The Gospel according to Ayn Rand

“Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.’” (Luke 6:20) According to Ayn Rand, the novelist and atheist philosopher so beloved of influential American conservatives today, that’s where Jesus got off track.

“There is a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus,” Rand writes. She argues that when Jesus teaches about “the salvation of one’s soul,” that’s individualism and therefore good. But when it comes to ethics, Jesus goes off the rails. Jesus’ mistake, per Rand, is the idea that, “in order to save one’s soul, one must love or help or live for others.” And that, Rand concludes, leads to Christianity’s “failure.”

Rand, of course, “is noteworthy for her atheism and uncompromising opposition to religion.”

Ever since Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) put out his draconian budget proposal that slashes essential programs for the poor and gives big tax breaks to the rich, Ryan’s attachment to the works of Ayn Rand has been in the spotlight. Jonathan Chait, in the pages of Newsweek, calls out Ryan for launching a “War on the Weak” and explains “How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites –and the rich as our rightful rulers.” The success of this idea that the rich have the right to rule and the poor don’t have any right to their help, is due to the popularity of the philosophy of Ayn Rand on the far right. According to Chait, Ryan is “a Rand nut…Ryan once appeared at a gathering to honor her philosophy, where he announced, ‘The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.’ He continues to view Rand as a lodestar, requiring his staffers to digest her creepy tracts.”

Rev. Jim Wallis takes up the contrast between reading Rand and reading the Bible. He compares her work (and Ryan’s budget) to the biblical prophet Isaiah, and Wallis calls down biblically based wrath on those who make a virtue of crushing the poor. His column, “Woe to You, Legislators,” cites Isaiah 10: 1-3. It’s an inspired choice. “Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims -- laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. What will you have to say on Judgment Day, when Doomsday arrives out of the blue? Who will you get to help you? What good will your money do you?”

I used to be a big Ayn Rand fan. I admit it. I read all her works and avidly discussed them with friends. I was in high school at the time. It became very clear to me as I experienced a call to the ministry in college that I’d I have to grow up, give up Rand’s selfish ideas, and begin to recognize that following the Gospel of Jesus Christ meant living for others.

Conservative Christians who support the Ryan version of radical conservatism based on the atheist individualist philosophy of Ayn Rand have some serious questions to ask themselves and these questions are long overdue. The political alliance between Christian evangelicals and the tea party has already been analyzed by pollster Robert Jones as a “shotgun marriage.”

It’s worse than that. Today’s radical conservatism is an unholy and unstable hodgepodge of ideas that are fundamentally alien to each other. This marriage is doomed.

Ayn Rand’s atheist hyper-individualism opposed religion in all its forms. The reason is that despite their failure at times to live up to their principles, the world’s religions all have an ethical core that teaches the moral duty human beings have to care for one another. Principled atheism and humanism, it should be noted, share this basic moral value. Rewarding the rich and denying the duty to care for the poor is incompatible with the core teachings of the world’s religions, and with many humanist values, as Greg Epstein describes them in Good Without God , and it is certainly a philosophy opposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

While I do not agree on certain theological doctrines with many evangelicals, I respect many of them for their on-the-ground commitment to the poor and the vulnerable. Evangelical Christians have read Isaiah, they have read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and they know that Jesus was not mistaken about the ethics of loving one’s neighbor. It is the whole law and the whole gospel.

Christian evangelicals who support the Ryan budget that hurts the poor and rewards the rich as the ‘Gospel according to Ayn Rand’ have some soul searching to do and Holy Week is a good time to do that.

“For what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God?” (Micah 6:8)

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  | Apr 18, 2011 11:53 AM