Wholly Un-Christian: The Rugged Individualism of Ayn Rand

Sometime last week I wrote a short post entitled "On Knowledge." The purpose of that post was to begin a much larger project on which I'm working on the topic of Christian epistemology, and to begin to trace out some of the core arguments in that field. One of the central claims I made in that post was the following:

Knowledge is more a Relationship with a Mystery than it is a quantifiable substance.

For a wide variety of peoples - from secular academics to fundamentalist Christians - this claim could seem an unsettling one. After all, it implies that Knowledge, something that we take-for-granted as being "objective," is an intimate, personal thing, a claim that rejects the received understanding that the mind is bifurcated from the body. Or, to put that in different terms, my claim rejects the binarism of mind-body altogether and says that Knowledge is something the implicates the whole of a person's Being. To Know is not just to "have knowledge of" but to also, in its own sense, "have experience of"; and "to have experience of" is somewhat authoritative (though not, of course, entirely).

This argument sounds a little mystical or existential, but it is actually a well-received argument in certain circles. For instance, the Reformed epistemologists - Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, for instance - use analytic philosophy to come to a similar claim when they argue that belief in God is, as they say, "properly basic." That is, just like one does not need a "rational" argument to claim the existence of their own hands - it is just something that you Know - one does not need a "rational" argument in order to believe in God. It is not necessary that belief in God be founded upon "rational" arguments in order that belief in God be rational.

While my own line of inquiry does not necessarily go through such lengths of apologetics, I think it is worthwhile to share Plantinga and Wolterstorff's claim here in order to legitimize the notion that a Relational, yet Authoritative, Knowledge is rational. After all, where does this argument of "basic belief" come from? It isn't from "objective" logic or rationalism, anyways, but it is grounded in certain basic claims of existence. It is "existential," in the sense that its claim is Known prior to its essence (if we accept Jean-Paul Sartre's definition of existential). This isn't necessarily profound - although the Reformed epistemologist's work is more complicated and profound than what I have just described - it is just the normal way that we engage with the world. It is part of the undergirding logic of humanity, as it were.

Now, I plan to write more in the dialectical manner that I did for that post last week, especially since I left it (unsatisfyingly) incomplete. Even though I have mentioned in the preceding thoughts some of the claims of Christian epistemology, I have not arrived at them in the writing quite yet, so maybe some of the above claims appear to be leaps that I have not yet justified. I intend to clarify those details in future blog posts.

Ayn Rand: Wholly Un-Christian
However, for today what I would like to do is address the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand, a thinker whose work has been assimilated by a particular brand of Christian thought, especially that Christian thought that pre-supposes the goodness of conservatism or capitalism as its values. What I aim to do is show, through comparative epistemology, how hollow Rand's whole philosophy is and how distant it truly is from Christian thought.

This might strike a person as bizarre, given the sort of credence that Rand has held in conservative, especially libertarian, Christian circles. For instance, one writer in The Atlantic says, of a Christian-Randian friend, "In his estimation, they [the heroes of Rand's novels] were articulating why government had no right to trespass on individual liberty he regarded as God given, and doing their utmost to work hard, play fair, and oppose autocrats." Meanwhile, when the final part of the theatrical version of Atlas Shrugged came out last year, the directors cast Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck (voices for the Christian right) to play their own part in legitimizing the story. Most telling - and most bothersome, to me - of the Christian right's relationship with Ayn Rand is a long essay - one of a handful - that Pastor John Piper wrote lauding her claims.

(I am going to pass over as though it were not significant how Piper's brand of complementarianism - one in which he has openly questioned whether a woman should be a police officer - doesn't quite fits to listening to a woman-philosopher's teaching. But that would be a fun argument to make, I dare say.)

To do this, I will effectively follow John Piper's own essay, pulling from the points that he admires about Ayn Rand. In so doing, of course, I will not comment on all of the things that Piper himself admits are un-Christian of her: her hatred of Jesus, her rejection of the strong laying down his life for the weak, her rejection of Mercy in general.

This, I think, too, is a principled of charitable judgment when it comes to atheist philosophers and engaging them with Christian faith. For instance, it should be clear that one of the most lamentable parts of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy is his utter rejection of the Gift and of Grace, or that one of the most problematic parts of Michel Foucault's philosophy is his rejection of the Eternal for the sake of the Historical. Etc, etc. Charitable interpretation by a Christian judging a non-Christian based on theological standards requires some sort of "shaving." Otherwise we land with the silly notion that these atheists hold to Christian beliefs, something that just does not make sense.

