Beware the totalitarian, welfare state.
Government should play a subsidiary role, not a substitutionary role in our lives.
A government that substitutes itself for God is a government gone wrong.
“We do not need,” Joseph Ratzinger once said, “a State which regulates and controls everything.”
We need instead, “a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”
Subsidiary comes from the Latin subsidium, which means ‘help, assistance.’
A government that plays a subsidiary role, is a government that promotes life-saving, life-giving self-sufficiency.
This is the essence of Rev. Dr. Edmund Aku’s work, ‘Solidarity, Subsidiarity and Common Good.’
Social cohesion is forged by solidarity and subsidiarity. The burdens of the community are voluntarily shared.
Good government is never above that community, but part of it.
Compatibility, says Aku, isn’t a prerequisite.
Solidarity will draw the incompatible together through empathy and sympathy.
It’s a theme I tried to explore in 2019 when writing, ‘The solidarity of suffering: From racism to empathy.’
Intersectional oppressor/oppressed cognitive distortions are not reconcilable with subsidiarity and solidarity.
If your melanin, social, medical, or material wealth status doesn’t tick all the politically correct intersectional boxes, then person, pain, and story are rejected.
For example, the social construct of Critical Race Theory tells me that my lighter shade of melanin automatically negates any need for justice over oppression in my life.
CRT disqualifies my personhood because of my skin tone.
“Lived experience” be damned.
According to the ideology, I am no longer a person, I am an oppressor.
Regardless of how painful, poor, abused, beaten, abandoned, welfare-dependent – oppressed I am or was – “white privilege” praxis states that none of the suffering I’ve gone through in life matters.
“White privilege” determines that I have no rights to sympathy and empathy, chiefly because it falsely assumes that my shade of melanin makes me incapable of giving sympathy and empathy.
So declares the collectivists drunk on the groupthink of woketivism: “All white people are racist.” “All heterosexuals are heteronormative homophobes.” (etc.)
Ergo, I have no right to belong to the community.
This segregation is social distancing. It is violent. It destroys solidarity and subsidiarity by substituting itself for God.
Therefore, Intersectionality can only ever be a form of bad government.
In Augustine’s words, a people governed by falsehoods are a people governed by the delusion of demons.
“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals…” – (City of God, IV:5)
The strong are not allowed to protect the weak. The weak are not allowed to be protected by the strong.
This denial of communal care ruptures relationship.
Dr. Edmund Aku argues,
“The moral responsibility prompted by the spirit of solidarity calls for empathy with the other, so that oneness is seen beyond literal sameness. In this way a sort of equilibrium is lived out where the weak find protection in the strong, and the strong gain fulfillment in this service to the weak.”
For CRT purists, forgiveness, reconciliation, and sacrifice are the antithesis of Marx’s self-serving never-ending revolution.
This means that the Lordship of Jesus Christ will be an affront to a world governed by would-be overlords; a world governed by the delusion of demons.
The government that plays a substitutionary role are anti-christ – alternative messiahs – incapable of solidarity and subsidiarity.
Consequently, a people who give governments the role of God, are a people no longer governed by sympathy and empathy.
This is proven by the blood spilled during China’s Communist Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Gulags, socialist killing fields in Cambodia, and the gas chambers of National Socialism.
Governments substituting for God will “want you broke, isolated, jobless, depressed, childless, medicated, and entirely dependent on them for your entire existence.”
The popularity of lockdowns, mask mandates, mass censorship of professionals, and ease at which governments are bypassing constitutional guarantees, in favour of rule by bureaucratic decree, are symptoms of a greater problem.
When government dethrones God, it disqualifies its right to govern.
Such a government will only have a surface interest in your health, and the health of the community.
It should never be forgotten that “the Nazi group in charge of the actual killing in the gas chambers were called the General Welfare Foundation for Institutional Care…’ [i]
Augustine said, “Let them acknowledge the facts, even if it goes against the grain; and let them stop destroying themselves by crazy insults against God, and refrain from deceiving the ignorant.” (City of God 5:24)
Once a good government slides from solidarity and subsidiarity into a substitutionary role, that government inevitably goes bad.
As Evelyn Rae notes,
“Stop being a simp for the government. They do not love you. They do not know your name or your circumstances and they certainly will not remember you. They make for a terrible parent and an even worse god – have them as neither.”
[i] Dean Stroud, 2013 ‘Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance’ Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing pp.132 & 136
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