Atlas Shrugged: A Christian Perspective

One week ago today was the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In a 1991 survey, Atlas Shrugged was ranked as the second most influential book by Americans, a distant second only to the Bible.

John Piper, a theologian whose writing has profoundly impacted my life, has written this review of Rand's philosophy, discussing how compatible it is with Christianity.

Cogent Christian responses to Ayn Rand are few. Positive Christian assessments are almost non-existent. I aim for this treatment to be both Christian and primarily positive, even though Ayn Rand was an atheist and outspokenly anti-Christian.

The necessity and rightness of rationality is, so far as I can see, unimpeachable. Accordingly, I am willing to follow her defense of the virtues of independence (making one’s own judgments), integrity (practicing what you preach), honesty (maintaining a freedom from contradiction between your words and your convictions), and productivity (the ambitious struggle to achieve your values). I agree without reserve that one should “always act in accordance with the hierarchy of one’s values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one” (VS, 44). And so long as Rand defines self-sacrifice as “the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one” (VS, 44), I will agree that all self-sacrifice is evil. She was right that the rational man should be dedicated to “the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values” (VS, 26).

Happiness, for Ayn Rand, “is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction” (VS, 29). On the basis of this definition, I am willing to say yes to the following sentence: “The achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose” (VS, 27). The meaning of this sentence is not that a feeling is exalted above the nature of reality in guiding our choices. The sentence rests on the conviction that reality is such that true happiness—“non-contradictory joy”—is the inevitable outcome of a life devoted to the principle that A is A, and that there is no true joy to be found in faking reality in any way. For the rational man, the aim to be happy is the aim to realize his values, and the aim to realize his values is the aim to live as a man, and the aim to live as a man is an effort to take reality seriously, to respond properly to the axiom A is A, Man is Man (FNI, 125; AS, 942). I cannot fault the basic validity of this approach to ethics. It is my own, as far as it goes.

It may have been noticed that in the list of Rand’s virtues above, which I condoned, justice and pride were omitted. This is not because I disagree with everything she said about them, but because the Christian cannot follow her consistently at these points. Rand argued that one must never “grant the unearned or undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit” (VS, 26). Men must deal with each other as traders not as looters and parasites. The Christian, on the other hand, is instructed: “bless those who curse you” (Luke 6:28). In short, Ayn Rand has no place for mercy, whereas Christianity has mercy at its heart.

Why was there this conflict here? I think it was due to Rand’s thoroughgoing immanentalism: the complete rejection of a divine or supernatural dimension to reality. If she was right in her atheism and naturalism, then I think her system was consistent at the point of demanding only justice. Given the scope of reality that Ayn Rand took into account, the axiom A is A demands that men always trade value for value.

But if Ayn Rand was wrong about God, if he exists, and, as St. Paul said, “made the world and everything in it . . . and is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24f), if such a God exists (and Ayn Rand offered no argument to the contrary, only the assertion), then a radically new dimension of reality must be reckoned with and a corresponding new value should guide man’s behavior.

I'd encourage my readers, both Christan and Objectivist to read the whole review. Piper sent this to Rand three years before her death, but sadly never heard back from her.

See my previous post, Greed is Good?, for related thoughts. Scroll down into the comments section to read a debate I had with one of my classmates on whether or not selfishness is a virtue.