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Properties of the Strict Father interpretation of Christianity






What makes this biblical interpretation a Strict Father interpretation is the centrality of God's authority, his strict commandments, the requirement of obedience, the priority of moral strength, the need for self-discipline and self-denial, and the enforcement through reward and punishment.

What makes this system work is reward and punishment based on moral accounting – reward for following, and punishment for not following, the authority of God. Without it, the entire moral system makes no sense. Without the reward of heaven, people will not follow God's commandments and all morality will break down. An offer of redemption without making you work for it would be like welfare: it would be an incentive to be immoral.

It is this religious system of reward and punishment that James Dobson, in the quotation above, claimed (through metaphor) to be the same as laissez-faire free-market capitalism. What conservative Christians have done is two things. They have given the Bible an interpretation in terms of Strict Father morality and they have, through metaphor, linked that interpretation of the Bible with conservative politics.

The Bible can, of course, be interpreted in many ways – and the wildly different denominations of Jews and Christians testify to that. For example, when a sinner accepts Christ as his Savior, he could see himself as appreciating Christ's, and hence God's, nurturance and thereafter taking Christ as his model for nurturant behavior. The former sinner would thereafter adopt a Nurturant Parent morality. If, in interpreting the Bible, one gives priority to God's compassion and nurturance rather than to his authority, then one's religious morality will tend to be Nurturant Parent morality and the application of that morality to political life would tend to make one a liberal. We will discuss such an interpretation shortly.

It is important to understand just why conservative Christians are conservative, and to realize that their interpretation of the Bible gives them no special claim to morality. Indeed, in this case, family-based morality precedes morality based on religion, since it is Strict Father morality that yields this interpretation of the Bible.

Conservative Christians are not conservative because they interpret the Bible – all of it – purely literally. There may be parts certain denominations do take literally, such as that God created the world in exactly 168 hours. But in many of the most important respects, conservative Christians have a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible just like everyone else. What makes them conservative is the same thing that makes them the kinds of Christians they are- – the use of Strict Father morality. Indeed, that's what makes conservative Christians try to interpret the Bible literally. If the Bible, as the word of God, contains commandments from the highest moral authority, commandments which are to be followed absolutely and strictly, then someone seeking to strictly obey those commandments is committed to having no personal, subjective interpretations; he would not be following God's commandments if they were only his interpretations of God's commandments.

But as we have seen, this is a self-defeating enterprise. Purely literal interpretation of the Bible is impossible – even in its most important respects – the understanding of God, one's relationship to Him, and the overall understanding of the conservative Christian tradition. In conservative Christianity, all of these require an interpretation – a Strict Father interpretation.

But conservative Christians go beyond applying Strict Father morality just to religion. They apply it to politics as well, forging a metaphorical link between (1) their religious system of moral accounting, (2) laissez-faire free-market economics, and (3) the Strict Father morality system of reward and punishment.

What makes conservative Christians conservative is this system of metaphor: God As Father, Well-Being As Wealth and Moral Accounting, Morality As Strength, Morality As Obedience, Moral Self-Interest, and so on. The Morality of Reward and Punishment, for example, assumes the metaphor of Moral Accounting and would make no sense without it.

In conservative Christianity, laissez-faire free-market capitalism is a moral, not just an economic, enterprise. Why? What makes it moral, not just economic? After all, the economics just says that, if each person individually pursues his own financial profit, the financial profit of all will be maximized. To make this a thesis about morality, you have to conceptually project financial profit onto moral profit. The metaphor by which this is done is Well-being As Wealth.

Only then do we get a moral thesis, which I have called Moral Self-interest: If each person individually pursues his own self-interest, then the self-interest of all will be maximized.

Interestingly enough, the economic theory is itself based on a metaphor, Adam Smith's metaphor of the Invisible Hand. The Invisible Hand metaphor makes use of the notion of force and the very general metaphor that Control Is the Exercise of Force by the Hand, as in expressions like " It's in your hands now, " " They handed him over to the FBI, " " It's out of my hands, " " I can't handle this project, " " You're in good hands with Allstate, " and so on. The metaphor posits invisible economic " forces" that control the operation of a free market. In this theory, economic " forces" are understood metaphorically in terms of physical forces.

The link in conservative Christianity between laissez-faire free-market capitalism and morality is thus metaphorical through and through, as is the interpretation of the Bible via Strict Father morality, and Strict Father morality itself is metaphorical through and through. To say this is not to " deconstruct" and question the validity of Strict Father morality and conservative Christianity, it is merely to apply an analysis of the concepts involved to enterprises of Biblical interpretation. I cannot repeat often enough that there is nothing wrong with metaphorical thought in itself. No one can think or function without it.


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