The Nanny Has Arrived

In many instances it's for good reason that we try to keep a semblance of separateness between politics and religion in American life. My gut tells me that excessive involvement by either side into the other, would serve as a corrupting influence. The same gut tells me, however, that severing one completely from the other makes just as little sense.

On many issues both politics and religion overlap. Treating our fellow man with compassion and kindness. Finding the right mix of justice and mercy for those who have committed unacceptable acts. And, of course, helping people to become self-sufficient.

At the core, however, of both politics and religion, is the issue of freedom.

In my particular faith, we call it agency, the belief that God gave us a brain with its mix of reason, emotion, conscience, and faith to make decisions about our behavior that can lead us to the highest levels of independence, or, into prisons both real and figurative. While I believe that our level of "reward" is more complex than God simply keeping a tally of behaviors, we largely create the lives we have.

It is my strong belief that God wired us to have freedom, knowing that we don't really succeed unless we really could have failed. It's vitally important to us spiritually to be able to choose between hurting others or being compassionate, loving or hating, intoxication or soberness, diligence or laziness, education or ignorance. The world is before us, as are its myriad paths, and we can make powerful choices that have lasting consequences on us both spritually and practically.

It is this God-given yearning for freedom that was manifested secularly when our Founders defiantly signed the Declaration of Independence, then a few years later drafted our Constitution, and set up our representative republic which guarantees certain individual rights. Among those rights, as we all know, are life, liberty, and the right to pursue our chosen level of happiness. Add to those general rights the more specific liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights -- and we still have a fairly short but powerful list of Constitution-granted liberty.

We have entered a new phase in our nation's governance, the effort now being to re-wire the human essence to yearn, not for freedom, but for a nanny. When anyone enters our lives and justifies our failures, it feels good. It feels good to be rescued. But it's not who we are. We are wired to sweat. We are wired to earn. We are wired to dream, to work, and to achieve. At our core, we are wired to be free to do all of these things.

When politicians threaten jail time for not buying health insurance, we've been robbed of our freedom. More subtly, when government takes from one group of people to help another group of people buy cars and homes, we've had a little more of our freedom stolen away.

I believe that when those who want to be nannied out-number those who want to be free, socialism begins in earnest, and at first appears to be a smashing success. But over time the dwindling number of producers can no longer sustain the voracious appetites of those who no longer want, but demand, to be nannied, and the whole unsustainable system will collapse.

Never forget that the more decisions that government is making, the fewer you are. Let's not let our freedom erode anymore.