https://reformedlibertarians.com/017
Kerry:
This is episode SEVENTEEN.
We’re discussing David VanDrunen’s view of civil government. I’m Kerry Baldwin here with Gregory Baus. We’ll be interviewing Pastor Taylor Drummond about his article, titled “Fool’s Gold? : A libertarian analysis of VanDrunen’s account of state legitimacy” that examines arguments by Dr. VanDrunen in his book Politics After Christendom. We link to the article in the shownotes.
In this episode, Pastor Drummond introduces himself and mentions how he became a confessional, Calvinistic Baptist, and a libertarian-anarchist. In reference to his article he talks about VanDrunen’s biblical, and theologically-based theoretical arguments for the legitimacy of the state, and explains his several critical responses.
Taylor Drummond has served Grace Community Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania since 2020; the church is associated with the Baptist General Conference, a denomination formed by ex-Lutheran Swedish Baptists in the U.S. around the 1860s. Drummond is a graduate of Grove City College and of Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. He’s married, and is a father of three.
Pastor Drummond, thanks for joining us. Before we discuss some of what you say in this article, would you tell our audience something about yourself and your background, including how you came to, let’s say, Calvinistic Baptist convictions and to libertarian anarchist or non-monopolist civil governance views?
Taylor:
Thank you for having me. A little bit about myself. I’m married to my high school sweetheart, Emily. We’ve been blessed with three children, [ages] four and down. So we have a busy household. It’s lots of fun. And I am currently serving as the senior pastor of Grace Community Church in Allentown, PA, which is a wonderful small little Baptist Church, situated in that city; everyone is leaving New York and Philadelphia, and they’re converging on Allentown.
About my theology, I grew up in a non-denominational Calvinist church. I didn’t even realize until high school when I started wrestling with theology at a deeper level that my church was Calvinist. I remember actually going back and listening to some sermons from my pastor when I knew he preached on Romans 9 and hearing him preach unconditional election and thinking, wow, it just totally went over my head at that point.
But it was in high school and in college that I started to wrestle with theology on a deeper level. I was introduced to guys in the New Calvinist movement, young, restless and Reformed. John Piper in particular. He was one that convinced me that the Bible taught Calvinism, that it was exegetically sound. It was through him I got introduced to Jonathan Edwards and some others. I then went to Grove City College for Biblical studies, followed that by going to Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside [near Philadelphia, PA], and there I was introduced to the Reformers. I already read some Calvin, but I was introduced to Turriten, Owen, and others, as well as to more modern theologians like John Gill and Herman Bavinck. And that really solidified my Reformed convictions.
And funnily enough, it was actually at Grove City and Westminster, which were both Presbyterian schools, that I was introduced to the 1689 London Baptist Confession by reading the Westminster Confession and then finding out the Baptists made a revised version of this, so to speak, a few years later. And I came to love that. My church does not subscribe to it confessionally, but I’m in substantial agreement with it to the point where if you were to go to the back of our sanctuary, we have it out on the table for people to take home. And I regularly reference it in my sermons and teaching. So that’s a little bit about my theology, how I arrived where I did now by the grace of God.
Politically, it’s somewhat a more convoluted story. Maybe. I was predisposed towards liberty my whole life. But I never really had an interest in it until seminary, probably. I never had an interest in politics. Which is odd because my dad’s favorite book is The Road to Serfdom by Hayek and I had seen it on our shelves and he told me I should read it and I just never even picked it up or considered reading it. I also went to Grove City College which is a good school for Austrian economics and I took a Foundations Of Economics course there where I had to read Mises and Rothbard and Menger, and others. But it was just focused on the economic side of things. And I loved it. And I was predisposed to liberty, but I just wasn’t interested in politics. And it wasn’t until I was at seminary that I finally got around to reading The Road to Serfdom. I read Capitalism and Freedom by Friedman and The Law by Bastiat. And you know, my family had told me to read particularly Hayek and Bastiat many years earlier, and I just hadn’t listened. And so that introduced me to libertarianism as a whole. But I found those books compelling and thought provoking, though none of them are in this non-monopolist civil governance frame, exactly.
