Government Is Inherently Coercive

I'm reading God's Name in Vain by Stephen Carter. He points to something that I believe is fundamental.

. . . electoral politics has been a difficult and often harmful location for religionists to try to make a stand against the culture. Possessing an honored voice that somtimes prevails is not the same as regularly exercising actual secular power to tell people, at a point of a gun, what they must do. . . . (p. 6)

. . . . Any conversation about politics is also a conversation about coercion. A conversation about politics is either about what people should be forced to do, or forced not to do (law); or about who should do the forcing (elections) . . . . (p. 28)

Government is inherently coercive. Government is about force.

So when I think about my faith and my politics, I believe I have to think about what my faith suggests to me about the legitimate or justified use of force in my daily life.

I'm not sure I really like the idea of asking what would Jesus do, or what would Jesus drive. Still, the idea might be suggestive of what I think I need to confront when I think about my faith and my politics: Who would Jesus coerce and why? I would like to ask for suggestions about answers to these questions that we might find by looking at the Gospels.

I teach the economics of government to college students and I often ask them to note that government is inherently coercive and then to consider in what ways the use of force in their daily lives might be acceptable. In general, it seems the responses suggest that force and coercion is justified in our daily lives in self-defense, or in the defense of ourselves and our property, and even in the defense of the person and property of others. I think this is a widely accepted idea, that force is justified in self-defense. I wonder if we can find scripture in the Gospels that would suggest that force in self-defense is a principle acceptable to Jesus?

Returning to Carter, Chapter 6 in his book is titled "The Separation of Church and Slavery." He writes:

All through the twentieth century, historians searched for ways to explain the Civil War in particular, and the abolitionist struggle in general, without the need for resort to religion. . . .Yet it was slavery, and nothing but slavery, that caused the Southern states to secede; it was slavery, and nothing but slavery, that the war's most ardent Northern supporters addressed. . . .There is good reason to think that without the steady drumbeat of Christian condemnation from the abolitionist preachers, there would never have been sufficient antislavery sentiment--to say nothing of antislavery interest--to enable the nation finally to go to war over the issue. . . .

The suggestion is that without Christian condemnation, force would not have been used to end slavery in the United States. The Civil War that ended slavery would, perhaps, not have been fought, except for the political action of Christians to influence the ways in which government used it's coercive power. I'm not sure the abolitionists were seeking war to end slavery, but, nonetheless, it seems that the war that ended slavery emerged from their actions in politics. Given my Christian faith, was this an acceptable use of force and coercion? And, I wonder, could slavery in the United States ever have been ended without the use of force?