Commentary: Modern-day Pharisees

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Evangelical Republicans today are like certain characters in the Bible in Jesus’ day, the very spiritual, very educated, very rich, very law-abiding and very beautifully clothed Pharisees. Jesus could hardly find words to describe them because they were so certain of themselves and yet so far away from understanding the real meaning of the constitutional law of Moses. They held to that law like it was gold when it suited their purposes, but treated the law like dirt when it didn’t. At one point, after running out of polite words to describe Pharisees, Jesus just threw up his hands and called them “vipers.” They were killers with forked tongues, not necessarily killing the body but truly killing the soul.

Republicans today love the constitutional law when it suits their purposes, like for example the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. That law is inviolable, they say, sacred like the Scripture. The right to own any and every kind of weapon, like an AR-15, is critical to representative government.

Why does unlimited and unregulated gun ownership fit Republican purposes so well? Republicans believe families must be able to defend themselves against their own government, which is full of anti-American Democrats who want to overthrow God’s kingdom and everything else good in America, including private schools, oil companies and law enforcement. So, Republicans want their own party members to be armed to the teeth, and rich party members to virtually have private armies to protect their interests from all the bad elements in society. In all of this they say they are thinking only of protecting their own innocent children, and the wonderful people they go to church with.

The Pharisees were the same way about some of the laws of Moses. They desperately wanted people to obey the law of the Sabbath and so instituted dire penalties for those who broke it. They spent lifetimes figuring out when the Sabbath started and ended, and what could be done on that day and what could not be done. Why was the Sabbath so important to them? Because they felt it was a religious day, and they wanted to be masters of religion as well as of politics.

Jesus said something about the Pharisees one day that gave rise in the Western legal tradition to the idea of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. The letter of both the Sabbath constitutional law and 2nd Amendment constitutional law says people have the right to a special day of rest and the right to own weapons to defend themselves.

However, having a day off work that is filled with minute commandments about every step one must take and every word that must come out of one’s mouth was not the original purpose of the law of the Sabbath. Having AR-15s on the loose in the community and in the hands of unstable citizens was not the original purpose of the 2nd Amendment.

Jesus in effect was saying, you folks need to consider the situation of the immigrating tribes during the Exodus. They previously had to work seven days a week under the slavedriver Pharoah and knew that back in Canaan they needed a day of rest every week to recover and direct their own lives. Moses and the leaders of the 12 tribes wanted a day of physical and mental recovery above all else, not a day of forced labor in the Pharisee church to substitute for a day of forced labor under Pharaoh. The way he explained this concept to people is that Moses wanted the Sabbath to be made to support humankind’s needs, not humankind molded to fit the rules of the Pharisee church’s Sabbath. The easiest way to ensure that would be to have a uniform day each week where employers could not do business or require their employees to work. Beyond that, no rules were necessary for the day.

In the same way, the Founders of the American republic wanted folks to have access to defensive weapons in case they were attacked by foreign forces. That requirement was ably met by establishing local and state militias and a national armed force. Ordinary working Americans did not need to own tanks and mortars and automatic weapons to be able to stop break-ins to their homes. Those things could be handled by means of ordinary rifles and handguns and alarm systems. Any other threats could be handled by means of education, free speech, elections, corporations, churches and other institutions.

Kimball Shinkoskey lives in Woods Cross, Utah.