Moore was one of the few prominent evangelicals this election season to remain an outspoken critic of Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign. He challenged the candidate on issues that seemed fairly obvious to any practicing Christian (the serial lying, immoral business practices, questionable sexual ethics, etc.) in surprising contrast to many others on the religious right who ignored or even made excuses for the candidate’s behavior.
.. The criticism being leveled at Moore by his religious counterparts says more about what the evangelical establishment mistakenly values today than it does about anything that Moore has done wrong. And it misunderstands the true role that Christians could — and should — play in the public square under a president who is likely to be dismissive of their cause.
.. So what is it that Moore said that these ostensible moral leaders don’t agree with? The statement that “if character matters, character matters”?
.. Perhaps it was that he pointed out how it was “a scandal and a disgrace” that when the sexually predatory “Access Hollywood” tapes were released, virtually all of the reaffirmations of support for Trump came from religious conservative leaders.
.. access is now the end goal of Christians in Washington... Christian leaders who think that having access means that they’ll be taken seriously when it comes to policymaking have been disappointed, including during the tenures of self-declared Christian presidents like the evangelical George W. Bush or Barack Obama... But where Christian leaders should be seeking influence, especially in a rapidly secularizing society in which their views seem ever more countercultural, is in trying to remain a respected moral voice worth engaging with — not by setting aside their most distinctive values in a grab for shifting political power. The most persuasive religious leaders will be those who, like Russell Moore, remain distinguishable from everyone else. Attacking the most principled among themselves is an attack on Christians’ best chance for survival in the public square.
Losing Liberty in an Age of Access
In an age when ownership meant everything, downtown Los Angeles languished. Today, current tastes and modern technology have made access, not ownership, culturally all-important, and LA’s “historic core” is the hottest neighborhood around. Likewise, from flashy metros like San Francisco to beleaguered cities like Pittsburgh, rising generations are driving economic growth by paying to access experiences instead of buying to own.
.. Rather than a fad, the access economy has emerged organically from the customs and habits of “the cheapest generation” — as it has been dubbed in The Atlantic, the leading magazine tracking upper-middle-class cultural trends.
.. Once associated with ubiquitous private property, capitalism is becoming a game of renting access to goods and services, not purchasing them for possession.
.. Hegel, for instance, theorized that the very concepts of human freedom and integrity could not develop and flourish unless the possession of property was a general right, exercised by virtually all.
.. In laying out the case for a distributist alternative to both capitalism and socialism, Belloc worried that a Lockean view could allow property to become so concentrated that the popular tradition of ownership would collapse. But he disagreed with Marx’s claim that this process was inevitable. Belloc intimated that a government facing a severe concentration of property would have to take radical measures to restore the tradition of ownership.
.. Raising the specter of “the public interest state,” Yale law professor Charles Reich warned in the mid-1960s that a public policy organized around the dispensation of largesse fostered a theory of property wherein government could give or take away without regard to the due process of law.
.. On the one hand, we have become accustomed, when installing software — computer programs, smartphone apps, video games, etc. — to clicking our blind assent to so-called “end-user license agreements,” which function roughly like government largesse in their lopsidedness: if you want the goods, you agree to the terms, narrowed and capricious as they may be or may one day become. Recently, what has been good for the software goose has become good for the hardware gander, with many of our devices, like our iPhones, being “owned” only in a sense dramatically attenuated by the terms of the contracts we sign when we pay for them. Not only have tech companies expanded the logic of licensing to the four corners of their market, but that full-bore advance has marched apace with a growing public belief that these terms are reasonable and commonsensical.
.. Despite the collapse of newspapers, subscriptions are booming — to everything from newsletters, podcasts, and on-demand video to short-term goods like shaving kits and steaks. The AMC theater chain recently announced it will begin experimenting with a flat monthly rate for an unlimited number of movies, in effect bringing the Netflix subscription model from the small screen to the big
.. The rise of the sharing economy has shifted massive sums toward innovators whose financial success has enabled the rise of what Noam Scheiber, in an influential New Republic essay on Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett, pointedly termed “boardroom liberalism”: “it is a view from on high,” he wrote — “one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms.”
.. Instead of “the most transparent administration in history,” progressives got the fiercest crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers in history. Instead of a White House where no lobbyist could tread, they got a team of cronies — ultimate insiders devoted to patronage politics on a comprehensive scale. Instead of a renewed respect for the press, they got carefully rationed access to power, used to control reporters and exact loyalty. Instead of a clean break with the Bush era’s push for “total information awareness,” they got a surveillance state, more than willing to access Americans’ intimate information, anywhere, anytime. Because progressives put equality above liberty, they did not anticipate these changes in fortune.
.. Unfortunately, as he shows, fewer and fewer Americans care about owning things. That is not just a problem because it cultivates passivity toward concentrated property and power.
.. If you’re not paying to play with the regulators in Washington, you’re mistreating your stakeholders.