Jesus Hates Taxes: Biblical Capitalism Created Fertile Anti-Union Soil

Shallah Kali

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Mon Mar-14-11 01:59 PM
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Jesus Hates Taxes: Biblical Capitalism Created Fertile Anti-Union Soil

Edited on Mon Mar-14-11 02:19 PM by Shallah Kali

A good overview of the fundamentalist religious movements that oppose workers rights - The Family, Reconstructionists & Dominionists and their political followers:

Jesus Hates Taxes: Biblical Capitalism Created Fertile Anti-Union Soil
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/4366/jesus_hates_taxes%3A_biblical_capitalism_created_fertile_anti-union_soil/

Pseudo-historian David Barton, a frequent guest of broadcaster Glenn Beck, is using his newly enlarged audience to promote American exceptionalism (America was created by its divinely-inspired founders as a country of, by, and for Christians) and Tea Party-on-steroids economics (Jesus and the Bible oppose progressive taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and minimum wage laws). The religious right has a long practice of claiming divine mandate for its policy agenda as it makes for an exceptionally potent political argument: if God supports radically limited government, then progressive policies are not only wrong but evil, and supporters of liberal policies are not only political opponents but enemies of God.

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The religious right�s anti-union roots are long and deep. Researchers have traced them through the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony, an intellectual godfather of sorts for much of the increasingly dominionist religious right; Gary North, a leading Christian Reconstructionist; and through fundamentalist textbooks used by homeschoolers and Christian schools. The roots of the Family, as Peter Laarman notes in his examination of religious indifference to the decades-long war on workers� rights, are in anti-unionism. Back in 1942, according to Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/562/

This is not a Religion Column: Biblical Capitalism http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/562/
(T)he National Association of Manufacturers staked to a meeting of congressmen who would become students of his spiritual politics, among them Virginia senator Absalom Willis Robertson�Pat Robertson�s father. Vereide returned the manufacturers� favor by telling his new congressional followers that God wanted them to break the spine of organized labor. They did.

One of the most striking examples of this theory reaching into the political realm is found in an early Christian Coalition Leadership Manual, co-authored by Coalition founder Ralph Reed in 1990. A section titled �God�s Delegated Authority in the World,� which argues that �God established His pattern for work as well as in the family and in the church,� cites four Bible passages instructing slaves to be obedient to their masters, including 1 Peter 2:18-19:

1 Peter 2:18-19 http://bible.cc/1_peter/2-18.htm
Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God.