But significantly, it was around that time I also read The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. Russell Kirk is kind of a classic conservative in many ways, the father of the modern conservative movement, one of them. And that was significant because though he said a lot of good things in that book, I was continually frustrated by the lack of principles. It didn’t seem like it was articulating a view that was built and worked-on, on the basis of first principles. And so it convinced me that maybe conservatism wasn’t going to offer those answers intellectually that I was looking for. Somewhere along the line, probably in 2019, I got listening to Tom Woods and Bob Murphy and their podcast. And from there it was a pretty quick step to starting to read the guys they talked about, that was Rothbard, Hoppe, and some others and I became fully convinced of libertarianism and adopting a non-monopolistic view of civil governance so to speak.
Gregory:
Excellent. The article we’re discussing, Fool’s Gold (question mark), a libertarian analysis of VanDrunen’s account of state legitimacy, was published in May this year in the Christian Libertarian Review. That journal was first published in 2018 and, like this very podcast, is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute. It’s an Open Access, blind reviewed, academic publication and is still accepting submissions for the 2024 volume. Further information about that is in the show notes. The Christian Libertarian Review features scholarly research related to the intersection of Christianity and libertarianism.
Pastor Drummond, let me introduce your article this way. The book Politics after Christendom: Political Theology In A Fractured World, by Dr. David VanDrunen, an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and professor of systematic theology and Christian ethics at Westminster Seminary, California, was published in 2020. It is perhaps the most significant work in Christian political theory in the last 20 years at least. Your article begins with appreciating VanDrunen’s interaction with libertarian writers and libertarianism, and appreciating his genuine treasure of insights from which libertarians can benefit.
In the article, you outline and critique both the biblical and the theologically-based political theoretical arguments VanDrunen presents for the legitimacy of the state. After summarizing his views, you argue three things, it seems to me. First, you say how VanDrunen’s theoretical argument is at odds with or contradicts his view of law, justice and rights. Second, you say how his theoretical argument is also in tension with many of his economic and theological observations. And third, you say how VanDrunen’s biblical argument for state legitimacy fails his own standard for justifying the state. So if that’s correct, let’s briefly cover the third part of the article first.
Can you give us a basic idea of the biblical case VanDrunen presents and how you address it critically?
Taylor:
Sure. So VanDrunen puts forward 6 very brief biblical arguments for the legitimacy of the state. And he does this at the very beginning of his work, chapter one. And to give you a sense of how brief these are, all six arguments take up only about three and a half pages. So this is really just a summary and overview. And my contention is that these six arguments, they might be consistent with the legitimacy of the state, but they don’t entail it, they don’t meet his own standards. So let me say a little bit what I mean there, because later on in his book VanDrunen actually set some pretty high standards.
He articulates two principles from which he draws a conclusion. The first principle is this, that the use or threat of physical coercion against fellow human beings is illegitimate unless justified. So coercion needs to be justified. Then he says, principle two, all actions of government are either overtly coercive or operate at some level under threat of coercion. So he recognizes that the state operates [on the basis of], its bread and butter is coercion. And then he draws this conclusion then the burden of proof for state activity should lie with the government, not the government. It is as an example of coercion something that needs to be justified and unless it’s justified, it’s illegitimate. So I think when you look at his biblical arguments what you can see is that though they might be consistent with the legitimacy of the state, they don’t actually entail it.
And let me give you two examples of this. I’ll give a New Testament example and then an Old Testament example. One of the arguments put forward from the New Testament is that if you look at the Book of Acts Paul submitted to state officials, he asserted his rights as a Roman citizen and even appealed to Caesar. And VanDrunen draws the conclusion this is indirect evidence that Paul and the New Testament view the state, the Roman state, as legitimate.
But I don’t think that necessarily follows, and for a few reasons. First, Paul was primarily called to be the apostle to the Gentiles. When he engaged with secular authorities through the book of what we see is that his overriding principle was that he would be allowed to carry out his mission, this commission that had been given on the Damascus Road, and that he engaged with them accordingly. And so we can see that he didn’t want to get sidetracked from his commission given him by the risen.To be the apostle to the Gentiles. And so when it furthered that commission, he engaged with the state officials trying to stay on their good side because he cannot go to the Gentiles if he’s in jail. And when they were to hinder it [his mission], he actually engaged in what we might think of today’s subversive activities.
