From Rush Limbaugh to the Sermon on the Mount: A Journey Through Politics, Economics, and Faith

In this essay, I will tell the story of my evolving views on libertarianism, specifically as they interacted with my evolving views on Christianity. The quick version is that I went from a hawkish-minarchist-atheist at the end of high school, into a pacifist-anarchist-born-again-Christian by the end of grad school. The point of the essay is not merely autobiographical, however: I will explain my transformation in a way that hopefully sheds light on these important issues for the reader.

Ironically, as late as 7th grade I made a pitch to my fellow students for the abolition of money. (It was part of a social studies class where each of us had to propose something.) I argued that if we got rid of money, there would be less crime. A student asked me how people would get things, and I said something like, “If you needed a new car, you could tell the government.” So this was my starting point.

My father would listen to Rush Limbaugh in the car, and so I heard the program when I rode around with him. I distinctly remember hearing Rush oppose public schools handing out condoms, because (he claimed) it would teach kids that having “protected” sex was okay and ironically would lead to more teen pregnancies. This was literally the first time I had been exposed to the concept that a government program could backfire. I was intrigued, and hence began my journey to conservatism (in the US political sense of the 1990s).

In addition to listening to Rush Limbaugh in the car, my father also subscribed to The Conservative Chronicle, which was a weekly digest of newspaper columns written by American conservative thinkers. (This was before everything was online; the Chronicle came in the mail and made my week when it arrived.) Some of my favorite writers were Mona Charen, Cal Thomas, William Safire, and Joseph Sobran. However, it soon became clear to me that my very favorite columnists were the economists, namely Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.

I eventually subscribed to National Review magazine; I think perhaps because I saw an ad. In one issue, I encountered an article about a natural disaster where some politician claimed that the silver lining was that the rebuilding efforts would help the economy. The author remarked that “Henry Hazlitt must be rolling over in his grave.” This led me to order Economics in One Lesson, and in the front Hazlitt paid homage to Ludwig von Mises. This put me on the path to Austrian economics, whereas up till then I had thought Milton Friedman was the pinnacle of free-market analysis.

By the time I was ready for college, I knew that I wanted to make a career as an academic economist in the Austrian tradition. I specifically went to Hillsdale College because it housed the library of Mises, and had an econ department with Richard Ebeling and other explicit Austrians (or fellow travelers). Reading Rothbard and Mises had confirmed my growing suspicion that I wasn’t actually a conservative (in the US political sense), but rather a libertarian. The conservative writers understood that the government couldn’t fix the inner city by spending money and raising the minimum wage. But the libertarians went further, and understood that the government couldn’t fix the culture by banning drugs. (I was still naïve when it came to foreign policy, largely because I hadn’t read revisionist historians.) In terms of consistency, I remember thinking that Rothbard’s explanation of the Great Depression made more sense, because (to put it crudely) Rothbard blamed the Fed for doing too much (i.e. inflating in the mid- to late 1920s), whereas Milton Friedman blamed it for doing too little (i.e. insufficiently inflating in the early 1930s).

In terms of my religious views, I was raised as a Catholic, attending St. John’s the Evangelist school for K-8, and then St. Thomas Aquinas for high school. I received the Catholic sacraments up through Confirmation. Yet because of my adoration of Richard Feynman and computer science, I gradually abandoned my faith, such that I called myself a “devout atheist” by the time I was in college. It was also during my freshman year of college that I made the final plunge into outright anarcho-capitalism; I had hesitated to embrace Rothbard fully at first, because it just seemed too “risky” to trust the market for police and military services. So by the end of my freshman year at Hillsdale I was an atheist and an anarchist—not something the majority of donors to such a conservative bastion would have appreciated!

I have many erudite colleagues who are Catholics, and I’m sure they would object that I was never taught Catholic doctrine rigorously. That may be true, but in my defense, I was the valedictorian at both of the schools I mentioned above; I certainly absorbed what they taught us. Judging from the sermons given on Sundays at our actual church (my parents took me every week to Mass), I think the younger priests viewed the devil as a metaphor, not an actual being. In any event, the priests definitely did not teach us the Bible. Instead, there would be a reading for the week, and perhaps the priest would apply it to our day.

Although I never returned to my Catholic upbringing, I definitely think it imbued within me two principles that I have always carried with me: First, a concern for social justice. I realize this may sound ironic since so many of my allies in recent years (and myself as well) have been opposed to the “social justice warriors” (SJWs if you’re into brevity), but even so, it was drilled into me as a little boy that if you’re going to be a good person, you need to identify the injustices of the world, particularly as they impact the most vulnerable, and work against them.

Second, my Catholic upbringing upheld reason as a gift from God, that was not at odds with religious faith. Crudely put, Aquinas himself sought to lay out how much we could deduce about God and other theological matters, purely via our mental faculties (and not divine revelation). In my case, I took that principle too far at first—since I thought my reason could displace “superstitious” religious faith altogether—but even so, I think it’s important for Christian apologists to give a rational defense of their faith. (Indeed, I think part of why God allowed me to wallow in ignorance and, eventually, despair for so long during my atheist phase, was precisely so that I could truly understand where secular humanists were coming from.)

