Jesus vs. Ayn Rand: Christmas Smackdown Edition
Will Willimon weighs in on how celebrating Christmas flies in the face of the values of Ayn Rand:
I’m amazed that these politicians promote Rand’s philosophy without concern for her atheism. But more amazing is the grand celebration we Christians are about to witness. Christmas, the nativity of Jesus Christ, is an eloquent rebuke to Rand and her contemporary devotees, because Christmas is God’s grand revelation of who God really is. The incarnation, as Luke tells the story, occurred among those on the bottom. Poor shepherds working the night shift were first to get the news that a poor, unwed Jewish woman was bearing Emmanuel into the world. Old people once made silent — Simeon and Anna — were the first to sing. These social leeches, as Rand regards them, were the first to be told by God of “God with us”. The rich and powerful, Rand’s chosen few, resisted Jesus from the day of his birth. And Christians believe that strange story is the whole truth about God. Jesus Christ — a poor, vulnerable baby whose family (according to Matthew) was forced to immigrate to Egypt, who cast his lots among the homeless, the hungry, the jobless and the poor — is God among us.|source:Call & Response, HT:Dustin Bagby
I touched on this earlier in the year with some other quotes comparing what Ayn Rand had to say with what Jesus had to say (Jesus vs. Ayn Rand), but this further highlights the absurdity that Christians would look to her philosophy which is based off of an atheist, will to power approach to economics, as something helpful to our current economic issues. This isn’t an issue even of whether or not we believe social programs ought to be provided by the government, this is an issue on a larger scale of whether or not we’re supposed to look out for the less well off among us, and in that regard Willimon is right on. The Christmas story stands in stark contrast to the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
