That Review: I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means
Is 'Thank God For Bitcoin' Unduly Alarmist and Anti-Authoritarian?
Darryl Burling left one of the first reviews of Thank God For Bitcoin (a book I contributed to) on Amazon. It was a 4/5 star review, so the critique of that review that you're about to read ought to be taken in light of that fact. As far as I can tell, Darryl is a brother in Christ and a good-faith actor, and his review was no hatchet job. He complimented the book in several ways and recommended that people read it. Almost every time I find myself on TGFB’s Amazon page, I see Darryl’s review.
And it irks me.
Forty-two people have said that Darryl's review helped them decide whether or not to buy the book, the highest number out of the reviews left on Amazon. This is another reason I thought this might be a worthy use of the time required to respond: Darryl has clearly been influential.
With that said, here we go. Darryl's two negative critiques can be summarized as follows: the book has an alarmist tone and comes across as anti-government.
Let's start with the tone. The book does have an alarmist tone—no objection there. That was purposeful. Darryl then ventures a guess at why the book is alarmist, attributing it to the fact that the authors are "deeply in the Bitcoin echo chamber." This critique seems initially to imply that expressing alarm is inherently out of place, which isn't true. Since Darryl is a Christian, I'll appeal to the Bible: there are countless examples of passionate warnings and appeals about impending danger. Many of the prophets do this explicitly. John the Baptist comes to mind, Stephen in the book of Acts, and Christ himself tries to shake his audiences out of the complacency they were mired in. There obviously is a place, Biblically speaking, for expressing alarm. Then what do we make of Darryl's critique? It seems he believes that we (TGFB authors) express an undue alarm over the subjects discussed in the book.
I would argue that rather than communicating anything about us, this critique tells us more about Darryl: he doesn't think the issues addressed are as important, consequential, or dangerous as we do. This begs the question: why not? Undue alarm by what standard? His assertion doesn't make a case about which points raised in the book are overstated, so we're just left to wonder. The nature of what has happened with money over the past 50 years and the effects that it has had on the world (especially the poor) ought to be alarming. It has destroyed the lives of people all over the world and has received almost no attention from Western Christians. Every currency in Latin America has failed multiple times since 1971, throwing individuals, families, churches, and these nations as a whole into poverty and the manifold dangers that accompany it. Darryl might not be experiencing those realities (and I hope he isn't!), but many are.
And that's to say nothing of the present realities and the trajectory that we are on. Things are even more dire than when the book was written. We wrote during the first 8 months of the pandemic, and the consequences of the policies enacted during that period only exacerbated many of the issues raised in the book. Let's move to the allegations that the book (and us, by extension) are anti-government. This accusation is just like the first: it tells us more about Darryl than it does anything else. Darryl grounds this objection by saying Christians are to submit to those in authority as if that will settle the issue.
We completely agree that Christians have a duty to submit to those in authority. However, we also quickly recognize that that submission has biblically grounded limits. Jesus, Paul, and many of the apostles were delivered over to the Romans and killed because they refused to submit to them in the ways that Roman law required. The Scriptures are replete with other examples, including Rahab, the Hebrew midwives, Jael, and others who actively resist, deceive, and even directly lie to governmental officials at various points. The warning to submit cannot be divorced from any context to justify autonomy and lawlessness on the part of governments. John the Baptist was killed because he spoke up about Herod's wickedness. Governments do not have the right to write their own job description. The Scriptures do that, and Christians have a responsibility to both know and vocally maintain those lines, obeying God rather than man when required. My most vigorous disagreement with Darry's review concerned his evaluation that "one of the biggest problems in the church today is that Christians are so belligerent against authority." Again, Darryl offers intuition in lieu of evidence to support this point.
However, in the intervening period since his review, the Lord saw fit to put Darry's belief to the test: governments worldwide told churches worldwide that they weren't allowed to meet together to worship, as they were not vital services. What were vital services, you ask? Strip clubs, abortion clinics, and violent protests, to name a few. How did the Christians of the West (the group that Darryl is actually critiquing; no one thinks that 100 million persecuted Chinese Christians or Christians living in majority Muslim nations in the Middle East, North Africa, or Southeast Asia are rebelling against their governments) respond? Most of them nodded their heads, stopped going to church for years, and signed up for multiple experimental vackscenes, trotting out Romans 13 anytime anyone objected.
They tutted and wagged their heads at their brothers and sisters who refused and who sought to do crazy, rebellious things like obey written, democratically passed laws instead of caving to the ever-changing dictates of unelected bureaucrats being paid by pharmaceutical companies to push lockdowns and experimental drugs on the entire world, including children.
Based on the way Western Christians responded over the past few years and the justifications given for doing so, I would argue that statism that treats governments as the final arbiters of truth is a far greater danger to the Church at large. It is not anti-authoritarian to insist that governments are not autonomous any more than it is unloving to object to the normalization of morbid obesity by saying that the aforementioned would be better off losing a few hundred pounds.
Modern governments have fattened themselves by assuming every responsibility except those God tells them to undertake: punishing evildoers and commending those who do right. They don't want to hear salty messages like that, but We are to be salt all the same.
C.S. Lewis once remarked,
"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
That's the danger that Darryl and the Western Church actually find themselves in today, and the danger that both Bitcoin and TGFB are working to combat.