As a former parishioner of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Denver who has had the pleasure of attending scores of masses presided over by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, I can personally attest to the great moral strength, courage, and wisdom of the archbishop. It was for this reason that I eagerly awaited the release of Archbishop Chaput's new book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life, which was released this month.
I was anxious to read the book for a more personal reason as well, stemming from a brief email exchange between the archbishop and me that occurred approximately a year ago. I had written to the archbishop in the hope that he could explain to me how Christians could morally countenance the practice of taxation by states. I said that it appeared to me that taxation was morally synonymous with robbery, (since taxation necessarily involves taking men's justly earned property by force and without their consent), and thus ought to be condemned by Christians as a violation of the 7th commandment. I asked the archbishop to clarify this for me, and he replied that taxation is not synonymous with robbery, citing the famous "Render unto Caesar" passage in the New Testament (Matt. 22).
When I recently learned that the archbishop had written a new book entitled, of all things, Render unto Caesar, my heart lept at the idea of finding a more thoroughgoing analysis of the moral relationship between Christians and the tax-funded state. I anticipated that I would encounter in the book a moral defense of taxation and the state that would lay bare our responsibilities as a Christians to pay taxes and support the existence of the state.
Unfortunately, however, the archbishop does not endeavor in the book to put forward an argument designed to demonstrate that taxation is not morally equivalent to robbery. Nor does he endeavor to demonstrate why all states are not, as St. Augustine famously put it in The City of God, "gangs of criminals on a grand scale." Despite the title of the book, Archbishop Chaput leaves the reader without any argument as to why the state has a right to rule over us, why we have a moral obligation to submit to such domination, or why the state possesses the moral authority to extract money from us at the point of a gun. Put in even simpler terms, Archbishop Chaput offers no compelling arguments against those of us who happen to be, in Jerome Tuccille's words, "sane, moderate, middle-of-the-road anarchist[s]."
This review will focus on one particularly troubling (and glaringly obvious) contradiction in the book. Specifically, I will focus on the problem of asserting on the one hand, as does Archbishop Chaput, that all human beings are endowed by God and nature with equal dignity and sanctity, while asserting on the other hand such things as "rulers who commanded obedience to just laws, peaceful conduct, or honesty in business dealings posed no moral problem for Christians" (p. 64), or "even in classic Catholic thought, the church must respect the institutions of the state" (p.135).
If we are to take seriously the idea of equal human dignity and the sanctity of every single human life, then, contrary to Archbishop Chaput, we must necessarily denounce the tax-funded, coercive state as the single most egregious violator of human dignity and the most dangerous enemy of human life and civilization. This is true, moreover, of each and every state that gains its revenue through taxation — including so-called "liberal democracies."
I was anxious to read the book for a more personal reason as well, stemming from a brief email exchange between the archbishop and me that occurred approximately a year ago. I had written to the archbishop in the hope that he could explain to me how Christians could morally countenance the practice of taxation by states. I said that it appeared to me that taxation was morally synonymous with robbery, (since taxation necessarily involves taking men's justly earned property by force and without their consent), and thus ought to be condemned by Christians as a violation of the 7th commandment. I asked the archbishop to clarify this for me, and he replied that taxation is not synonymous with robbery, citing the famous "Render unto Caesar" passage in the New Testament (Matt. 22).
When I recently learned that the archbishop had written a new book entitled, of all things, Render unto Caesar, my heart lept at the idea of finding a more thoroughgoing analysis of the moral relationship between Christians and the tax-funded state. I anticipated that I would encounter in the book a moral defense of taxation and the state that would lay bare our responsibilities as a Christians to pay taxes and support the existence of the state.
Unfortunately, however, the archbishop does not endeavor in the book to put forward an argument designed to demonstrate that taxation is not morally equivalent to robbery. Nor does he endeavor to demonstrate why all states are not, as St. Augustine famously put it in The City of God, "gangs of criminals on a grand scale." Despite the title of the book, Archbishop Chaput leaves the reader without any argument as to why the state has a right to rule over us, why we have a moral obligation to submit to such domination, or why the state possesses the moral authority to extract money from us at the point of a gun. Put in even simpler terms, Archbishop Chaput offers no compelling arguments against those of us who happen to be, in Jerome Tuccille's words, "sane, moderate, middle-of-the-road anarchist[s]."
This review will focus on one particularly troubling (and glaringly obvious) contradiction in the book. Specifically, I will focus on the problem of asserting on the one hand, as does Archbishop Chaput, that all human beings are endowed by God and nature with equal dignity and sanctity, while asserting on the other hand such things as "rulers who commanded obedience to just laws, peaceful conduct, or honesty in business dealings posed no moral problem for Christians" (p. 64), or "even in classic Catholic thought, the church must respect the institutions of the state" (p.135).
If we are to take seriously the idea of equal human dignity and the sanctity of every single human life, then, contrary to Archbishop Chaput, we must necessarily denounce the tax-funded, coercive state as the single most egregious violator of human dignity and the most dangerous enemy of human life and civilization. This is true, moreover, of each and every state that gains its revenue through taxation — including so-called "liberal democracies."
Article Source: mises.org
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