(Doctrine and Life, February 2000, pp.80-86)
The Christian origins of Liberalism
Liberalism may loosely be described as the philosophy that individuals should be free to do as they please, provided only that, in so doing, they do not impair the freedom of others. Contemporary liberalism is post-Christian; that’s a point that hardly requires elaboration. The Christian faith, for many reasons, has become marginalized from the mainstream of Western culture. Post-Christian, or secular, liberalism is a dominant element in contemporary Western culture, and has had an impact wherever that cultural influence is felt, that is to say, almost everywhere, in view of the globalization of communications, economics, politics, and, to a lesser but growing degree, of culture.
Liberalism has had its real victories. The constitutional recognition of rights to freedom of speech, assembly and worship are examples; others include the development of universal primary education, democratic political institutions and of trades unions. Those were substantial gains for humanity, and liberalism is entitled to claim the credit.
Liberalism originated in a Christian matrix, though it was the Christian faith rather than the Christian church, which brought it to birth. Without the Christian faith, there would have been no liberalism. Central to that faith is respect for the person created and redeemed by God and destined for eternal life with God. Each individual matters and is not to be used as a means to an end. In conjunction with this is a strong commitment to community deriving from the doctrine of the Trinity that, in one God, there are three divine persons, really distinct but equal in all things. That “distinct but equal” element calls together the individual and the community into a civilization of love. Christian moral teaching presupposes free will, the faculty of the human mind to make free decisions. In that teaching, freedom is seen as the right to do what one ought to do, that is to say, freedom is situated in a moral context based on biblical teaching such as the Ten Commandments and on the exercise of reason. In this, conscience is the servant of truth, recognizing that all truth is God’s truth whether mediated through faith or reason. And the motivation it calls on to enable and empower people to be moral is the love of God and neighbour deriving from faith in God’s love for us, expressed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The parting of the ways
In the course of the last two thousand years the Christian church has often failed seriously to be true to its own tradition of respect for the person and for human freedom. This has especially been the case since the Reformation when the church tore itself apart in the struggle between Catholic and Protestant, sometimes subordinating the gospel to the political considerations of the day. In the nineteenth century, the church became increasingly reactionary. Had it understood its own tradition it would have welcomed the development of liberal ideas then under way and been able to influence them. Instead it opposed them and, in doing so, isolated itself from a movement with great potential good for humanity and for the church itself.
The effect of this was that the liberal movement gradually became secularized. This had already begun on a small scale in the Reformation itself with Protestantism’s radical individualism. It was greatly accentuated in the French Revolution: the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” expressed a secularized view of Christian liberalism. Post-Christian liberalism is like the prodigal son in Luke 15; he lived off the riches accumulated by previous generations, squandering them in “doing his own thing”. It is a parasite, living off the Christian tradition of the past; if it kills its host, it dies with it. The challenge is to turn that process into one of symbiosis, of mutual enrichment and giving of life.
The principal point being made in this article is that contemporary liberalism, having broken from its Christian origins, has become intolerant and needs to recover its roots if it is to fulfil in the future the positive and beneficent role it exercised in the past.
Contemporary liberalism is intensely individualistic, with little sense of community: remember Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families’. And Reagan-Bush “voodoo economics” assumed that the sum of mass individual selfishness would create the collective good. The Me Generation of the nineteen sixties was the classic representation of post-Christian liberalism; its members – Bill Clinton is an example – are now senior decision-makers in Western society. Their philosophy is strong on individual rights, short on responsibility to the community.
The post-Christian liberalism of the second half of this century has brought about a new situation, one which reflects little credit on its ancestry. Consider a number of recent developments: –
The liberal free-market policies adopted by the World Bank, the IMF and many governments in the last twenty years are a return to the laissez-faire economics of the nineteenth century. The social safety net of the post-war years has been diminished (ask an English person about the NHS) and the survival of the fittest has again become the rule with large-scale and long-lasting unemployment as a by-product. In Third World countries, the application of the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the international lending institutions has hit the poor harder than any other group. Spending on health, education, agriculture and infrastructure have been cut while military spending has been maintained at levels which commonly exceed health and education combined. To whose benefit? Not the poor: the rich man’s freedom is their exploitation; their role in trickle-own economies is to pick up the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. Liberalism’s free market gives cold comfort to those at the bottom of the league.
With the ending of the Cold War there was a determined effort to extend democratic government to those many Third World countries which had previously laboured either under military dictatorships or one-party states. The end is praiseworthy, but what of the means? Democracy cannot be imposed, because there is no democracy without democrats. Well-meaning attempts to impose democracy by, for example, making elections a precondition for loans, smack of paternalism: ‘We know what’s good for you; development means that you become like us’. Many Third World countries do not have the cultural elements necessary to underpin a Washington- or Westminster-style democratic system, but that is the strait-jacket into which they are being pushed instead of being encouraged to develop alternative structures of political participation more in keeping with their own traditions.
Some elements of the ecological movement have broken with their liberal origins and turned ecology into a dogmatic ideology, a kind of substitute religion, which claims sweeping but unsubstantiated authority. The old cartoons depicting the religious eccentric proclaiming on his sandwich-boards ‘Doom is at hand, the end is nigh’ must be changed; now it is the ecologist who wears the boards, but with the same myopic view. Some elements of the Green movement call for a degree of state control that goes well beyond liberal parameters.
