Isn’t the state needed to keep sinful people under control?
Question 29 in Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated & Expanded
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All people are sinful, but does this mean we need the state to control all people?
There are certainly those who would agree that people need to be controlled. One of the key philosophers who advocated this idea was Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes maintained that individuals pose a direct threat to each other, thereby making the existence of the state a necessity for maintaining order. He believed that power to govern equally distributed among individuals was a motivator for people to attack one another, and that power held centrally, by either an organization or a single person, resulted in peaceful cooperation. James Madison echoed this in his famous quip, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
But since libertarian Christians recognize that all people are sinful and have a propensity toward corrupting power, we disagree that the state is a necessary apparatus for tempering sinful behavior. Indeed, the last thing we want to do is concentrate monopoly power in the hands of sinners. Instead, it’s the role of the church to encourage moral behavior, and the role of the Holy Spirit to sanctify us, in part, toward that end. Contrary to popular belief, “legislating morality” is outside the scope of God-ordained civil governance.
To create the conditions for human flourishing society needs civil governance. Civil governance is the administration of civil justice, which is based on the legitimate use of coercion. The initiation or first use of coercion is always illegitimate, regardless of whether it’s an individual acting alone or people acting in the name of governing authority. So straight away we see that it’s improper for civil governance to control anything through the initiation of force. Instead, civil governance can only be responsive, and only to previously (and thus improperly) initiated coercion.