An example of that is when he was in Damascus, the king of Damascus issued an arrest warrant, and was seeking to have him arrested, and had people posted at the city gates. And what did Paul do? Well, he was let down in a basket over the city walls at night. In modern terms, we say he was evading arrest. Why? Because his primary commission or calling was to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. That’s what his calling was. And he wasn’t going to let them stop it. And so when viewed in that way, yes, Paul does engage with state officials. He doesn’t seek to subvert them at every turn and call them illegitimate actors because that’s not his point. That’s not his purpose. His purpose is [to be] an apostle to the Gentiles. And that’s what he’s going to stay focused on. So you can easily see why this is. If he had made his primary goal preaching against the Roman Empire and trying to dismantle the political theory that lay behind it, he would quickly have been taken off the scene and the Roman Empire would not look kindly upon that. So that’s an example of a New Testament argument that I just don’t think gets to the conclusion that VanDrunen wants it to get to.
Another example is an Old Testament argument where VanDrunen says if we look at how the Old Testament speaks of these pagan kings in the surrounding nations, it will often refer to them as God’s servants. In particular, Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Jeremiah is called God’s servant in a number of places. And from that he infers that, well, if they are God’s servant, they must be legitimate. God’s people are told to seek the good of the cities in which they are in exile at that time. And so these were legitimate states.
But again, I think that might be consistent with the legitimacy of the state, but it doesn’t actually entail it. It is true God calls Nebuchadnezzar his servant a number of times, and in fact he’s explicitly states that Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian Empire as a whole is his servant in bringing down the covenant curses upon unfaithful Judah, ultimately ending in the destruction of Jerusalem, the carrying off of the people into exile. But Jeremiah goes on, and he is also crystal clear that after Nebuchadnezzar has acted as God’s servant in these things, God is going to punish Nebuchadnezzar for that very act. And we can see this throughout the book of Jeremiah. One example in Jeremiah 25, in verse nine, God says that Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, is my servant and that he will bring Babylon against the land of Judah and its inhabitants. He’s going to use them to judge Judah. But then if you just read a few verses later versus 12 to 14, he prophesied that after the 70 years of exile are completed God is going to punish the king of Babylon and the nation of Babylon for their iniquity, for their sin. And what makes it even more clear is that if you keep reading in Jeremiah, at the very end, Jeremiah ends his book with this extended word of judgment against Babylon in chapters 50 and 51. And there God makes it explicit that the judgment coming upon Babylon is judgment for the very actions they carried out against Judah and against Jerusalem. And we see this because God mentions the temple.
Let me read two verses to flesh this out. Jeremiah 50:28 says this again, speaking about judgment upon Babylon. He says they flee and escape from the land of Babylon to declare in Zion the vengeance of the Lord our God’s, vengeance for his temple. Right? So there’s vengeance for His temple. Another one in Jeremiah 51:11. It says there, sharpen the arrows, take up the shield. The Lord has stirred up the spirit of the king of the Medes, because his purpose concerning Babylon is to destroy it. For that is the vengeance of the Lord, the vengeance for his temple.
And so when we see it in context, yes, Nebuchadnezzar is called God’s servant in carrying out this destruction upon the nation of Judah for their wickedness. But then Jeremiah turns right around and says that God will punish Babylon for that very act. So what we see here is what we see elsewhere, that the pagan kings, they were the instruments in God’s hand providentially, but that did not grant them moral legitimacy for carrying out these real acts of evil, using the providential hand of God so that they could be called his servant and carrying them out. And we see this throughout the Old Testament. You see this again if listeners want to track down another example in Isaiah 10. Just look at 10, how Isaiah speaks about Assyria. Assyria is the rod of God’s anger and that Assyria is also punished for his presumption and for his actions against the nation of Israel.
So that’s just an example. Basically I see these arguments as being plausible but I don’t think they actually entail the conclusion of the legitimacy of the state that VanDrunen needs them to entail to prove his thesis.
Kerry:
That is really interesting. Thank you for explaining that.
Back to the first part of your article, Pastor Drummond, how do you explain VanDrunen’s theologically based theoretical argument for the state or civil government? And how do you primarily critique this argument as inconsistent with his view of law, justice and rights?
Taylor:
Yeah. So I want to begin by commending VanDrunen and for actually offering a theoretical account of state legitimacy, because if you were to pick up your popular book on politics and Christianity, most don’t even do that. Most do not see that this is something that needs to be proven and then attempt to do it. So I think he’s commendable for seeing first that there is a burden of proof upon him and trying to rise to that challenge.