In grad school, I rediscovered my faith (I have told the story elsewhere) and also became a pacifist. The two movements reinforced each other, and were informed by my free-market libertarian worldview. Specifically, because I was so familiar with explaining the flaws in the typical statist claims that, “Without taxes, society would be overrun by bank robbers and rapists!” it wasn’t much of a stretch to see that even the typical Rothbardian wasn’t trying very hard when he concluded, “Without a violent police force punishing NAP violations, society would be overrun by bank robbers and rapists!” (Just as many statists initially misconstrue Rothbard as arguing, “We don’t need police,” so too many non-pacifists misconstrue me as saying, “We don’t need laws or judges.” On the contrary, you can still imagine a society where lawbreakers are clearly identified, and non-violent defensive measures can be taken to minimize their harm. If you’ve only thought about it for 60 seconds before deciding pacifism is “obviously stupid,” you haven’t taken it seriously and, I would argue, you’re giving violence too much credit.)

And then, because my academic training showed me mechanisms by which a society could exist and even thrive if its major institutions eschewed even defensive violence, I had a deeper appreciation for some of the “crazy” teachings from the Sermon on the Mount. Rather than many Christians who say, “Oh, obviously Jesus doesn’t mean that stuff literally—that would be nuts!”, I was able to explore the possibility that He wasn’t engaged in mere hyperbole.

Thus, my understanding of the world gave me “permission” to seriously entertain the boldest of Jesus’ teachings. But the reinforcement ran in the other direction, as well. It’s a lot easier to declare, “I renounce the initiation of aggression, period, and hence I’m a radical libertarian in the tradition of Rothbard,” when you think a loving God created the universe and human nature. Just as the Bible teaches that Joseph’s brothers intended evil but God used their treachery to save many, more generally God is the Invisible Hand that turns our avarice and greed into service to others. Violating moral rules may seem to confer advantages, but in the long run this is an illusion. A society that adheres to property rights and refrains from systematically coercing innocent people—after all, that’s what a State necessarily does on a daily basis—will prosper and outperform a society that embraces statism. Even though atheist Rothbardians can also endorse such sentiments, they would have a much harder time justifying their faith in the Non-Aggression Principle. (In the atheist framework, why wouldn’t government inflation or deficit spending or the military draft sometimes produce net benefits?)

After I rediscovered God in grad school, I briefly flirted with other approaches (such as Buddhism) but everything led me back to Jesus. As far as the narrow question of pacifism was concerned, He showed that you need to follow God’s will in your life, and everything will be just fine in the end. “But bad guys might kill you!” Yes that’s true, but what’s your point? God has the power to raise you from the dead.

(To avoid confusion, I am not saying that if you’re a Christian, you must be a pacifist. I’m just explaining how Jesus—and then later Christians like Tolstoy in his The Kingdom of God Is Within You, as well as religious social activists who used nonviolence strategically—taught me the true power of love and the seductive but false promises of violence and hatred.)

Another interesting—and ironic—connection between my academic/professional life and my personal faith involves the question of whether the God of the Bible is a tyrant. People like Christopher Hitchens argued that not only did Yahweh not exist, but it was a good thing He didn’t, since (in Hitchens’ view) the God of the Old Testament was a dictatorial monster. And yet, I have argued (both in speeches and print) that if the Genesis account were true, then the God of the Bible would clearly be the rightful owner of the physical universe. And as the landlord (cosmos-lord?), God would thus have every right to set the rules for His tenants. Thus, conventional libertarian arguments about drug use and prostitution would need a giant asterisk. (To be clear, I still oppose government prohibition of such activities, but not because I think everything originally was unowned and then homesteaded by the first homo sapiens, etc. etc.)

The more I study the Bible and listen to various commentators/preachers, the more I am drawn to Reformed systematic theology, or what is popularly dubbed “Calvinism.” Although such analogies can only be pushed so far, I think Calvinism is similar to Rothbardianism, because they each have a set of intuitive principles that, when followed to their logical conclusion, make most people shy away. But once you get over the initial shock—“How could we possibly allow ‘market forces’ to regulate nuclear weapons?!”—it becomes obvious that the intuitive principles are correct, and that the incredulous critics are simply confused. I’m now in a position where I think, “If you think through the implications of the attributes of the Biblical God, how could He not have predestined everyone’s fate? What would it even mean to say He hadn’t?” (This is not the place to explain it, but my position does incorporate human free will, in a subtle way that basically reinvented what I later learned was the doctrine of Molinism, named after a 16th century Jesuit monk who also made contributions to economics.)

In wrapping up this essay, I would like to encourage Christian libertarian readers to continue with their study of both arenas of scholarship, and to continue spreading the good news: An infinitely wise, infinitely benevolent Creator has designed our reality such that loving people will create heaven on earth, and regardless of what others may do, all you need to be restored in fellowship with Him is accept His free gift of mercy and grace. Don’t let the haters tell you otherwise!

Source: https://libertarianchristians.com/2025/03/19/from-rush-limbaugh-to-the-sermon-on-the-mount-a-journey-through-politics-economics-and-faith/