Religion stands up to Big Brother - Christian Libertarians oppose pornography and drug abuse and government intervention to prevent their pervasiveness; includes analysis of the work of Reverend Robert Sirico and the Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 7, 1993 | by Richard Miniter

Summary: Although confined for now to intellectual circles, the Christian libertarian movement has the potential to make a political impact equal to that of the religious right. These libertarians abhor drug use and pornography, but believe the government shouldn't regulate such social ills, and their laissez-faire views extend to economics and foreign affairs.

Like most religious leaders, the Rev. Robert Sirico warns his flock about the dangers of illegal drug use. He formed the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty partly to push for drug policies that would make innercity streets safe again. But Sirico's approach is a little unorthodox: He thinks drugs ought to be legalized.

"If God made the heavens and the Earth by his mere word, and created man and woman free to either damn themselves or find redemption," asks Sirico, a Roman Catholic priest in Grand Rapids, Mich., "then where does the government get off" regulating nonviolent behavior such as drug use? Though he doesn't condone drug use, Sirico thinks the government shouldn't regulate behavior that harms only consenting adults.

Sirico, a Paulist, is one of a growing number of religious leaders and churchgoers who hope to reverse what they see as America's moral decline -- but they don't want the government to help. They call themselves Christian libertarians, and as a group they are hard to pigeonhole. They believe in God and the free market. In their ranks are ministers who abhor pornography but don't want to enlist the government's help to stop it. They are critical of moral relativism, sexual promiscuity and an active U.S. foreign policy. Christian libertarians, both Catholic and Protestant, want the government to safeguard only life and property and to leave moral instruction to the clergy and volunteer groups such as the Salvation Army and Alcoholics Anonymous. They believe the government should ban abortion, though they worry about how it would enforce such a ban without violating basic civil liberties.

These attitudes put them firmly out of step with the religious right, which is comfortable using government power to legislate morality on issues such as homosexuality and creationism, and with major religious organizations such as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Churches, which have long called for political action on a range of social issues, from poverty to the environment.

Founded in 1990, Sirico's Acton Institute, with an annual budget of about $500,000, is winning the support of an increasing number of business leaders, including Amway co-founder Richard DeVos. With a handful of paid staff members, the Acton Institute is challenging the intellectual consensus long held in religious circles that socialism is morally superior to capitalism.

In fact, Sirico contends, his views on capitalism are "much more controversial in religious circles" than his views on drug legalization. This is strange, he says, because the vilification of business by some Catholic leaders is responsible for driving many people away from the church. "I hear it all the time" from lapsed Catholics, he says.

On the morality of capitalism, Sirico argues that "the free market is morally neutral; its morality [rests] upon the morality of the people engaged in the process" of buying and selling. The Bible endorses neither capitalism nor socialism outright, he says, but some political systems are more consistent with biblical teachings than others.

The Acton Institute is named after Lord John Acton, a 19th century English classical liberal and devout Catholic who is best known for the phrase, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Though led by a Paulist priest, the Acton Institute is not a strictly Catholic enterprise, Sirico says. "We are ecumenical and reach out to people of all faiths."

It would seem that Christian libertarians could find common ground with the politically powerful religious right on the issue of government intervention against abortion and on free market economics, to which the religious right is generally friendly. But Christian libertarians extend the idea of laissez-faire to social issues -- an area in which the religious right has an extensive legislative agenda. Churchgoing conservatives usually have no qualms about calling for economic deregulation while at the same time asking the government to ban drugs, sodomy, pornography, funding of indecent art, and a host of other things they regard as social ills. And they do so "without addressing or even recognizing any contradiction between their positions," says Doug Bandow, a member of the nondenominational, evangelical Christian Assembly Center in Vienna, Va., and author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics.

The argument made by Bandow, who is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a syndicated columnist for Copley News Service, finds some support on the left. "I think [Christian libertarians] are very consistent in a way that liberals and conservatives aren't -- they don't want the government involved," says Arthur McGovern, a philosophy professor at the University of Detroit Mercy and self-described "contemporary liberal."