Let me begin by noting also an ambiguity here. VanDrunen doesn’t give a precise definition of the state or the government in his work though he uses the terms like state, government, and civil governance synonymously and you can see it and how he uses them together. And he doesn’t give a precise definition of those terms. He also takes exception to the monopoly status of the state. He says that he thinks that is an error that’s come about in the modern period to view the state as a monopoly. But it’s unclear in his book whether he thinks that he shouldn’t be a monopoly or the state is not in fact a monopoly. And I think actually, if you read what he says about the function of the state and the government, how it works, he’s at least admitting that it functions like a monopoly. Let me give you an example. He says this: government institutions are not natural in the sense that familial institutions are, and they are not voluntary in the sense that enterprise institutions are. Governments claim jurisdiction over every person within their territories [and] do not allow those people to opt out and back up their policies and taxation codes with the threat of physical coercion. So to me, if you have an institution that’s unnatural, it’s not voluntary, it’s over a particular territory and it doesn’t allow people to opt out and in fact threatens them with physical coercion if they try to do that, I don’t know how else to explain that except as a monopoly. So I’m taking him to admit the monopoly status of the state and therefore for his arguments to have relevance for it.
But ultimately I don’t think those arguments work. So let me lay out a little bit of the groundwork. VanDrunen’s whole entire book is framed by the Noahic Covenant. For VanDrunen, the Noahic Covenant is a covenant of common grace. It is universal. That means that encompasses all of creation. It’s preservative, so it restrains evil, but it doesn’t actually provide a resolution to evil. And it’s temporary; it’s put in place only until the second coming of Christ. For VanDrunen, the Noahic covenant is setting the stage [on] which redemption will happen, but it itself does not actually work that redemption.
And when we look at the Noahic covenant, particularly in Genesis 8 and 9, we see three sets of institutions implied. Those are the three he mentioned earlier. First, there’s the familial institution implied in the commission given to Noah and his sons after the Flood to be fruitful and multiply. Right? They’re supposed to again have children and produce offspring, and that implies the legitimacy of the family institution. VanDrunen also sees implicitly here that there are enterprise institutions that are authorized by the Noahic covenant in the command to fill the earth. Not only are Noah and his children to have children, but they’re supposed to have lots of children and fill the earth. That’s going to require all sorts of things. It’s going to require capital accumulation and industry, it’s gonna require protecting yourself against the forces of nature. And all of that implicitly affirms the legitimacy of the enterprise institutions.
But for the focus of this paper, I really focused on that third institution, the judicial institution. And he sees these authorized in Genesis 9, verse six, which reads this way. This is the ESV. Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And VanDrunen argues that here is our authorization for judicial institutions that the Noahic covenant envisions a rectifying retributive justice worked against evil doers, and then implicitly, the institutions necessary to carry that out. One more word on this before we get into the law and his discussion of law, is that VanDrunen sees built upon this judicial institution, this authorization in Genesis 9:6, the existence of negative natural rights. And that first word is really important. Negative rights because, VanDrunen actually very helpfully and persuasively argues that, positive natural rights do not exist, and they cannot fit in the Noahic covenant. And a negative right, to give an example, is a right that doesn’t impose a positive duty on someone else.
For example, if you were to speak of the right to marry. Well, the negative right to marry simply means that no one else has the right to stop you from marrying whoever accepts your proposal, whoever will agree to marry you. No one else has the right to stop that. It implies merely a negative duty of non-interference. But a positive right to marry means that someone has the positive duty of marrying you. If you have the right to marry positively, that means someone else has the corresponding duty to marry you. And VanDrunen rightly recognizes that the Noahic Covenant only envisions negative rights. And this view of negative rights and Noahic justice, these are the standard to which government must conform. He says this: that government agencies and officials have legitimate authority only within the bounds granted by the law, and the law has authority only within the bounds of the natural law. Alright, so that brings up the issue of the law.
Do you have any clarifications I should make on rights before we move into the law?
Gregory:
No, that seems clear so far. I was wondering: I noticed that illustration of negative rights in the article and wondered if… I couldn’t remember if VanDrunen had given a similar illustration. But that was your illustration, right?
Taylor:
That was my illustration that I actually took from Russell Kirk. He gives that illustration; it didn’t originate with me. But everyone can see, it’s pretty obvious, the ridiculousness of a positive right to marry, because it implies a duty of someone to marry you. So I think it’s a helpful one.
