Nineteenth Century Conservative Protestant Theory and the Biblical View of Property

0:00Okay, the subject of the thinkers that I'm going to talk about in most of this paper sort of falls somewhere in the middle after Calvin, but before Rockefeller. So I'm going to talk about primarily 19th century conservative Protestant theologians and how their thinking was shaped by their conservative Protestant theological tradition up to that point, and also Scripture itself. And I think what made me want to revisit this literature, I've drawn upon this for a book that I've hopefully am close to completing, is with the election of Obama, it seems like the, what we call the religious left is feeling their oats.

0:52Here I present to you, a series of white papers, specifically people like Jim Wallace and Sonjeners,]. a blog devoted to faith-based interventionism called God's Politics. And recently they provided an excellent foil, they provided a values audit of Obama's budget. He claims to have coined the phrase, he says, Wallis does, and it's entered the lexicon of the value audit of a budget. This is what he says about, this is what Wallace says about Obama's budget, quote, it contains major investments in the president's three priorities, significantly expanding healthcare coverage, focusing on climate change reduction and developing renewable energy and investing in education, early childhood programs, strengthening and reforming public schools, expanded opportunities for college, all of which will benefit low income people.

1:41So it's chock full of values, but one value that both Obama's budget and Wallace ignores And this is of course the value of private property. So what I wanted to do was to provide sort of a comparison and juxtaposition of or just use the sort of the current say religious left Protestant interventionist perspective on property and compare that to and show how that's in opposition to an important strain of 19th century American Protestant thought and scriptural passages that comment on the and the Ethics of Property. Historically, you can trace back, clear back to the Gospels, a line of thought that has affirmed and defended private property, certainly in general.

2:29This begins in the patriarchs. You also find it in the broader scholastic tradition. And also, as Timothy Terrell just pointed out, at least inconsistently in the literature of the reformers, This line of thought had some impact on 19th century Protestants, both of whom saw themselves as theological descendants of reform thinking, Calvin, Luther, etc., and also those who didn't really think of themselves as much, the Baptist tradition. The first 19th century Protestant theologian I want to comment on is Francis Wayland. He was a Baptist minister and educator who was president of Brown University for 28 years.

3:20He, I believe, was born late 1790s and was highly influential. He explained the Christian ethic of property in his treatise on ethics called The Elements of Moral Science. Science, and what turns out to be a common approach amongst Protestant Christian theologians writing about the ethics of property, Whelan viewed the right of property as a divine ordinance. Not just a positive convention, but a divine ordinance that God reveals to us in three ways. Our conscience, the general consequences of society either embracing or rejecting property, and Holy Scripture itself. For instance, all people, he argues in his book, all people as soon as they are old enough to begin to think, perceive the difference between mine and yours.

4:08Possessive pronouns are used in all known languages and people naturally feel that whoever violates property rights or their own property rights is wrong and unjust. Secondly, Waylon points out God teaches us that the ethics of property, he teaches us that private property is ethical through the observed consequences of either upholding or violating the right to property. Weyland notes that in those lands without the right to property, people tend to labor only enough to manage their own individual subsistence. They tend to neither accumulate capital, goods, nor plan for the future. And consequently, without private property, quote, the human race must perish or exist in wretchedness. Weyland further developed private property rights, defended private property rights and developed its implications for economic society in his Elements of Political Economy.

5:01This work was the leading economics text written by an American in its day and was so popular that taking into account total college enrollment at the time, Weyland's book had more per capita sales than Paul Samuelson's economics. So it was pretty popular and influential text. Well, in that book, Whalen explains that the motive to productively use capital can be destroyed by either common ownership of property or by theft, and Whalen shrewdly notes that theft can be perpetuated or perpetrated by either individuals or by the state, which he classifies as the most destructive form of theft, is when the state gets involved through Confiscatory Taxation and other means of restricting the use of private property.

