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by Andrew Sandlin

Aside from Romans 13 and Exodus 20, perhaps the most important text in the Scriptures relating to the issue of civil government is 1 Samuel 8, in which God communicates to Samuel his response to Israel's request for a king like the nations about them. In a curt rebuff, Jehovah states in essence: "Fine: if you want a king, I will give you a king. You have rejected me; therefore, I will give you a merely human king and all the bureaucracy that such a monarch entails. But know this: when you bitterly complain to me after your king's bureaucracy reduces not only the size of your wealth, but also the size of your household, my ears will be deaf to your cries. You have rejected my decentralized political order; consequently, I will reject your bitter complaints at the burdens of the centralized political order entailed by the human bureaucracy for which you lust" (cf. 1 Sam. 8:7-18).

God's ideal arrangement for civil government is a highly decentralized, family-anchored, appellate-court based political system (Deut. 1:9-18). The Jewish theocracy instituted in Saul's reign was a concession to the requests of a rebellious, worldly people. God's ideal plan for the state is maximum individual freedom, strong family government out of which grows a sound ecclesiastical government, and a civil government whose responsibilities are limited to protecting life, property, and religious freedom. This is an aspect of what I call Christian libertarianism, and it is what the Bible teaches.

Extensive taxation constitutes theft by legal coercion. God required Samuel to tell Israel that the king for whom they lusted would take as much as one tenth of their possessions in order to maintain his monarchy (1 Sam. 8:15). Even this proportion borders on excess, since it was God's concession to Israel's rebellious lust that elicited this bureaucratic arrangement. We can be certain that any civil government that taxes its citizens at a rate greater than 10% is a larcenous, thieving state.

It is imbalanced merely to criticize tyrannical states for the sin of excessive taxation; as in the case of Old Testament Israel, much modern excessive taxation occurs as a result of the faithlessness of an apostate populace--including the professed church. For example, a Reformed denomination in the British Isles assaulted theonomy on the grounds that it is a non-biblical, free market economic program covered by a thin theological veneer. It is much more accurate to say that this church wants to retain its lust for the spoils of state-coerced theft under the guise of an assault on theonomy.

Citizens, even supposedly good Christians, have become so accustomed to state largess that any suggestion identifying it as violating God's law or that it should be eliminated meets with, at best, blank horror and, at worst, stern disapproval. A simple verbal test suffices to prove this. Ask any Christian if he would be willing to undergo the following arrangement: get rid of all his taxes except for the barest minimum to maintain a decentralized civil government, and at most an armed defense. Tell him he would then be responsible for his and his family's own health care, retirement income, formal education, elderly care, road access (small tolls paid to private owners), nature recreation (fees for visiting privately owned beaches and parks), and so forth. In other words, ask him if he would be willing to pay for privately what his taxes are presently used to finance. In simpler terms, would he prefer that a civil government steal upwards of half of his income to maintain a bureaucracy and furnish third-rate services that he should be willing to voluntarily pay somebody in the private sector to operate in a competitive market guaranteeing better quality? Most would respond, "Absolutely not!"

These people suffer from an economic slave mentality. They lust for the guarantees of state tyranny, which they infinitely prefer to the freedom of private enterprise. They fall under the spell of the Marxist dreams of statist utopias and, as the case with ancient Israel, God has given them their wish. These same individuals will then loudly complain on April 15th every year of the extent to which the civil government seizes their income, yet they only have themselves to blame for this tyrannical statism. Slave mentalities necessarily lead to slave states.

Only when Christian men return to Christian libertarianism--maximum individual freedom under God's law--will they gradually and peacefully throw off the shackles of a tyrannical state. But they will never throw off the shackles of a tyrannical state until they throw off the shackles of a slave mentality, which prefers the security of tyranny to the risk of freedom.

Secure men suffer from tyrants. Free men enjoy their freedom.

Andrew Sandlin is an ordained minister and the president of the National Reform Association. He also serves as the executive director of Chalcedon, and editor of the Chalcedon Report, and the Journal of Christian Reconstruction.

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