Feeding the Beast
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

There is a scene in Braveheat early on in which we are given a glimpse of what the coming struggle was really all about. Wallace had just returned home after being away through most of his youth. He is asked point blank if he has returned to battle with the English overlords. Wallace explains that he has come not to fight, but to farm, and to raise a family. The freedom which he cried out for at the end of the movie was not a libertarian kind of freedom. He wasn't longing to be able to use drugs in peace. It wasn't a consumerist freedom; he wasn't demanding his MTV. It was an agrarian freedom, covenantal freedom. He wanted the state to leave him alone, to leave him room to pursue Ms life of peace in peace. In a word, he wanted to be tolerated.

Wallace did not take up arms because the state had failed to pay him sufficient attention, or to provide him with enough protection. He did not draw his sword because London threatened to lower the haggis subsidy. Rather Sir William rebelled because of Longshank's desire to rob from the Scots to give to his cronies. And the King struck at the heart of freedom, taking land and progeny through the horror of the doctrine of the first night.

Tolerance can be a glorious thing, something we can and should seek from our governments. But we must beware a subtle trap that lies just beyond tolerance. It is one thing to beseech the state to leave us alone, it is altogether another to ask the state to make others leave us alone. This subtle distinction is a line which separates small and legitimate government from an obtrusive, rapacious government. Too often we cross that line.

What do you think when you read about lawsuits in which strict sabbatarian Christians sue their employers, or former employers, having been required to work on the Lord's Day? Do you cheer this as an act of heroism? Or when conservative Christian students at secular campuses protest for their fair share of student activity funds, are you excited?

Because we live in something resembling a democracy, we feel perfectly at ease lining up in the special favors line down at Leviathan's office. Thus we used the state to "Protestantize' the immigrants last century through the creation of the public school system. It seemed harmless enough, though R.L. Dabney saw what would happen even then, that they wouldn't be "our" schools for long. Thus we made nice to the state in asking them to help us help the poor, only to lose the allegiance of the poor, the poor themselves and our shirts in the process.

We have a choice. We will probably continue down the road we are on, and stage the necessary protests, create the letter writing campaigns, and fill out the form in triplicate filing for victim status. The result of this is we might have a perpetual claim on some Cabinet office ("Make the evangelical Secretary of Interior," the chief of staff will say, "He won't hurt anything there.") and just maybe the endowed Scalia chair at the Supreme Court. Of course we might also get a lot more professions of faith, in order to take advantage of 'Religion norming" down at the admissions office of Leviathan University.

The better choice is to stop asking the beast to feed us, thus stopping feeding the beast, to get out of the victim line (we're at the back anyway), go back home and raise our families. The better choice is to show patience as long as we can toward the state, to ask quietly for tolerance and not special favors, and to stay above the feeding frenzy at Leviathan's trough. That's the choice Wallace made, and stuck with as long as he could.