Luke 12:15- "And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."
Matthew 16:26- "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?"
Matthew 16:24- :Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me"
In the Christian Faith, Jesus calls people to not have a Utility Function of U = f(Material Well Being, Ideology), but instead he calls people to have the function U = (Ideology). With this in mind, the life that Christian's are called to live would lead to complete shirking in political arenas. Now some voters ideologies may align with the representative, but in this case shirking would be inevitable. The question then is, how does anyone who is a Christian hold public office? This answer can be found in the principle agent problem. Followers of the Christian faith are the agents and the principle is how Jesus calls us to live. No matter how hard anyone tries, it is impossible to live this out. Without the principle agent problem in this sense, christian politicians would only act off of the ideology of what Christianity says and not the desires of their voters, leading to no one who is a Christian to be elected to public office.
2 comments:
Hi Jay. I really enjoyed reading your post! It is interesting to think about how religious ideology might inform political decision-making. I just wanted to provide a little clarification on the principal-agent problem. Rather than "principle" referring to the values that guide us, I think the "principal" in the principal-agent problem is whomever the agent makes decisions for. In the case of representative democracy, the agent is the elected official, and the principal is his constituency.
I still think this could be applied to your example of Christian elected officials, but it might work a little differently. For example, if I was elected to represent a group of people less Christian than me, since I (as the agent) get to make decisions on their behalf, I would be motivated to "shirk" my duty to represent their preferences and instead vote based on my own pure personal religious ideology. This could still hold true for the reverse situation (if the agent is much less religious than the principal). The agent still would be motivated to "shirk" their duty to represent the religious ideology of their constituents, and instead act based on their own (more secular) preferences.
Hi Jay (and Paige!). I love this post! I too was thinking of my own faith during the discussion in class about ideology. The influence of Christian faith on policy decisions has always been very interesting to me, particularly in cases of welfare, the death penalty, and reproductive rights.
Paige, thanks for the clarification on how the principal-agent problem affects politicians in Jay's example. I wanted to go back to something that you wrote, Jay, in your post: "Followers of the Christian faith are the agents and the principle is how Jesus calls us to live". I really like this notion. Even set completely apart from the political arena, it is still impossible to deny the existence of the principal-agent problem that Christians face in their everyday lives. Christianity itself is really comprehensive example of the principal-agent relationship: Jesus is the principal and Christians are the agents. The definition of the principal-agent problem, "when agent's interests are not aligned with the interests of the principal", pretty much sums up the ongoing struggle against sin that Christians face in their everyday lives. Christians are called to live by the Gospels and to act according to the will of God. However, this does not always happen exactly as it should. Slack, when "agents can misbehave or shirk without consequence", occurs regularly in the day-to-day Christian life because the consequences--the promise of eternal life--are not always at the forefront of the agents' minds. In the same strand, Jesus is no passive principal. He saw the principal-agent problem coming from a mile away (funny, the things that you see coming when you're God incarnate); he worked to prevent shirking by giving Christians "explicitly defined output" (the Bible!!!).
This is such a fun fusion of my two very favorite things, Christianity and Economics. Thanks for your post, Jay!
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