Christian Civics: Governance and the 10th Commandment
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.
Exodus 20:17
A society that breeds and traffics in envy is in a bad place. Envy and happiness are mutually exclusive, like matter and space. The one squeezes out the other. Envy pushes gladness and gratitude to the side. And a society that is less and less cheerful and grateful and more and more jealous and bitter is a society that will soon be looking for blood. If you live in a culture that’s a hotbed for envy, you’ll soon be living in a culture rife with tensions and enemies.
Human society requires that people live near each other and interact with each other without killing each other. Ideally, they’ll even work together to pave roads, build buildings, catch bad guys, and grow food. If that doesn’t happen, if instead the human beings in the same day and place have rage towards each other and fantasize about each other’s downfalls, it will be very difficult to live in society with each other. People won’t want to live fruitful lives in concord with one another. Instead of production and neighborliness you’ll have overt or covert hostility. And contemporary America seems to be on a current kick of fostering the resentments and jealousies and bitternesses that will soon land us right there.
A better America, the America I want, would not automatically cast the guy with white skin as the enemy of the guy with brown skin. It would not automatically assume the neighbor with three new cars did something devious and the guy with one old car didn’t. It wouldn’t presume who my foes are based merely on checking account balances or family tree. When we write laws and enforce laws, or when we decide what public money to take from whom and whom to spend it on, based on this sort of animosity, we are creating a society of increasing friction and hostility. And that resulting wear and tear is going to slowly erode society itself. We can only live together and work together if we can live together and work together. If we hate each other, wish ill upon each other, have contempt for one another, and in some cases even do violence to one another, society becomes less and less possible.
Public schools and universities should not teach black students to be suspicious of white students. State and federal legislators should not be demagogues such that they merely play upon citizens’ sense of grievance. The more the public square of America is filled with the assumption that I am owed what someone else has, the more the typical American citizen is governed towards envy and strife, the less America will be possible. Since society involves different human beings working in concert, envy and enmity are quite literally the enemies of society.
The laws we pass, the public education we administer, the tax revenue we spend should never foster jealousy, envy, and bitterness. If they do, the potential lifespan on the society required to do things like pass laws (and pave roads and collect taxes and have an electric grid) will grow ever shorter.