At first glance, Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand seem as far apart as possible. Jesus founded the world’s largest religion; Ayn Rand founded Objectivism, a prominent atheistic philosophy. Jesus sacrificed His life for our sins; Ayn Rand is the self-described “arch-apostle of selfishness.”
But one thing Objectivism and Christianity have in common is the importance of every person. To Ayn Rand, each individual human being is an independent entity whose rights are derived from their status as a rational human being – and the foundation of morals is respect for the rights of those individuals.
Morals have a parallel foundation in Christianity. Each human is a rational animal – a being with intellect and will, one who can come to believe in Jesus and choose to follow them. Whether those beings choose to do that or not, the foundation of ethics is treating those individuals as an end in and of themselves.
That’s the meaning of the word “catholic” in “one holy, catholic and apostolic church” in the Nicene Creed and the name of the “Roman Catholic Church”: catholic, meaning universal, meaning, embracing all believers, open to all. Christianity isn’t for a specific group: it’s for everyone.
There are obvious differences between Objectivism and Christianity. Objectivism is based on the evidence of existence; Christianity is based on a foundation of faith. Objectivism rejects the idea of an agent as an explanation for existence; Christianity places the agent God as the logical ground of being.
In Objectivism, the individual is sovereign; in Christianity, God is sovereign. In Objectivism, pursuing your own values is the ultimate end goal of your actions; in Christianity, pursuing your own will over God’s is a sin, and is one of the biggest stumbling blocks we need to overcome.
The biggest difference, of course, is their attitudes towards altruism: Objectivism rejects self-sacrifice as evil, whereas Christianity places it as its highest good, founded as it is on the greatest self-sacrifice of all, the Son of God’s death on the Cross to blot out the sins of all mankind.
But this last difference is less of a difference than it first appears. Objectivists are not altruistic, but they are benevolent: trying to make the world better for human beings. Christians should focus on the Kingdom of God rather than the world – but to do so, we must love our neighbors as ourselves.
This Great Commandment, this fundamental respect for others as equals to ourselves, is all too easily forgotten in Christianity when we fall prey to one of Christianity’s greatest sins: self-righteousness. Jesus told his disciples to shake the dust off their sandals and move on if people rejected the Gospel.
Three and a half centuries after Jesus, Saint Augustine was recommending religious persecution for people who refused to convert to Christianity; eleven hundred years after, that had devolved into the Inquisition; fifteen hundred years after, it perhaps hit its nadir in the witch trials.
God is more than capable of giving every human being the experiences they need to choose whether or not to believe in Him. He’s got the budget for it. And while He wants us to witness to good news about Jesus to help them believe, He doesn’t need us to do that – and doesn’t want us to do it by force.
Forcing others to conform to our beliefs is precisely the opposite of casting the dust off our sandals. Forcing others to conform to our beliefs is precisely the opposite of turning the other cheek. In those circumstances, that’s when I turn to the Great Commandment – but sometimes, I need a little help.
That’s where the clarity of Objectivism comes in. Saying “love thy neighbor as yourself” is poetic, but open to a lot of interpretation about what that “love” really means. If we instead ask the very specific question: Am I treating the other human being in this transaction as a unit? we can get somewhere.
Each person is a rational being, an independent agent, an end in and of themselves. Ethics consists of making decisions which are good for those people, not for abstract concepts or groups – which is where Augustine went wrong, by putting “pastoral” concerns over letting individuals make their own decisions.
The temptation in dealing with the other – the jerk, the liar, the thief, the guy who leaves his shopping cart catty-cornered blocking off two parking spaces – is to demonize them, to see them as evil. But this is a kind of fundamental attribution error – blaming behavior on people’s nature, rather than circumstances.
Some people fail to put the shopping cart back because they’re oblivious; others don’t care; and yes, there are people who do it because they’re deliberately trying to be jerks. The action is the same – whether it’s an asshole trying to tick people off, or a harried mother whose baby’s diaper has exploded.
There is real evil in the world – but it rests in the actions, not the people. People, in and of themselves, are not evil. They may do evil – they may have committed sins – but in the end, they are people, individual human beings, worthy of respect – concrete units, not instances of abstract groups or concepts.
Remembering that people are people, worthy of respect as people, is paradoxically hardest when the person’s beliefs are different. You want to go after the jerk in the parking lot. But you also get outraged at the political opponent, or the person whose philosophy or religion are different. They’re so wrong!
Yet they’re still people. And so, when the question arises, I ask myself: am I thinking of this person as a member of a class – as an asshole, or a political opponent, or a religious one – or as a concrete unit, as a rational being who has the same right to their own life that I do – and the same right to make choices?
Once I accept that person as a person, my values say I should love them as myself – and love, to me, is taking on other’s goals over your own. This isn’t quite the self-sacrificial cartoon version of altruism that Ayn Rand criticized, as I have many other values which I will not and should not compromise.
But Christian values come first. Ayn Rand helps me to remember that people are not abstract characters in my internal mental drama, but real, concrete, existing human beings – and once I remember that, Jesus Christ can help guide me to treat that person as my neighbor, and to love them as myself.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Ayn Rand. I had a trouble capturing her rotation, as this essay set her spinning in her grave.