Liberals tripped themselves up badly when they began to use language as a means of social engineering. C. S. Lewis was right when he said of language that, “If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on”. Especially in academic circles, political correctness has become the dogmatic orthodoxy of secularism, leading to subterfuge, dishonesty, pretended dialogue and hidden agenda. And it is no service at all to those in whose name it is intended to help. For example, when living in Africa, I found it difficult to offer any criticism of things African without running the risk, mainly from expatriates but also from Africans who had learned to play the colonial guilt card, of being accused of racism, even if neither the issue in question nor the criticism had anything to do with race. The original definition of racism was: “the belief that races have distinctive cultural characteristics determined by hereditary factors and that this endows some races with an intrinsic superiority over others” (Collins Dictionary). That definition has now been widened to cover almost any kind of cross-cultural criticism. One result of this in Africa is that honest discussion of, let us say, development problems, is almost impossible, leaving Africans with the feeling that as long as they find an excuse for their problems they need never find a remedy. And to challenge that assumption is to leave oneself open to the charge of racism. None of that helps Africa.
The sexual revolution of the nineteen sixties, motivated by the desire for greater personal freedom, and rendered “safe” through the greater availability of contraceptives, has turned, thirty years on, into an explosion of sexually-transmitted diseases of which the most serious, AIDS, carries the death penalty, not to mention the multiplication of teenage pregnancies, abortions and marital breakdown.
In the abortion debate, liberals rest their case on “choice”. But the unborn child is allowed no choice, even though it expresses its will to live to the extent that it can by struggling against the attack on its life. And the father of the child is excluded from the decision-making process, even though liberals see themselves as advocates of sexual equality.
Where did things go wrong?
Post-Christian liberalism is based on an intellectually lazy assumption of the perfectibility of the person through human effort alone. That is an act of faith for which there is no rational basis and much evidence to the contrary. Such liberalism places its trust in education, legislation and administration. But our schools are in crisis, in some cases because of “value-free” education. (Value-free education is value-less education.) Legislation and administrative bureaucracies have multiplied, yet they fail to come to grips with the crisis of contemporary Western culture, that of the use and abuse of human freedom, and of finding a moral basis for the human exercise of that freedom. That latter task is beyond the scope of such institutions.
Contemporary liberalism is trying to legislate in a moral vacuum, and it doesn’t work. Law requires a basis in morals. Morals, in turn, require a foundation in religious faith, for example, to motivate the person beyond the level of enlightened self-interest because that doesn’t go deep enough, or far enough, or motivate powerfully enough, and to situate morals in a context which gives ultimate meaning, direction and purpose to life.
Post-Christian liberalism, while contributing to the marginalization of the Christian faith, (contributing, and no more: the Christian churches were themselves responsible for most of it) has made secularism the unofficial but real state ideology of modern Western society. Secularism (I’m not thinking of secularization) is now the established “religion”, more deeply established (in the British sense of the term Establishment) than any church was; and it is “liberal” in treating all religions with equal disrespect. In some countries, anything which is religious is rigorously excluded from public life, even while liberals express their commitment to pluralism. Secularism poses as neutral, non-ideological, above the fray of factional contention and sectarian strife. But that is disingenuous: secularism is an alternative ideology, no less a contestant in the struggle of ideas than, say, Christianity, communism, nationalism or fascism. It has a legitimate right to argue its case, as do other systems of ideas, but it goes much further: it presumes a privileged position for itself as the rightful occupant of the seat of state. Sometimes this is simply ridiculous: I can recall being invited by a state-run radio station to give an interview on the role of a university chaplain, provided I said nothing about religion, because that would have violated the station’s secular charter and left it open to the charge of abusing its position by trying to impose religious values on the public.
If liberalism comes to be seen as a burned-out case, a fatally flawed ideology which leads to the atomization of society, it will be discarded as was communism, that other flawed ideology. That would be a tragedy, a real loss to humanity. Unless liberalism can be restored (and, to some Christians, the word “liberal” has become a term of abuse) the likely alternative on the political level is dictatorship in some form, such as, perhaps, nationalism, the great survivor among twentieth-century ideologies. We have seen in Bosnia, Kossova and Chechnya where that leads. And, in religion, a savage supernaturalism such as is found in some elements of Islam could come to be welcomed as a source of certainty in the face of moral drift and spiritual emptiness. Do liberals want that?
Where do we go from here?
How can liberalism be brought back to health and sanity? The contention of this article is that it can be done by re-sinking its roots in the Judaeo-Christian faith. Please note that I am not offering the Christian churches as a vehicle of such restoration or a role model for a renewed society, much less commending any old-style church-state alliance. The churches are part of the problem rather than of the solution: historically, if they had been more liberal, today’s liberalism would probably be more Christian. And today the Christian churches are in a reactionary mood, inward-looking, and too occupied with their survival to be able to exercise any significant influence on society. Not for the first time they have cut themselves off from the mainstream.
What does the Christian faith have to offer to this task? An answer to that question would require not an article but a book. However, by way of summary, one can point to what it has to offer about relationships, meaning, motivation and conscience:
– about relationships with God, with others, with self and with nature, with Jesus Christ as the exemplar of such relationships;
– about ultimate meaning and purpose in life, in examining the perennial questions of free will, evil, suffering and death.
– about motivation, through acknowledging that a selfish or self-centred life is self-destructive, that the person needs to look disinterestedly beyond the self to the other in order to fulfil his/her vocation to become human. It also offers an understanding of human freedom which recognizes that we live in an imperfect world (a theologian would call it a fallen world) but that such a world can be restored, not by human effort alone, however well-meaning or intelligent or persevering that may be, but by faith in God who is the necessary foundation of moral obligation.
To say that the above calls for a radical re-assessment by liberals is an understatement, but will anything less respond to the need?
‘Throughout the Western world, “tolerance” has become remarkably intolerant, and “diversity” demands ruthless conformity.’ (Mark Steyn, “Intolerant liberalism that sees gay activists deny others the right to a view,” The Irish Times, 9 August 2003, p. 9)