5:49Wayland was a group of Northern pre-Civil War Protestant thinkers that a recent historian of thought has termed the clerical economists. This group included Wayland, John McVicker, an Episcopal priest who taught political economy at Columbia College for 40 years, Alonzo Potter, and an important Episcopal bishop and Henry Bethaic, a Presbyterian layman who taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1836 to 1855. All these northern Protestants promoted a high view of private property and free economic policy basically with certain exceptions here and there. And so that there was this tradition of at least northern Protestant thought that affirmed Private Property and applied it in a way that promoted a free economic policy, free market economic policy.

6:47Another noteworthy Protestant who advocated the ethical imperative of private property was the important Southern Baptist pastor, educator, and chaplain to the Confederacy as he was known, Basil Manley. Manley noted that God instituted private property and consequently God's social order necessitates The Defense of the Right to Private Property. In a sermon that he preached on a fast day at the request of the governor of Alabama, he told the congregation that, quote, the rights of property are established by the creator. Respect for them is essentially not only to the well-being of society, but to its very existence. If we don't have private property, we have no society. Now, Manley was important not just as a pastor, but also as an educator.

7:33Later, he was the president of the University of Alabama for many years. As the president of that institution, he taught political economy and he used Whelan's text as the text for the class. And he followed very closely Whelan's perspective. So Whelan was primarily a pro-property, free-market guy. Finally, these lectures are also pro-property, free market in perspective. Not unlike Mises, Manly believed that private property was, quote, co-evil and commensurate with any step in social progress. Baptists and Episcopalians did not have a corner on the ethics of private property.

8:18Moving past the Civil War, Charles Hodge, the towering Northern Presbyterian theologian, also provided an important argument for private property. In his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, which was published in the 1870s, when he comments, he goes through and comments on all of the different commandments that was presented by Moses. In the Commandment Against Theft and the Commandment Against Stealing, he says very explicitly and matter of factly, God has instituted a divine right to property. And he goes on to elucidate in this section that the violations of the right to property include theft, fraud, and indeed communism, noting wisely that quote the right of property is ordained by God and cannot be violated without incurring his displeasure and the certain inflictions of his divine punishment. Southern Presbyterian theologian and pastor R.L. Dabney also concurred. He, similar to Whalen, he defended private property in a later book, probably the latest book that I quote from. His Practical Philosophy was published in the 1890s.

9:33He said that I'm going to provide three lines of argument to defend property. First, the experimental and prudential. Second, the scriptural. And third, the logical and ethical. So it's a sort of triumvirate that's broadly similar to Wayland's perspective. Dabney explained that all civilizations have recognized private property as a basic Principle for the Development of Society and as such part of the natural order. While criticizing the Romantic poets, as he called them, who longed to return to a property less state of nature, sort of like Rousseau, he explained that, quote, the scanty products of the spontaneous powers of nature can never be increased until the institution of private property is made permanent and sacred. The mythical poets were simply silly. Their age of community was not the golden, but the iron age, the age of squalid want and hard savage misery.

10:22It is the institution of private property which brings the Golden Age, her ever-increasing abundance for her happy and multiplying children and securing the enjoyment of her blessings. The Christian view of property begins with the understanding that we hold property as stewards of God, who ultimately owns all there is. In fact, the whole earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, is what Psalm 24.1 tells us. So our property is God's gift, and this is how Dabney perceived it, that property is Dabney also wisely notes that an existential fact of the created order is that use of this property is individual. Therefore, if God has given man the earth to use for his glory, it must be that he has distributed particular units of the earth to individual persons so that they can use them to fulfill God's cultural mandate.

11:15Now I go on in the paper to then point out that not only do these Protestant thinkers link the right to property to sort of our natural conscience and to the consequences of having property or not having property, but also very explicitly to Scripture. And so I go into a section where I talk about what I call the biblical view of property or the Christian view of property. Wayland, Hodge and Dabney all appealed explicitly to The biblical texts in their arguments for property and clearly we find in the Old Testament many precepts against acts of theft, you know, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill. The prohibition against theft is also affirmed, however, in the New Testament where Jesus indicates that not stealing is a commandment to be kept by the rich young ruler.