So VanDrunen… on the basis of these rights arises this view of law, and VanDrunen views law as essentially a customary legal order. So throughout his work he uses law and customary legal order interchangeably. These are synonymous, and he does give a very helpful definition of these. He says that the customary legal order are those aspects of the customary order that members of the community regard as legally binding. VanDrunen argues that this is something that arises from a number of different sources. It’s polycentric. It’s not like legislation handed down from on high. This arises from the society of which it is a part. It’s also organic. He argues that this is an instance of spontaneous order, and significantly, that law emerges organically, polycentrically and consensually.
I wanted to read a few quotes because he does make a specific point of this. He says this: while legislation makes law by imposing the will of one upon the many, that is, by coercion, the customary order makes law by consent. He says, again, most horrific customs do not enjoy the genuine consent of all parties involved and thus do not fit the idea of customary legal order as I defined it. And he sums up his whole view of the law this way: he says the customary legal order is the law, but essential to that argument was that the customary legal order coordinates a community’s life by free, mutual and consensual interaction. And he goes on to say that unjust law hinders the task that law ought to promote, and thus the human community has no authorization to develop unjust laws.
So he’s laid out his Noahic view of rights and justice and the law that is built upon them. And then he gives his argument proper. And really his argument is very simple. Its substance is contained in one paragraph. So I’ll read that and then break it down. This is the substance of his argument, he says this: if legal authority emerging through the customary order is legitimate then other forms of authority it authorizes are also prima facie legitimate. And among other forms of authority the law may authorize and which it seems likely to authorize is civil government. That is to say, where the customary legal order recognizes certain bodies and offices of government, approves certain means of staffing offices and defers to certain kinds of government action for an acting and defending just rules for the good of the community, these various provisions are legitimate.
That’s the substance of his argument and it takes place in three premises and a conclusion. First, he kind of says the customary legal order is legitimate. Again, full agreement here. Premise two is that the customary legal order may legitimately authorize other authorities. Again, I don’t think anyone needs to have a problem with this. And then in his third premise, he says the customary legal order has legitimately authorized the state. And it’s from that that is able to draw the conclusion that the state is legitimate. So it’s really built upon the customary legal order, which itself is built upon his view of Noahic justice and rights.
So now we’ve set the stage for the critiques. And I have two things that I think are in contradiction here. And ultimately I think that VanDrunen’s analysis of rights and his analysis of law are by and large correct, but they’re actually in contradiction with his argument for the legitimacy of the state. And the first is this, that if the law, the customary legal order, arises consensually from the community, then that law cannot be used to justify non-consensual institutions like the state. In other words, you need to not only say, well, that the customary legal order has authorized the state, you need to give a defense of the morality of that authorization. And VanDrunen, you know, he tacitly admits this. He does say that you can point out societies that have customs that might even be legally enforceable that we view as unjust. Or a hypothetical situation, you could imagine a society in which only a fraction of the population are redheaded and somehow the custom has arisen that is legally permissible to hunt redheads and they are legally forbidden from fighting back or defending themselves in every way. And very clearly, even though that’s a custom of that society, that’s unjust. And so we’d have to say, well, that is not enough just to recognize, yes, this is a custom that has widespread agreement. If consent is essential to the authorization of a legal order, then by definition, we cannot authorize the state because the state is non-consensual.
Let me give an example of that: taxation. It’s one that I think gets to the heart of it. Right? Taxation is not a repayment for a crime. Taxation, as VanDrunen admits, is levied upon everyone within the geographical bounds of the state under the threat of coercion. And you can’t opt out of it. You can’t opt out. This is not the defense of natural rights. It’s not by consent because there’s a threat of coercion there, and it’s not punishment for a prior crime. And so it doesn’t seem to me that the customary legal order can actually authorize this because it goes against the nature of the customary legal order itself.
Another thing that that that shows this kind of contradiction is if the customary legal order is consensual and consent is necessary to it and essential to it, as VanDrunen says it is, then the very existence of anarchists and others in a society that do not consent to the legitimacy of the state would disprove the consensual nature of the state and therefore, as VanDrunen says, that the state would not have the genuine consent of all parties involved. And we just see this, not only in anarchists, but anyone who wouldn’t pay taxes unless there’s a threat of coercion, well they’re not giving their genuine consent. They’re only doing it because there is that threat of physical coercion that if you don’t pay, you’re going to get locked in a cage. And so I think there’s a contradiction here that the customary legal order has consent right at its heart, but the state has coercion right at its heart. And these two, you can’t mix them. And so it’s illegitimate to say the customary legal order authorizes the state because it can’t do so.
