Sorry Ted Cruz, Christianity and Ayn Rand are incompatible – Rare.us

The writer Raj Patel once suggested that there are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old kids life The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged and that one would produce an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, while the other is a book about orcs.

If thatquote is to be believed, then the ranks of the emotionally stunted and socially crippled must include such Rand devotees as Senator Ted Cruz, who quoted extensively from Rands novel Atlas Shrugged during a filibuster.

This is the same Ted Cruz, by the way, who very consciously announced his 2016 presidential campaign at Jerry Falwells Liberty University and constantly endorsed a return to Judeo-Christian values.

President Donald Trump, whose blatantly insincere lip service to Christianity ultimately triumphed over Cruzs initial popularity with evangelicals, is also a fan of Rands and, according to one interview, identifies strongly with Howard Roarke, the protagonist of The Fountainhead. Rand would likely have condemned Trump as a heinous pull-peddler, but I digress.

Unfortunately for Cruz and Trump (and all the tea partiers who claim to serve both Christ and Rand), the two philosophies are simply incompatible.

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In a nutshell, Rands philosophy, which she dubbed Objectivism, goes something like this: There is no God. Human beings are differentiated from animals only by their reason. By freely applying that reason, men can triumph over nature and create wealth. The way to be a good person is to use your reason well, and those who use their reason well become rich. So the ability to make money is the only system of morality thats on the gold standard.

Her characters swear never to live for another man or ask another man to live for them. Altruism is a wicked system of morality and charity that, while permissible, should only be practiced when the recipient is deserving and the giver is serving his own self-interest.

Rands novels also dehumanize the disabled and glorify adultery. Oh, and she was a champion of abortion rights and had a long extramarital affair.

Obviously the entire Christian worldviewfrom the metaphysical belief in the existence of God to the ethical emphasis on humility and charitystands opposed to these beliefs, and it is not necessary to go into detail on this point. That article has already been written dozens of times.

Despite these seemingly obvious contradictions, I have friends who consider themselves committed Christians while also claiming to find truth and inspiration in Rands works.

Certainly there is common ground to be found. A byproduct of Rands insistence on the primacy of human reason is her insistence on the freedom to exercise it. In her system, no man may use violence (whether directly or implicitly) to compel another to do anything.

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There is certainly a strong Christian tradition of defending individual liberty, from John Paul IIs work in liberating Eastern Europe from Soviet control to Whittaker Chambers defection from communism. But it is one thing to claim that our moral obligation to the disadvantaged is best fulfilled by the free market and quite another to claim that we have no moral obligation to the disadvantaged.

The latter argument, by the way, is a far more compassionate and voter-friendly way to frame a free-market, libertarian-leaning policy agenda.

I see no problem in agreeing with isolated ideas from the works of Ayn Rand while disagreeing with major parts of her philosophy as a whole. I do the same thing with Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ursula K. LeGuin. And, I might add, House Speaker Paul Ryan does a decent job of pulling off that balance, saying in an interview with the National Catholic Register that her novels sparked his interest in capitalism and free markets, but that he later came to reject Objectivism because it reduces human interactions to mere contracts.

Those wishing to run for office as practitioners of a religion that emphasizes the dignity of all human life would do well to minimize their connection with Rand to a few key issues of individual freedom and loose regulationor, perhaps better yet, completely avoid quoting the manifestos/sexual fantasies of a woman devoid of pity.

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Sorry Ted Cruz, Christianity and Ayn Rand are incompatible - Rare.us