12:04The biblical ethic, there's other passages there you don't have time to go into. The biblical ethic forbidding theft includes abstaining from fraud. We find in Proverbs verses like this, A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight. Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike, an abomination to the Lord. Abomination, by the way, is a bad thing. The encroachment of someone else's property by moving recognized property boundaries is likewise prohibited. And additionally, besides outright acts of theft, The New Testament also instructs that the Christian ethic of property includes the right to voluntary exchange, and this is implied by passages that teach that being secure in one's property includes the The ability to do with that property what one wants as it relates to interpersonal relations provides he does not aggress against someone else.

13:20Me, Calvin Beiser, has written some really good stuff on this. In Acts chapter 5, for instance, which is a passage that a lot of interventionists and even socialists like to appeal to as a justification for intervention or socialism, in Acts chapter In chapter 5 you find the historical account of the demise of Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit and what happens of course is that Ananias with the full knowledge of his wife sells a piece of property and asserts that they were giving all of the proceeds to the Church in Jerusalem all the while holding back some revenue for themselves and the Apostle Peter confronted Ananias and says, quote, while it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?

14:09This is your property. Why did you do this? He says, you have not lied to men, but to God. And then Ananias is struck dead, and his wife comes back, says essentially the same thing as Ananias did, and God dispatches with her as well. So Peter expressively says that their property was theirs to do with as they saw fit. In Matthew chapter 20, we find a parable about the Kingdom of God God, where Jesus tells the story of a master who hired different laborers to work different amounts of time but paid them the same amount of money. In response to complaints from the laborers who worked the longest but received the same pay as those who worked the shortest, the master who represents God says, quote, friend, I am doing you no wrong.

14:54Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity? The moral force of this parable relies on the acceptance of the principle that the owner of property can do with it what he wants as long as he does not violate someone else's right to property. As Weisner concludes, quote, justice in economic relationships requires that people be permitted to exchange and use what they own freely so long as in so doing they do not violate others' rights. Now I would not say that the main point of the parable was to defend property rights, but I would say that the moral force of the parable as it applies to the kingdom relies on the acceptance of the ethics of private property.

15:58So how does this apply to policy in general? Well the 19th century Protestant theologians recognized that ethics of property applies to economics by mandating a free society, a free market, a market in which people have the right to engage in voluntary exchange. The limits against theft apply not just to individuals, but also to the ruler. Individuals who are not allowed to engage in theft, it is true that the Biblical ethic of property means that the rulers are not allowed to engage, or individuals are not allowed to engage in theft. It also implies that the state is not allowed to engage in theft. And also, if the The right to property implies that individual citizens have the right to use their property freely as they so choose, including engage in voluntary exchange, that the state has no ethical right to be able to stamp out voluntary exchange.

17:09So the implications of the Christian doctrine regarding private property are relatively straightforward. As Wayland defines it, the right to property, quote, is the right to use something in such Christian manner as I choose, provided I do not so use it as to interfere with the rights of my neighbor. Later, he also says this, quote, each one has a right to use what is his own exactly as he pleases. If society interfere by directing the manner in which he shall appropriate it, it is an act of injustice. Good intentions, therefore, on the part of any Christian to achieve a social end are not enough. A truly Christian economic policy must not merely be seeking ends that are perceived as desirous or even specifically Christian.

18:12An economic policy that is in agreement with Christian ethics must also achieve its ends with ethical means. The theology and ethics of a diverse group of 19th century American Protestant theologians and pastors provide good counsel as we attempt to accomplish divinely sanctioned ends using divinely sanctioned means. It is understandable that Christians feel compassion when others less fortunate must endure harsh working conditions or find themselves in bankruptcy or must try to support a family on what we think are very low wages. The Christian Ethnic of Private Property, however, requires that we do not resort to acts of violent aggression or theft in order to alleviate the suffering of the downtrodden. Just as we are not allowed to use the owner of the state to force people to go to church, we are not allowed to force people to give to others.

18:57We are not allowed to use the power of the state to keep people from entering into voluntary contracts. We are called to be charitable to those who need it. We are called to be merciful to the poor and see that widows and orphans are not oppressed. Justice demands, however, that we use our own resources to help those in need and to convince others voluntarily to do so. Lobbying for government intervention in the economy to do by force or to use force to force other people to do so, lobbying for government intervention in the economy to force others to do so, violates the right to property and therefore violates the Christian ethic.