Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Politics and Religion
Lawlessness, Power, & Authority

Lawlessness, Power, & Authority

Last updated on: August 28, 2020 at 8:43 am by Gene Veith

0 Comments

Lawlessness, Power, & Authority 2020-08-28T08:43:00-04:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I commend to you two posts from my fellow Patheos bloggers.

To learn what it feels like when law and order completely breaks down around you, read this post by Grayson Gilbert, who lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin, writing as his neighborhood is being looted and his community is going up in flames. In Kenosha, population 100,000, a police officer shot a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back–in front of his children, no less–paralyzing him. Of course this has sparked protests, and rightly so. But it has also become a pretext for visitors from Chicago and Milwaukee to pour into Kenosha, forming mobs that roam the streets, smashing windows, looting businesses, setting buildings on fire (including a church), and assaulting people on the streets. A white 17-year-old killed two protesters. In this climate of anarchy and social breakdown, Grayson recounts what it’s like to live in a community where all of this happening. He describes the smell of the burning city, evoking the fear of the citizens who live there, including his black neighbors, whose homes and livelihoods are being destroyed. His post defies summary and excerpting, so read it yourself.

Unjust police violence and racism are terrible and must be addressed. My question, though, is how does it advance the cause of Jacob Blake to commit violence against people who had nothing to do with his mistreatment? Black Lives Matter. So why should people supposedly committed to that cause–many of them white–loot black-owned businesses and set fire to black people’s neighborhoods?

For an answer to that question, read Timon Cline’s post, Chaos Creates Conservatives. It is mainly a tribute to the British conservative thinker Roger Scruton, who died this year. The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but let me just quote a few of its passages from Scruton.

As a young intellectual, Scruton was in Paris during the student riots of 1968. The violence and destruction he witnessed–similar to that in Kenosha, Portland, and other cities today–turned him into a conservative. He recounted his experience in an article published in 2003 in the New Criterion entitled Why I Became a Conservative.

He tells about a friend of his who was exhilarated by participating in the rioting.“She was very excited by the events… Great victories had been scored: policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist [de Gaulle] and his régime would be begging for mercy.”

So he asked her a question. “What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades?”

She replied with a book: Foucault’s [The Order of Things], the bible of the soixante-huitards [the student protestors], the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.

Cline comments, while quoting Scruton again: “Though Foucault is long dead, Scruton notes well his outsized, enduring legacy, solidified in seemingly every university reading list in Europe and America. ‘His vision of European culture as the institutionalized form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to resist it.’”

I can also attest that the French post-modernist Michel Foucault is venerated on university campuses, and his reduction of all truth-claims, moral values, and cultural institutions to power and his insistence that all power is oppressive are foundational to today’s critical theory.

Cline says that Scruton found two answers to Foucault:

For the young Scruton, the antidote to Foucault was the Anglo-American common law tradition, a love for which he cultivated whilst studying for the bar. “Law,” he said, “is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it.”

Moreover, the common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

The second answer Scruton found in the 18th-century Edmund Burke, the seminal conservative thinker who critiqued the lawlessness of the French Revolution. From Scruton’s essay, as quoted by Timon Cline:

Far from being the evil and obnoxious thing that my contemporaries held it to be, authority was, for Burke, the root of political order. Society, he argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority—by which is meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it. And obedience, in its turn, is the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition which makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into ‘the dust and powder of individuality’… In effect Burke was upholding the old view of man in society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view of him, as citizen of a state… Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

Here I think we can see where Christianity comes in: There is legitimate authority. Strictly speaking, God holds all authority, but His authority is masked in human vocations (such as that of parents, lawful rulers, etc.). Thus, as St. Paul says, “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1). And, yes, obedience–to God, to parents, to lawful rulers, etc.–is a virtue. Furthermore, power is not innately oppressive. God’s power is righteous, as is His power exercised through human vocations.

To be sure, human sin distorts both authority and power. But that authority and power can be exercised in a morally good way frees people from Foucault’s vicious circle: If power is always oppressive, overthrowing the oppressor by seizing power means becoming an oppressor oneself.

Whereas if authority and power can be exercised in a good way, there is a political way forward and justice–including for black people–becomes possible.

Photo: “Unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after Jacob Blake Shooting,” YouTube screenshot. Credit: Andrew Mercado via Storyful

Previous Post

August 27, 2020

Protestant Integralism

Next Post

August 31, 2020 The 6 Phases of Disaster

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"I know wired earbuds are making a comeback (I never stopped using them as I ..."

reg

Luther on Tools

"VCRs, tape decks, and cassette players are all having a revival among a segment of ..."

Tom Hering

Luther on Tools

"As a (retired) lawyer I see potential liability from sharing things like power or sharp ..."

reg

Luther on Tools

"I am not sure the items you mentioned, though disused, discontinued, discarded, could be considered ..."

reg

Luther on Tools

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category America Apologetics Art baseball Bible Blog Christ Church crime Culture Economics Education Ethics Family Food Football Government History Holidays Holy Week Humor International Islam Language Law Life Issues Literature Media Medicine Movies Music Nature News Personal Philosophy Politics psychology Reformation Religions Sacraments Science sex Social Science Sports technology television terrorism Theology Uncategorized Vocation war

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What happened to Jesus 40 days after His resurrection?

Select your answer to see how you score.

He visited the temple He ascended into heaven He went back into hiding He performed one last miracle

Books by This Author Books by Gene Veith

See All Titles »