And that brings me to the next contradiction I see here. Built upon that, I think there’s a contradiction between VanDrunen’s account of negative natural rights and his argument for state legitimacy. And I could formalize this argument in four premises and a conclusion. So VanDrunen, sorry, this is my argument critiquing his. Premise one: natural law establishes negative rights and prohibits their violation. I think VanDrunen would wholeheartedly agree. Premise two: the customary legal order has no authority to violate the natural law. VanDrunen states as much in his work. Premise three: the customary legal order cannot legitimately authorize violations of natural rights. That’s really a restatement of premise two, but being a little more specific. Premise four: the state by definition involves the violation of natural rights. The conclusion I draw from that is that the customer order cannot legitimately authorize the state because it is a violation of natural rights.
Now I expect that VanDrunen would object to my premise four, that the state by definition involves the violation of natural rights. But we should remember the burden of proof rests on him, right? He’s the one that already articulated the principle that all coercion is illegitimate unless justified and all government actions are coercive or operate under the threat of coercion. Therefore, he’s accepted the burden of proof that lies with those seeking to justify that coercion. But this cannot be justified on the basis of natural rights. Let me go back to that example of taxation. Taxation is not in any way a defense of the negative natural rights of the citizens. It’s not a repayment for a crime. And so it can’t fit in the category of retributive or rectifying justice. There’s no wrong that is being righted by taxation, unless you want to go the route of arguing that everyone subject to taxation is already a criminal and that this is retributive justice. But I don’t think anyone wants to go there. Certainly VanDrunen doesn’t want to go down that route. But if the state is only authorized to use rectifying retributive justice, remember based on Genesis 9:6, then it can’t authorize taxation, because not everyone is a criminal. They’ve not violated someone’s rights. This is not the equivalent of paying someone back for damage you’ve done to them or to their property. Taxation is fundamentally different. Moreover, remember that the state doesn’t allow you to opt out. It’s not even that it allows you to opt out of this system. And VanDrunen admits that. He acknowledges that the state claims this right exclusively. And it doesn’t allow you to say, you know what, I’m going to take my money elsewhere. And if opting out doesn’t violate someone’s rights, but the state does not allow you to opt out, then the state is violating your negative natural rights, and it’s doing so as a monopoly.
And so it seems to me, I agree with VanDrunen’s account of natural rights, I agree with his account of the law, but those things totally undermine his argument for state legitimacy. And because he’s shouldered the burden of proof, I think I can say that he has not met his own requirements to justify his argument.
Gregory:
Yeah, I think what VanDrunen’s discussion really needs is a clearer, more precise distinction between just and unjust coercion. And you quote some statements he makes from an article that he draws on for some particular section of the book, I forget, his protectionist article, perhaps that’s in Chapter 11. But in any case, there, he seems to make a statement that specifies what we would call the principle of non-aggression, the illegitimacy of the initiation of coercion against other persons and their property, or their property. And in his whole discussion of the customary legal order and the whole basis of law and how law cannot legitimately authorize injustice, it seems like distinguishing between what then is legitimate coercion and what’s illegitimate coercion, how we can make that distinction based on the idea of justice, and then thus arriving at the nonaggression principle essentially (which he somewhat hints at throughout the book, throughout Politics after Christendom) makes a little bit clearer in some of the articles that he had written that he draws on for some of his material there, but introducing that distinction I feel like would have clarified his whole discussion.
And basically he would have had to more clearly come [to a libertarian anarchist view]… if he recognized the monopoly of the state as inherent and as a violation of the nonaggression principle, which it is, or of basic justice… you know, so in some ways I feel like VanDrunen is what we might call an anonymous anarchist. Alright, so we’ll see. We’ll see if we can bring him around to explicit libertarian anarchy.
