Here, we take up the task of both teaching and rebuke, as all Scripture is profitable for, in demystifying the evil of “Social Contract Theory.”
Standing on a basis of rejecting God, and on the presuppositions of atheism and esotericism, Social Contract Theory postulates an impossible “state of nature” that is pure hedonistic freedom and anarchy, and then suggests than man “gives up rights” when entering into the “social contract” by mere existence within a society.
This view of politics leaves no room for the Lordship of Christ over the political and civil spheres, and was designed to allow the rise of an oligarch class, and an absolute government in God’s place.
“Mystification of Social Contract
The rise of Social Contract theory, from Hobbes to Rousseau, was aimed squarely at evicting God from government and from society.
What this concept comes to down to is a simple yet exceedingly difficult to answer question: “what makes government legitimate?”
This is a very important question to account for. On one hand, government uses violence to coerce compliance with its decrees – so those decrees better be, and better be seen as, legitimate. In a deeper sense that which is said to legitimate government truly is king. Even in a nation with a king, if that government is said to be legitimated by the majoritarian opinion of its people, then that majority of people is, indeed, over the king himself.
So, “what is over government” is about the most important question that exists in politics.
In the time leading up to the rise of the “Social Contract” it was widely understood that God was over government – be it king or parliament, both were in subjection to the Lord. This was, in its own inception, a revolutionary good for the governed, as, before the time that government was seen as subject to God, government widely was seen as god. This was true in a virtually unbroken line from ancient Egypt to Ceasar of Rome. The ruler represented the divine, and, therefore, there was nothing over the ruler. The ruler, as lord over all, was said to be subject to nothing at all, but all was in subjection to him. Nero gave a fitting manifestation to the consequences of this idea.
It was the idea that God is over all, including government, and even Caesar, that set the stage for the time known as the “enlightenment,” the scientific revolution, and, later, the founding of the United States of America.
You see, if there is nothing over government, then anything that the government decrees is necessarily the final say. There is no higher ethic. There is no higher authority to which to appeal. There is no such thing as a “right.” You have no rights – not even the rights of conscience. You are subject to the violence of the state at will and on a whim, and, according to the logic of this concept, you have no grounds on which to complain.
It is only when a transcendent authority is placed over government that you have anything that might be called a “right” at all. It is only in this view that you might make “an appeal to Heaven” when your government transgresses against you. It is only in this belief of government subject to the transcendent that you even have a leg to stand on to complain about official oppression.
As a rather clever mystification of circumstances, and as sinners are wont to deny the Lord His due, a series of “philosophers” constructed the idea of a contract that you are automatically entered into by mere existence. They justified this based on the “state of nature” thought experiment importing the presuppositions of esoteric Anarchism: Hobbes, “in a state of nature life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”
This thought experiment, based not on Christian presuppositions about creation under God’s Lordship, but, rather, on atheistic and esoteric ideas about a “pre-government” state of existence, provided the necessary impetus to restore the status of the state as the highest authority – a “lesser evil” than this “state of nature.” This was rather obviously thin metaphysically from its Hobbesian beginnings, which is why Rousseau applied the more complicated, and successful, mystification of the “general will,” which draws on the Platonic “democracy” paradigm to suggest that there is a portion of the population that has access to the knowledge of the realm of “forms,” and this gnostic sense provides a path forward in History for that society willing to elevate these gnostics as philosopher kings. This “general will,” then, accessible to only select persons, forms the further legitimizing mechanism of Social Contract Theory.
So, what then is the “Social Contract” from a traditional American perspective? It’s a big lie meant to nullify the “creator” of the Bill of Rights, that Christian God from which the rights of man are decreed in Scripture, in order to elevate the state into the position of god over a mass of sheep, to be manipulated and disposed of, and to have no higher appeal than to a manmade bureaucracy. The petty secret here is that this “Social Contract” is undertaken as a revolutionary coup d’état to elevate a class of “golden” oligarchs over the “bronze” “demos.”
There is no “Social Contract.” There is only the decreed Word of God that defines the rights of men, the scope of the spheres of government, and commands the obedience even of kings.
The Constitution is not a “Social Contract.” It is a constitution, which is to say a formational document describing how and why a state is to be constituted. If it were a contract who would arbitrate a dispute? Do you remember signing the dotted line to enter into this contract? Can a single party to a contract choose to forcibly dissolve that contract and exit any obligations – which is precisely what the Declaration of Independence did, and why Article 10 of the New Hampshire Constitution exists? Of course not, because it is not a contract, and the only real legitimacy on which it stands is in pointing to both the consent of the governed and the Word of the Creator.
A republic is legitimized by consent. The American republic was understood to persist only as long as that consent was granted by a “moral and religious” people. In other words, the American republic defined by the American Constitution is legitimated to the degree that it aligns with God’s design over a godly people.
A Christian has no business playing with such concepts of “Social Contract” that were designed by the enemy as a weapon against the advance of the Church on the gates of Hell.”
