The Godless Surveillance State
In “The City of God,” St. Augustine noted that without justice, government is nothing more than organized robbery. The justice he meant, of course, was the justice that Christians (and others of common sense) would typically find summarized in the Ten Commandments and the New Testament, and not the catchall of inane ideologies touted as “social justice” by today’s socialist/leftists. And the organized robbery that takes place involves far more than money or material goods – it robs us of our freedom.
Believers have no doubt that Scripture is the very foundation of honest justice. Without it, there are no immutable truths, no solid anchors to keep us responsible and accountable to each other and to our God. Without Biblical truths as anchors, the concept of morality, for example, becomes nothing more than a human construct that can be changed whenever the whim strikes (as in the 60s sexual revolution; as in Roe v. Wade; as in trans “bathroom laws”; etc.).
When governments operate without Scriptural grounding, at risk (among other things) are the value and the sovereignty of the individual. For example, the coronavirus “pandemic” of 2020-2021 spawned many tin gods (national, state, and local) and gave them the opportunity to dictate new and restrictive rules of behavior to large groups of individuals on issues where they not only lacked complete and accurate information (i.e., on mask use, vaccines, and treatments), but where they also could encroach on natural law – e.g., an individual’s right to decide what’s best medically for himself and his family.
A basic rationale for the vaccine push was the old collectivist axiom of embracing what produces “the greatest good for the greatest number.” (What that axiom never deals with is who and how many the “greatest good” tramples.) To the vax pushers, it was irrelevant that most individuals who resisted the jab did so based on information that contradicted the CDC – and the 90 to 100 million who resisted were simply outcasts.
Many saw the attempt to vaccinate everyone as a big step toward a collectivist goal of a national database of everyone’s personal information. Why, a person might ask, would such a database be dangerous to freedom? After all, the IRS already has a database with lots of taxpayer information. True, but given the infiltration in recent years of a once even-handed IRS by dedicated leftists (e.g., Lois Lerner), you can imagine the threats if this information were available to all the government bureaucracies. And make no mistake – unless our country reverts to the Biblical grounding on which it was founded, taxpayer information will eventually be misused.
You can see a variation on this theme that’s been playing out in the private sector, on social media like Facebook and Google. Conservative opinion and/or information that contradicts the leftist party line is identified and often buried, and some purveyors of such opinions or information have been suspended or banned from the platform. None of the people who run these operations answer to God, but they relish being tin gods. And bear in mind that with a national database, government penalties for getting or even speaking out of line could be a lot worse than being banned from a platform.
Here’s an example of abuse of a government “registry” from just a few years ago – not here but in Afghanistan. Before Biden’s disastrous pullout, the pastors of Christian churches that had been planted over the previous 20 years made the dubious decision to formerly register their faith with the Afghan government. Their rationale was to legally proclaim their faith in Christ “for the sake of future generations” – i.e., so that their children and grandchildren could “openly call themselves followers of Jesus.” But with the sudden US pullout, the Taliban returned and captured the registry, which included locations and pastors’ names. Some pastors subsequently received letters from the Taliban, basically saying: “We know who you are, what you do, and where to find you.”
Closer to home, an example from Maine involved “real ID,” which would be the basis for a government national database. Back in 2007, Maine passed a law that rejected the feds’ real ID concept. However, a year later, the administration of a Democrat governor, through bureaucratic machinations, implanted the fundamentals of real ID in the data requirements for renewing driver’s licenses. In 2011, an individual I knew of refused to renew his license on the grounds that the new requirements were both unconstitutional and circumvented express Maine law. He was stopped on the road more than once, with no cause other than they knew he hadn’t renewed. He eventually came out on top after a court appearance. Basically, the state was turning the license into a tracking device.
If and when the left regains power and achieves its drive for a national database, the next step could be surveillance cameras on every block (some US cities already have a lot of them). That, coupled with online and other censorship by woke corporations, would result in total surveillance. You might think of it as incremental slavery – and any sense of individual sovereignty or worth would become a distant memory.
As you’d expect, there are many who would say these views are nothing more than (right-wing) paranoia. Most of these gainsayers are the same people who disdain Jesus and instead declare their complete trust in government to protect our lives, our tax dollars, the integrity of our elections, our borders, our privacy, our property, and our opinions. That trust is consistently shown to be misplaced.
Consider what the left would do if they regained power. Instead of real protection, their government would promote policies that would disparage the Christian worldview, shred the Constitution, hinder the police, propose election laws that would lock in fraud opportunities, ban constitutional gun ownership, release violent criminals, allow unvetted illegals to flow into the country at will, openly look the other way when groups they support (BLM, Antifa) loot and burn private property, and tacitly encourage various (social) media to violate the First Amendment. And a lot more that you wouldn’t like. All would be made easier to carry out if the government had total surveillance over the citizens.
What would pave the way for this creeping tyranny is that many or most rank-and-file voters are apathetic, ignorant of the US Constitution and its state counterparts, ignorant of our history, ignorant of economics, and are spiritually dead. They also believe that charity begins not at home but on Capitol Hill in DC. They elect feckless leaders who tend to eschew the truth or euphemize it with newspeak to satisfy voters’ itching ears.
We could go on, but the point is that without Jesus, America is dead in the water as a moral and free nation, and we will likely lose our individual freedoms and worth. In the words of George Washington:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…Let it be asked: where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion, [for} whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education, reason and experience forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Norbert J. Kuk