Paul Ryan's Moral Compass

I heard recently that conservative Christians, uncomfortable with Romney’s Mormonism, have been trying to twist and tweak the Mormon religion and/or Christianity so that in their own minds the Mormon faith can be called a branch of Christianity.  If that could be done, they could vote for Romney and feel good about it because he now, suddenly, would be a Christian. 

It can’t be done, of course.  You can’t make the Mormon faith just another Christian denomination without changing both Christianity and Mormonism so much that neither would any longer be what it was. 

If I as a Christian wanted to vote for Romney, I wouldn’t worry about his Mormonism. I won’t vote for Romney.   I simply don’t trust him.  Nor do I like his proposed policies.  But his Mormon religion does not concern me.

I am, however, concerned about the faith of his running mate, Paul Ryan.  Although he is a member of the Catholic Church, Ryan has said that “more than anyone else, Ayn Rand taught me quite a bit about what my value system and beliefs are.”  “The reason I got involved in public service,” Ryan says, “by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, it would be Ayn Rand.” He says that Rand “does a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism.”  He believes that “an attack on democratic capitalism is an attack on the moral foundation of America.” What he means by democratic capitalism is, essentially, a free, unregulated market.  Now anyone who sees that as the moral foundation of America scares the daylights out of me.  But if it doesn’t scare you, perhaps you ought to learn a bit more about his guru, Ayn Rand.

To start, you can go to You-tube and find her interview with Mike Wallace in which she says, “I am against God.  I don’t approve of religion.  It is a sign of psychological weakness.  I reject it as evil.”  She sees selfishness as a great good and self-sacrifice as a great evil.  This is the woman whose morality  of capitalism Paul Ryan calls “fantastic.” No wonder his budget guts government policies that assist the poor and the sick, children and old people.

Frequent Dordt College Plumbline speaker Michael Gerson in a Washington Post column quotes her as saying, “Man exists for his own sake, the pursuit of happiness is his highest moral purpose, and he must not sacrifice himself to others . . . .”  An article in Christianity Today by Gary Moore cites this epigram from Ayn Rand:  “I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.”

Recently, after Paul Ryan’s budget and his allegiance to Ayn Rand were criticized by the Catholic bishops, Ryan said that his supposed admiration of Rand was an urban legend.  But, that’s a bald-face lie.  You can go to You-tube to hear and see him saying the things I have quoted above.  Of course he denied saying them when he realized that Catholics and the Religious Right might not vote for a vice-presidential candidate who said such things.  But the video doesn’t lie.

Romney’s Mormonism is nothing compared to Ryan’s Ayn Randism.  And at the heart of this philosophy is radical individualism.  In contrast, the church is a community, a body made up of many parts.  And in that body, the strong help the weak, the wealthy help the poor. That doesn’t happen in Ayn Rand’s “ideal” world. And it doesn’t happen in Paul Ryan’s proposed budget for the next year.

Congressman Ryan’s proposed Republican budget (on which Romney has lavished praise) cuts services to the poor and cuts taxes for the rich. It will extend the Bush tax cuts and “cut the top rate for individuals and corporations from 35 percent to 25 percent.”  Then it will slash “Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and low-income housing. These programs to help the poor . . .  absorb two-thirds of Ryan’s cuts” (Jonathan Chiat, “War on the Weak,” Newsweek, April 18, 2011).

The prophet Isaiah writes:  “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people. . . ” (Isaiah 10:1-2).