from the water, creating dead zones that suffocate the fish that fishermen depend on for their livelihood. Clearly, private property is not going to solve this problem; both farmer and fisherman need to make a living, both can reasonably claim ownership over their section of the river, and the requirements of each are inimical to the other's livelihood. And what if the conflict is not with a fisher, but with people who use that water to drink or bathe, pitted against a company that owns another segment of the river and uses it as a waste dump? Whose ownership of one part of that water triumphs over the ownership rights of the other?

Similarly, how is a libertarian system to deal with the problem of air pollution? A state or municipality that insists on building cheap, dirty coal-fired power plants to run its electric grid will emit sulfur, mercury and other toxins into the air, potentially causing smog and acid rain hundreds of miles away. Similar problems occur with the owners of old, inefficient cars. How can private property resolve this problem? Who owns the air? Certainly, no one could ever prove that it was the emissions of one individual polluter that caused any particular problem. And what if the pollutant is not sulfur dioxide or particulates, but carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming and thereby causes destructive hurricanes, droughts and rising flood waters all over the planet? Again, no individual polluter is wholly responsible for these destructive side effects, and yet inarguably, the less greenhouse gas is emitted into the atmosphere, the better off we will all be.

Or, consider a common problem in the American West: homes built in chaparral and other ecosystems that are adapted to fire. After decades of mismanagement, we have learned that our well-intentioned efforts to manage this habitat by snuffing out small fires were a terrible mistake. Regular burns consume the dead wood from these habitats, keeping fires frequent, but small. Trying to suppress fire altogether only leads to tinder building up until a truly gargantuan wildfire inevitably begins, one that is impossible to contain and is far more destructive than small fires would have been. Again, private property cannot solve this problem. How could a libertarian system handle a stubborn landowner who insisted on stamping out every fire that began on his property, putting not just himself but his neighbors in danger?

Also, consider fish and other wild food sources. The ocean cannot be privatized - fish schools can and do move around, after all - and as a result, fisheries worldwide are collapsing as the most sought-after species are fished to extinction. Even worse, as a fish species draws closer to extinction and becomes rarer, demand increases and a catch can command an even higher price, leading to even more fishers seeking it. Unfettered capitalism cannot stop this destructive spiral.

Finally, not all tragedy-of-the-commons situations involve the environment. What about the issue of compulsory state service - for example, a military draft? There is no better example of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation than this. In a time of war, each individual may reason that he personally is better off not joining the military. But if everyone follows this logic, society in general will collapse and everyone will lose their freedom and possibly their lives. Private property certainly cannot solve this dilemma.

There is no way to get rid of the commons. The products of human industry we can buy, sell and trade, but there are some things that cannot be divided up and that no one person can own. By their very nature, they must be shared and held in trust; either everyone has access to them or no one does. Clean air and water, a safe living environment, responsible use of natural resources, and national security are all among these. A purely libertarian state, with no power to direct what individuals do on their own property, cannot adequately respond to these issues.

Instead, without abandoning the notion of private property - for it is a very useful abstraction in many cases, one that often does motivate people to do the right thing - what we need is a governing authority that can control access to the commons. To address the valid concerns of force and fraud, this authority should be established by mutual agreement of the people, formed by widespread consent and bound by rules governing what actions it may validly take, so that it will not be exploited by one part of society to the detriment of another. But it should not lack the ability to take effective action to prevent the destructive Prisoner's Dilemma situations that would otherwise arise, where the logic of individual selfishness leads to group suicide. Only a classically liberal, rather than a libertarian, society can effectively address this problem.

Other posts in this series:

• Why I Am Not a Libertarian II: Positive and Negative Liberty
• Why I Am Not a Libertarian III: Opportunity and Obligation