But the difference between Sartre and Rand - and this is important because they both fall on the Cartesian lineage - is that I think there is some legitimacy to Sartre's ontology. When read alongside the Book of Romans, he resonates with a particular hamartiological description of man's sad estate. Sartre won't call this "total depravity," but he is an incredible thinker on the problem of sin. There's some deep value in a phenomenology of sin, like that which we gain in Sartre, and I, for one, feel confident that I could use Sartre as a starting-point in an apologetic with non-believers.

I do not find Rand so useful. She seems particularly useful if one is interested in shoring-up the Christian right belief of "rugged individualism," but since that's not a Biblical belief, it would turn out that she's only successful in shoring up a heresy that pretends to be a claim of Christian Truth - at least, in the minds of certain Christian thinkers.

The Epistemological Problem of Rand's Axiom of Existence
To repudiate Rand's whole philosophy, I think it vital to begin where she begins - that is, with her epistemology. And she starts with Aristotle and the axiom of existence. This claim is incredibly simple: A is A. A stone is not a leaf, a tree is not a bear, but a stone is a stone and a tree is a tree. For Aristotle, this question is a metaphysical question, one regarding how we deal with logic of the reality that we experience. But for Ayn Rand this question is an epistemological one, in which the experienced reality is the absolute truth for reality. Or, to quote John Piper's explication "Existence is not wishy-washy but a firm base for epistemology," and "metaphysics... is the foundation and arbiter of epistemology."

This claim should be clearly understood to be deeply flawed. After all, since the time of Plato (and earlier) all of philosophy has practically rejected this idea. For Plato, existence revealed that which was hidden in the realm of the essences, whereas for Descartes, his own experience was so untrustworthy that he found he needed to discover some foundational rational basis of knowledge. Sartre gets the closest, in certain ways, to this claim, but then he says that we deceive ourselves and live in "bad faith," which means that our existence is not a firm base for truth at all. There is a reason that Rand was never picked up much by the intellectual establishment in the academy and that reason had more to do with the philosophical incongruity of this epistemology than any political aspirations.

But my argument is not to compare Rand with the philosophers, but to stake my claim on the un-Christian-ness of Rand's claim. This one is utterly simple: As Christian we confess that we are utterly evil in the state of sin and cannot help ourselves. It is only by God's Grace and Gospel that we can be redeemed and regenerated from our evil estate. The Protestant Reformation staked its entire claims on this doctrine, from Martin Luther's "Bondage of the Will" to the similar claims made by John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Even the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church - written to be a little more ecumenical and lenient towards Anglo-Catholics - make an express statement regarding man's state, calling it the "infection of the nature."

If, therefore, man is dead in sin, as the Scriptures say, then how shall he know the Truth? Or how shall he know Reality, Existence, Knowledge, and be trustworthy to report it? This is the major philosophical problem inherent in Rand's axiom of existence, because although she purports to present an "objective" view of reality - her very philosophy being called 'Objectivism' - the epistemological foundations of her view are truly based on subjective experience, with no rational guardrail against deception. (On the contrary, even Sartre's "radical freedom" subjectivism contains the rational guardrail he calls "bad faith.")

In this sense Rand is thoroughly out-of-touch with her own intellectual history. There's a sense in which she is an inheritor of Descartes and Sartre, and she seems to be rejecting the lineage of Freud, Hegel, and Lacan outright by staking her claims on the "radical individual." But she does not inherit from Descartes and Sartre their (relative) humility. Descartes is so distraught by the inability to find real truth in the world that he dismisses many truths in search of a foundational one ("cogito ergo sum"). Sartre is perplexed by why free human subjects do not act freely, until he realizes that we arrest our own freedom through bad faith. But Rand has none of these "guardrails," instead she has implicit trust in the reasoning faculty and experiential truths of the human person.

So, clearly, not only is this bad philosophy, but it is also dangerous hamartiology. If a Christian person believes this, then they, like Pelagius, believe that humans are "pretty much good" and that sin is "things we do that are bad," two claims that are repudiated by Augustine and pretty much the entirety of the orthodox theological traditions. Instead, we report that the human being is a slave to sin, and that even the human reason is a slave, such that Paul's Gospel depended not upon reason but upon the supernatural power of God (see I Co. 2). In fact, Paul would even go as far to say that humans create fantasies to validate their own idolatrous tendencies, rather than face the glory of God in their sinful state (see the first two chapters of Romans).