Taylor:
I think he does have that quote you’re mentioning from the “Protectionist Purpose of Law,” which is published in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. And yeah, he says there that political power may be wielded to defend against those who violate others rights. But it leads to the question then of, OK, if it’s for this purpose only done anything you’re going to say that the state has the right to do, you’ve got to be able to trace that back and say, well, and that’s grounded in these negative natural rights and it’s not violating them on other fronts. It’s not just that well, that’s good for this person’s rights. But you know, someone else’s over there. Importantly VanDrunen recognizes that negative rights don’t come into conflict the way that positive rights do. Negative rights are universal and they’re reciprocal in the way that positive rights aren’t.
And so I would love to see him engage with that and perhaps engage with some of the literature on the nonaggression principle, and hopefully he would move in our direction. I like that phrase anonymous anarchist.
Gregory:
Or the accidental anarchist.
Taylor:
I doubt he would use that language, but I do think his book is very much moving in the direction of liberty. And so I think even though we don’t agree with him in all his conclusions, I would recommend, heartily, that libertarians pick up his book and read it because you’re gonna learn a lot. And it’s actually Chapter 11, it’s going to firm-up your foundation and be a great use for you.
Gregory:
Yeah, I think this part of your article, this part of your critique and pointing out the contradictions in what he’s laying as a foundation of justice and law with which we agree, but how that doesn’t actually end up authorizing the state in a more precise definition as we understand it –I feel like it’s such a great insight into the both the value of his work and into the actual conclusions we should come to that lead to libertarianism, libertarian anarchism.
Well, lastly, Pastor Drummond, in your article, you also mentioned how VanDrunen discusses the rightful extent of civil government authority in terms of three categories of functions, namely the so-called protectionism, perfectionism, and service provision, we could say provision-ism maybe.
How do you summarize what VanDrunen says about these? And briefly, what tensions do you say his views present for his argument for the legitimacy of states?
Taylor:
Yeah. So VanDrunen adopts what he calls a protectionist view of the bounds of state authority, and that he views that the state has authority to enforce rectifying justice. And by that he means that has authority to uphold rights and punish their violations. And so he views things like law enforcement, national defense, those types of things being in line with that. And much of what he says is actually in line with libertarianism, except for his provision that the state is doing these things. We also believe in the law and the enforcement of rights and punishing their violations. That’s all perfectly consistent with libertarianism. And actually VanDrunen admits that in theory all violations of rights could be handled privately and he admits that in theory, though he’s going to reject that ultimately for pragmatic issues. But he adopts, he calls it, a protectionist purpose of the government, so its job is to protect natural rights and punish their violations.
And he critiques what he sees as two other views. One is perfectionism and that views the government right not only to protect its citizens rights, but the government is authorized to make its citizens better. Perfectionism views the government’s job to be the moral improvement of its citizens. And when VanDrunen looks at this, he just sees it as a very uncomfortable fit with the Noahic covenant. He notes that the sinfulness of man is a reason to reject this, because what grounds do we have to believe that sinful human beings put in positions of power will be able to actually accomplish the moral betterment of those given to their care? But he also rejects it under the fact that the Noahic covenant is universal but has very narrow ends. It’s not aimed at the moral perfection of those involved in it. And it’s also a covenant of common grace, and it authorized common grace judicial institutions that are common to Christian and nonChristian societies. So ultimately though he doesn’t really give a theoretically conclusive argument against perfectionism. He says the posture should be away from that because of these reasons: because of the sinfulness of man, because of the common grace and the Noahic covenant, all policies should be based on protectionist grounds, not perfectionist grounds.
And then he moves on to consider things that don’t properly fall into either one of those categories. And that’s the provision of different services, for example, the providing of roads or trash collection or these things that aren’t really offered for the moral betterment of the citizens. And they’re not really protecting natural rights. And so these are just services the government might provide. And VanDrunen admits, at the outset, that service provision cannot be justified on the basis of natural rights because natural rights are negative. No one has a positive right to a nicely paved road, which you might have. I’m in Pennsylvania; our positive right to a nicely paved road is one full of potholes. That’s what we have here. But he says that ultimately there are some dangers in service provision. Things could get politicized. I think our education system. How much of a battle is it over education because it’s so politicized? He also says there’s a danger in human sinfulness again rearing its ugly head. You’ve put these things into the hands of a small group of sinful human beings and the likelihood they’re going to abuse their power is great. And also recognizes that when you centralized service provision, you’re going to run into inefficiencies. He recognizes that the market is a very efficient way of providing goods and services in a society. And when you remove that, the free market and the aspect of competition, you’re going to see some lags in how services are provided.
