God and America

You and Your Things

Imagine it’s Friday night and you’re working late at a company that does things the old fashioned way. Your employer handles lots of cash, and it’s your job to make the bank deposit, which you typically do on the way home. Only today the car is in the shop. You missed the bus that goes by your neighborhood, and you’re not sure if there will be another one tonight. There’s a train that runs in the general direction of home, but you’ve never ridden it before and from the map it appears as though the closest stop is a good mile or more from your house. And it’s not the best part of town.

You don’t have enough money for a cab, and you don’t feel right about dipping into the company’s bank bag for a personal expense. You decide to take the train and walk the rest of the way.

At your stop you notice that the platform is empty, the streets are darker than those in your neighborhood and it’s eerily quiet. Home is several blocks away. You only know two streets that will take you there, Maple and Elm, but you’ve never been down either one. But you have heard of the neighborhood, Pottersville, and what you know about it is not good. In fact, one of the two streets has the highest crime rate in town, but you can’t remember which. And now that you think about it, you’ve read some articles about Pottersville, and recall that the three most prevalent crimes on the street whose name you can’t remember are assault and battery, strong-armed robbery of company bank deposits, and murder. You now wish you’d dipped into the company cash and refilled the kitty later.

Maple and Elm look identical. The houses on each are indistinguishable, the lighting poor and the distance to your front door the same no matter which route you take.

Your goal (end state) is to make it home without being murdered, assaulted or robbed. In other words, you want to be safe in your person and in your things (you know, the reason Smaller Man, Medium-sized Man, Bigger Man, Bigger Man’s Cousin and Hungry Woman decided to exchange the unbridled liberty of the state of nature for the security of civil society).

And for purposes of this example, assume you don’t believe in God, never had any interest in religion, and don’t want to be preached to by anyone who does.

One of the two routes you could take will almost certainly guarantee you will be the victim of a violent crime, but you have no idea which route that is. You take a deep breath as you are about to launch on what could be the last mile of your life. But right before you do, out of nowhere you remember one thing—and one thing only—about either of the streets. You think you recall reading somewhere that everyone on Elm Street professes to be an evangelical Christian. Which route are you taking?

“Oh, no! What will people think?!” Let me make this even easier. You don’t have to talk to a pollster, you’re not part of a focus group, no one is watching and no one will ever know the route you took, unless you take Maple and end up on the late news crime report. It’s just you, two darkened, identical streets and one piece of information you know about the “culture” of one of them. Your goal is to make it home alive and with the company deposit.

If you chose Elm Street, why? Did you flip a coin? Or did you use what you know about Christianity, even as an ardent non-believer, to your direct and immediate benefit in furtherance of your strategic objective to make it home alive and with the money? If you did, you just “leveraged” Christianity as a non-Christian to get exactly what you wanted. You knew enough about what Christians believe to understand that they claim to love their neighbors as themselves, and in your situation, you concluded that such an organizing principle furthered your strategic objective. You’re fine and the Christians of Elm Street are fine. You could have chosen Maple, but better the angels you know than the potential devils you don’t. The State has done its job, the only job it was created to do because nature couldn’t. The social contract you never signed and the arrangement you were born into has finally worked.

Welcome to the secular benefits of Christianity. There’s more.