This sort of "objective" thinking is actually precisely what I rejected in my earlier essay, because at its heart - and this is true even of Descartes - "objective" thought is a man-centered way of thinking, it does not call or rely on an external authority, but it calls and relies on the internal authority of one's own mind. In this sense, the "rational individual" that Rand characterizes in her hero-worship is nonexistent. (By the by, can we talk about how Nietzschean her hero-worship is?)

The Supernatural Problem of Rand's Axiom of Existence
The second major problem, staying just with the axiom of existence, is the rejection of supernatural existence implicit within her "A is A" claim. At its center, "A is A" is a naturalist claim. By staking this at the center of her epistemology, Rand points to an atheistic universe, one in which there are no supernatural gifts, no supernatural powers, and no miracles. (Of course, in Rand's universe none of these things could exist anyways because of her views of Mercy and Helping the Other.)

Beyond the rejection of Christian hamartiology that I mentioned earlier, this rejection of the supernatural has more resounding consequences if a Christian were to appreciate it. After all, as Christians we believe that we live a dual-existence, as citizens of two worlds, so to speak. And in that Christian worldview we, like our Father before us, "call things that are not as though they were" (Ro. 4): the poor are the inheritors of the earth, the meek are the strong, the slaves are the free, and the free are the slaves, the kings are paupers, and so on. For the Christian these "now-and-not-yet" claims are not happy epigrams or koans that make us think of "a better world." No, that would be nonsense. For the Christian these claims - the claims of Jesus about His Kingdom - are the True Reality that is hidden by the physical reality. This is the meaning underneath Augustine's City of God, isn't it? This is part of the implications of Luther's Two Kingdoms, isn't it?

More centrally still to our theology, this is why in Christian sacrology we so highly value the Sacrament of Communion. It is not just bread and wine, but body and blood. For the Catholics this is literal, whereas for the Protestants (and the Lutherans are peculiar on this) this is symbolic, yet real. (The Presbyterians, for instance, would confess that Christ's "real presence" is manifest in the Sacrament, even though he is not "really present" the way the Catholics say he is.) Historically, the Sacraments were the epistemology of the Church in the manner that they represented how we dealt with the problem of our two realities.

So this means that Christians either believe "A is B" (the Roman Catholics) or something more like "A represents B." For the purposes of rejecting Rand's axiom of existence, the point is the same: Christians reject, fundamentally, the idea that "A is A." Now, we don't reject, of course, the idea that reality does exist and that we can observe it and learn things about it - that would make us anti-scientists in our own way - but that is not how Rand means her epistemology. For her, "A is A" is the utter foundation of Truth and Reality. And Christians just cannot accept that belief because it deeply contradicts our central ideas of Truth and Reality.

The Satanic Project in Rand's Epistemology
The last part of my argument - for now, because there is so many more ways I could continue my invectives on this topic - is to make an observation based on Rand's words and a certain, familiar, being from the Bible. At the end of the day, even though I find the above arguments regarding her axiom of existence compelling, it is this argument that deeply disconcerts me regarding Rand's prevalence in Christian thought.

That is because Rand's thought holds a striking similarity to what Satan's goals and thoughts are revealed to be by the Bible, as well as to some of the central claims made by Satanists to this day. I should be clear that I don't invoke the name of the Devil to speak as some sort of fundamentalist, but because I take seriously what the Bible says about this being, and I take seriously the reality of spiritual warfare that is involved in the world of thoughts and ideas. When the same idea pops up time and again, it seems worthwhile to identify its source directly.

Here are few claims made by Rand that I think hit on my claims here directly (all quotes from Piper's helpful summation):

"My philosophy in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute."

Let's gather from that: Man as the self-actuating Individual whose purpose is his own happiness.

"This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man."

So this Man described previously is supposed to be ideal...

"Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it."

And here we see the axiom of existence and its epistemological claim: to apprehend a thing is to know it. (See the rejection of this version of "knowing" in that previous essay.)

Let me sum up Rand's claims in a way that might sound familiar: the being that should be worshiped (she uses that term elsewhere for her "ideal man") is the Ideal Man, the Perfect Man, whose purpose and goal is his own pleasure, and who holds knowledge over everything that he sees. To pursue that gratification, this Man will be wholly made of Reason and achieve utter productivity.

