Western Liberalism

WESTERN LIBERALISM STANDS FIRM ON CHRISTIANITY’S ROCK

GREG SHERIDAN

But identity politics threatens to unravel the threads of a universal tolerance
The horrible death of George Floyd at the hands of a brutal policeman in Minneapolis is producing very diverse reactions. One is a wholly good sense of human solidarity across racial lines. Such a response, that race is incidental to humanity, of no consequence in determining a person’s worth, has no power to diminish human dignity, is a wonderful response, and expresses traditional liberalism. This requires the law to have no consideration for race, which means justice for every human being regardless of race. Seeking that authorities live up to this is a necessary ambition.

But a good deal of reaction is heading down the destructive road of identity politics. Identity politics attacks the universalism which is the heart of liberalism.

Rejecting this universalism for an ideology which elevates race, gender, sexual orientation or some other features into the central organising principle in politics and culture is a disastrous wrong turn.

One reason we are in danger of taking this doleful path is the decline in Christianity as the animating inspiration of public culture.

It is worth understanding that the universalism of liberalism, indeed the whole of Western liberalism itself, is entirely a subset of Christian moral thought and development. One thing our culture rightly does is elevate and revere the experience and testimony of victims, especially powerless victims. This was not the way in the pre-Christian, ancient world. The humiliation and death by crucifixion of Jesus, both man and God, put a divine face on human suffering. It gave the suffering an unimagined dignity.

The Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament had already introduced a novel universalism. God created humanity in his own image. This elevated the status of humanity to a level it had never known. It was also a statement of the universality of humanity.

The Old Testament is assuredly the story of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel, but it is also the story of God’s relationship with all humanity, beginning with creation.

God does not create one race or another. He creates humanity. Throughout the Old Testament, there are many statements of the universality of God and the universality of the human condition.

It is worth noting that African slaves in America took great inspiration from the experience of the Jewish people when they were enslaved in Egypt. The great black spiritual songs emerge in part from this inspiration.

The most radical statement of Christian universalism comes from Paul, in his letter to the Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

The Christian concept of the natural law over time became universal human rights. At every step of history, many Christians have dishonoured their teachings with their behaviour. But equally many Christians have lived out their beliefs.

My point though is the intellectual and political development of liberalism. Everything we like in modern liberalism is a direct expression of Christian teaching and thinking. The idea of humanity changed fundamentally after Jesus. Instead of being primarily considered as a member of a family, or tribe or nation, each individual was seen to have been created individually in the likeness of God, to possess an immortal soul and to be in a personal relationship with the living and eternal God. This meant that individuals had rights and obligations: the rights of nations and tribes were of a much lesser order.

The most important book in understanding the basis of modern Western society is the work of Oxford scholar Larry Siedentop: Inventing the Individual, The Origins of Western Liberalism. He writes: “The Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society. Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.”

Siedentop argues that by the later parts of the Middle Ages Christians had thought through and begun to try to implement all the foundations of modern liberalism. It was a long and conscientious process. Third-century Greek theologian Origen confirmed the free will of every human being to choose between good and evil. Another thirdcentury theologian, Tertullian, in Carthage, affirmed religious liberty. Christianity produced a pro-woman sexual revolution. Marriage became for the first time an institution of mutual love and mutual consent. Christians didn’t kill their female babies. Benedictine monasticism, when it came round in the sixth century, was radically egalitarian and democratically self-governing — the monks chose their abbot.

Some Christians owned slaves but there were always fierce Christian voices, including popes, denouncing slavery. A fourthcentury bishop, Gregory of Nyssa, denounced a man who had bought slaves. He thundered: “For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth the price of this human nature? God himself would not reduce the human race to slavery since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, recalled us to freedom.”

Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century developed a full understanding of the sovereignty of human conscience. The church, seeking independence from princes and the state generally, gradually divorced the concepts of sin and crime. The church could pronounce on sin, the state on crime. Internal church government, which had to be universal among church members, led governments of states to also became universal in their jurisdictions, rather than leaving power, often absolute, in the hands of local lords.

Liberalism was not invented in a minute and the Enlightenment thinkers often given credit for it were mostly Christians and used Christian moral categories and concepts. The question now is whether liberalism can survive the total severing of its connections with its Christian roots. I have the most serious doubts. Liberalism survives for a while because the first generation or two are imbued with Christian moral concepts and traditions. But eventually it goes crazy, as it is demonstrably doing now.

Without Christianity, there is nothing absolute for liberalism to anchor itself to, so its very practice of tolerance can easily morph into intolerant ideological demands. The various impulses of liberalism always need to be integrated in a genius of balance. But when there is no overarching transcendent belief, there is nothing to provide this balance. Each impulse runs to extreme, often absurd, excess, which is why so many notionally liberal commentators have endorsed violence in the recent protests.

This crisis of liberalism is a crisis in the heart of our civilisation. It is a vacuum where there should be belief.

Some Christians owned slaves but there were always fierce Christian voices denouncing slavery