The Case for Subsidiarity and Governing Thyself
By O. Henry Swartzentruber
Six years ago this month, Americans embarked on the strangest school year in history. I was reminded of that era recently while text-venting to a friend about how quickly government governance lost its mind during the Covid-19 pandemic. He offered a familiar, big-government challenge to individual liberty: “Your decisions affect other people, you know.”
True enough, Rowdy. It is a fair point, but it entirely misses a bigger question: How did an individual’s choice to simply go about his daily life in 2020—and perhaps leave his house—inherently infringe upon someone who independently chose to stay home? But of course, it didn't.
This tension brings us to "subsidiarity", which I love to bring up on Odon Journal's "The Juice" Podcast, a principle deeply rooted in early Christian social teaching. It says decisions should always be made at the lowest capable or competent level of authority. Subsidiarity is not an argument for anarchy, nor is it a license to endanger or infect others. It does not suggest that government has no role in a genuine national crisis, or deny that human actions have collective consequences. Instead, it serves as a warning against the modern urge to outsource authority away from the people who must live with the results; the wedge between who makes decisions and who bears consquences. At its core, subsidiarity is the framework for personal responsibility—the converse to a victim mentality.
Critics of local decision-making rely heavily on aggregated metrics. My friend’s argument was predictable: if 1,000 people congregate, a percentage may become infected with a virus, and some will inevitably transmit it to the vulnerable. Statistically, this is true. Yet raw statistics do not render individual judgment, local decision-making, and personal responsibility irrelevant; they make them vital.
When I pushed this idea with a local clergyman, he countered that the pandemic demanded "solidarity" instead, implying that local churches should uniformly follow suit out of collective sympathy. Really?!
American jurisprudence has long balanced individual action and harm through a classic legal maxim: "the right to swing my fist ends at the other person's nose. You may swing your fist indefinitely in an empty cornfield without government intervention because the risk of harm is low. That changes quickly in a crowded room.
Yet during the pandemic, the real debate was not whether public health mattered, but whether churches and restaurants in rural Pike County—with zero active cases—should face the exact same restrictions as in Manhattan. It forced us to ask whether a healthy 20-year-old man should be subjected to the identical mandates as an 80-year-old with multiple comorbidities. We were told to "trust the science" or something.
Closers and centralizers argued viruses do not recognize county lines. True, but neither do diverse populations share identical natures. A rural community and a major city, different ages and types, all have vastly different risks, capacities, opportunity costs, and trade-offs.
Subsidiarity does not mean "leave me alone." It means placing responsibility where it can be exercised most responsibly— the individual, the family, the church, the county, or, when necessary, state or federal government. One fatal flaw of modern governance is the assumption that because a problem is large, the solution should be dictated from the top.
The Framers anticipated this trap, and the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution speaks to it directly: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Beautiful and poignant.
When we allow centralized authorities to make too many choices, a free society slowly becomes a managed society. If you are paying attention, that is exactly where we are heading. Citizens do not learn self-government by being shielded from the consequences of choice. A child never forgets that a frying pan is hot, but they only learn that lesson one specific way. We learn self-governance the same way: by being trusted with personal responsibility—and being held accountable for how we use it.
Never forget- Back to School 2020.