This should give orthodox Christians pause. It should also sound familiar to us. We are told in the Bible that Satan was "perfect and without flaw" before he fell, and that his one goal was to "become like the Most High." Then in the garden we hear that his temptation to Adam and Eve is "the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil." It's because of this relationship in theology that the Devil-inspired character of the Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian desires to hold all knowledge, so he can control all things. (I wrote a bit about this character in a blog post about three years ago... My writing has improved plenty since then, thank God!)

But just pointing to the figure of Satan as seen directly in Scriptures is not enough: let us add to that list the People of Babel, who built a tower to prove the almighty-ness of Man, or Pharaoh, who thought that he was higher than God, or Goliath, who likewise exalted Man over God. The Jewish Rabbis point to these images and say that these, too, are representations of Satan and the kingdom of darkness. This is what their values are: the exaltation of Man, the power of Man's productivity, the worship of Power, the goal of self-gratification, and the mastery of knowledge. It is not for nothing that Ayn Rand - alongside Nietzsche's Ubermensch - is one of the intellectual undergirdings of the Satanic "Church" in America. They share an epistemology centered on the mastery of knowledge by "Reason alone."

And even if that is not convincing enough as to the dangers of Rand's philosophy, I would recommend the reader to go and read C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength and see what our beloved evangelical intellectual feels about the exaltation of Man as a philosophy. (Clearly John Piper has not read it.)

The Danger of the Appeal / An Ecclesiological Antidote
I surely hope that Christians do not receive Rand as a speaker of Truth. Her idea of Truth is so far from our orthodox version, grounded in our Creeds, that I can say without hesitation that it is heretical at best and Satanic at worst. I don't think either of those words are ones to be tossed about lightly.

So why does she appeal to Christians like John Piper? Why did he, by his own confession, read so many of her works in ardent fascination (which is not the same as erudite curiosity or academic interest)? It seems to me that the underpinning danger of the appeal of Ayn Rand is rooted in how American evangelicals deal with the problem of the Individual.

And this problem seems to be primarily a non-denomination / Charismatic / Pentecostal / evangelical problem, not a denominational one. The Presbyterians, who are very conservative, avoid this problem through Covenant Theology. They do not think it "collectivist" (in the political sense) to assert that individualism is a dangerous belief and a historically American one. Nor do they find that invective as a rejection of their commitment to the doctrine of penal substitution justification for the individual. I do not think - and I agree with the Presbyterians and the Reformed Christians on this - that the rejection of individualism requires a rejection of individual salvation. They are not tied up with one another in that way.

I wonder if the culturally-mediated ideas of Individualism, one of the children of secular rationalism and modernism, have a stronger hold over us than we'd like to think. Where does this idea come from? After all, I know of no theologians who hold to the version of Individualism that I have heard in some Christian circles. Of the ancients and the Reformers - Augustine, Calvin, Luther, etc. - and of the modern theologians - from the PCA, LCMS, etc. - we hear nothing of this sort of theology. So where does it come from? The study of Individualism in the Church is something I might write on in the near future.

For now, it suffices to say, that the antidote to this type of Individualism is quite simply the Church: that we grow in an understanding of God's Covenant relationship with us as a community, that we identify the Sacraments as those Covenant signs that bind us together, and that we confess our faith individually-together as worshiping communities committed to God's Purposes in the world. Or, to put it another way, when the Church invests into her ecclesiological (of the governance and organization of the church body), missiological (of the evangelical purposes of God in the world), and sacrological (of the Sacraments) values, then she will also grow in her vision of orthodox hamartiology and epistemology. All of theology comes together when we operate as the Church, rather than as lone-wolf individuals.


And, beyond that, that although I could write further on the major epistemological problems inherent with Rand's philosophy, I don't think she's worth my time. One might note that I didn't even get past her "metaphysics is epistemology" foundation, and there is a sense that I don't really need to. If her beliefs and philosophies are flawed from the outset, why should I interrogate further? Surely the rest of her system, built upon this premise, is rickety. But Christ said: "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock." (Mt. 7:24-25) When something is foundationally flawed, whatever claims that come from it are unsteady. And Ayn Rand, whatever some Christians might admire in her, represents easily the most unsteady philosophy I have ever heard of (and I have read some crazy, unsustainable things!). She does not deserve a place informing our Christian thought.