And ultimately, I think these three things, human sinfulness, politicization, and market efficiency, they’re in significant tension with his argument for legitimacy of the state. You know, for example, politicized things, if it’s a danger to have important things be politicized, education, like the family, well, you could just add to that list other things that are very important, like law, defense, you know, law enforcement, the defense of rights. Those things are very important. And so the danger of politicization is there as well. We don’t want those things to become politicized and have people squabbling over the levers of power there.
Similarly with human sinfulness. Humans are sinful. Power corrupts. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely, and VanDrunen recognizes that governments are some of the worst perpetrators of evil. And therefore when we’re considering whether the government should provide this or that service, he says we should go with the private one because it’s dangerous to centralized power in the hands of a few because of human sinfulness. But if that’s important for things like the provision of roads –which actually VanDrunen gives a brief argument for private roads, which is a wonderful thing– and it’s true of trash collection, then how much more true is it of those things that are even more important? Like law enforcement, right? And the provision of law; these are things that are so important that the danger of human sinfulness is so much more of a danger. It’s worse to have the law enforcement in the hands of a few sinful human beings than it is trash collection because the damage that can be done is so much greater.
And the same thing with market efficiency. He recognizes that markets are efficient. There’s a possibility of loss. There’s innovation, there’s competition. All these things that work to make the market so efficient and he recognizes that whenever you remove that innovation that comes from competition and freedom, you’re going to get a lag in efficiency.
Just one example of this is for everyone to think of the last time you went to the DMV. I can guarantee you no one went to the DMV and thought, wow, this is a wonderfully efficient institution. You went to get your drivers license renewed and probably sat in line for an hour to then work through paperwork with some employee who didn’t know what they were doing. And that’s because there’s no incentive to get better. There’s no incentive, there’s no competition to pull away business from government provided services. But this applies equally to all government services. If it’s important to keep government hands out of the provision of the grocery stores and food, because we recognize that would be a bad thing, how important is it to keep that market efficiency functioning in things like law enforcement and defense in these areas where the the need for quality service is so much higher because the cost is so much higher?
And so ultimately, I think he makes some wonderful insights about politicization, about human sinfulness, about the inefficiency of coercion. But I just think that he needs to apply those as well to these other areas of government service provision, not just the ones about providing roads or things like that. He needs to apply that to, particularly, to law enforcement and defense as well, because those are the key protectionist provisions that he wants to argue for. And so I think if we take these seriously, we’re gonna come to the conclusion that a private solution is always better, even from these theological and economic insights. A private solution is better. It’s theoretically possible, and it’s going to provide these things at a better quality without violating the natural negative rights of anyone else.
Kerry:
Thank you so much. One thing that came to mind as you were articulating these last points about all the services provided by the state: I’m reminded of why we as Reformed Libertarians draw a distinction between the state and civil governance. It’s very easy to think about how politicizing education or healthcare or some of those things that is still fairly easy to think of as being provided for better by the market, why politicizing those things is bad. But we haven’t quite gotten to the point where people understand politicizing civil governance, and meshing those two things together [is bad]. And so understanding that we can have proper civil governance without politicizing it and that is a way to get it out of the hands of the monopoly state.
So I want to thank you, Pastor Drummond, for coming on. We really appreciated talking with you about this really important article. We do hope that listeners will read your article. We also want to recommend reading the book Politics after Christendom. Despite these critiques we’re offering or that you’re offering, we do think that VanDrunen put together some good work there.
So how can listeners find out more about your church and contact you or follow your work?
Taylor:
If you’re interested in my church, which is Grace Community Church of Allentown, gracecommunityallentown.org is our website or you can search it on whatever search engine you use. And if they want to contact me, I’m in the Facebook groups that they’re probably part of if listening to this podcast, so you can find me there. More germane to this topic, I do have a substack which I periodically write on, not very frequently, but when I have the time called Thearchy. So you can search for that there you’ll find some of my musings about topics like these and others, if you wanted to follow it.
Gregory:
We’ll put those links in the shownotes. We should say that not long ago you were able to send this article to Dr. VanDrunen. I’ve also had some friendly-critical correspondence with him on these issues, so we’re hopeful for further fruitful conversation with VanDrunen and about his work. Thanks so much.
