Christianity and Liberalism: Two Alternative Religious Approaches
by David T. Koyzis
t the very end of the twentieth century, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball published a collection of essays titled, The Betrayal of Liberalism : How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control.1 This title is characteristic of one school of analysis of contemporary liberalism, represented by what Alasdair MacIntyre has labelled “conservative liberals.” The gist of the argument is as follows: liberalism is a philosophy of freedom which had made huge strides in liberating humanity from a variety of oppressive institutions, including chattel slavery, feudalism, hereditary monarchy and other forms of ascriptive social patterns. Liberalism’s beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were on solid foundations, as articulated by the likes of John Locke, Adam Smith, the American founders and (perhaps) John Stuart Mill. Modern constitutional democracy, including that of Canada and the United States, would be all but impossible without the groundwork laid by this early liberalism.
However, the story continues, over slightly less than the last hundred years, the original liberal impulse has been betrayed by those falsely claiming the liberal label. These include the likes of US Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and, especially, a series of Supreme Court justices (in both countries) whose decisions have imposed an undemocratic rights-oriented regime on a recalcitrant public deemed to have retained “unconstitutionally” atavistic attitudes towards abortion, homosexuality, marriage and a number of similar issues. Furthermore, the very institution of the welfare state is leading us down what the classical liberal economic philosopher, Friedrich von Hayek, was calling as early as 1944, “the road to serfdom.” This more recent liberalism is thus eroding representative government, personal freedom and even equality, insofar as it champions race- and gender-based affirmative action. The net result is a society which is anything but liberal in the traditional sense. When a human rights tribunal is able to force a private printer to accept business effectively advancing a cause with which he disagrees, then liberalism has become most illiberal indeed.
This “betrayal of liberalism” thesis is advanced primarily by those who would call themselves liberal in the older sense. They retain a commitment to the principles championed by Locke, Smith and Mill. They are very often citizens of the United States who attach more than ordinary significance to the American founding, including such foundational documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights. They take great interest in the thoughts and writings of such figures as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries, assuming that in them they will discover the collective mind of the founders and it will enable them to unlock the riches of the liberal tradition bequeathed to later generations. They will then be able to hold up this tradition as a standard by which to measure the apparently misguided activities of the pseudo-liberal upstarts.
Proponents of the “betrayal of liberalism” thesis include, most prominently, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel, Robert George, and other so-called “Catholic Whigs” associated with the journal First Things. For these figures the Christian tradition itself calls for a classical liberal and democratic approach to politics, at least at the present historical moment. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Catholic Whigs ascribe their own position to Pope John Paul II himself. On the protestant side one can find Charles Colson, the Reformed theologian John Bolt, and a number of others associated with the several Reformation traditions. Catholics, Protestants and Jews of this persuasion have come together in the Acton Institute of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which pursues market-oriented economic, political and social reforms. Of course, there are also people who do not identify overtly with any of the traditional religions and adhere to some form of the “conservative liberal” thesis, such as Milton Freedman and Hayek himself. But among Christians adhering to this interpretation, there is at least an implicit tendency to assume that the American founding is somehow uniquely revelatory of God’s purposes in history. Their common assumption is that it is possible to follow the principles of the earlier liberalism championed by the founders without necessarily embracing the latest manifestation of the liberal worldview.
