Christianity, Equality, and Constitutional Government

Sorting out a mass of confusion

Editor’s note: As mentioned on Power Line in introducing the Political Questions Substack, the main purpose of it is to offer deeper dives into topics beyond the headlines. It is meant more for academic readers and curious lay readers, and as such may not be for everyone, but we hope you’ll give it a try and stick with is as we build it out and add more contributors and topics here. Who knows—we might add some humor pieces, and perhaps even a weekly picture gallery!

“Lucretia” offers here her first contribution as a collaborator on the site, based on a conference paper she presented at an academic conference at the National Public Service University in Budapest last fall. It is too good not to share with a wider readership.

—Steve

One of the paradoxes of our time is that the ever-increasing demand for equality has been accompanied by the ever-increasing destruction of genuine equality, i.e., equality recognizing the actual dignity and worth of every person or equality under the law. This unfortunate phenomenon now manifests itself across almost all Western societies.  Elites advocate for redistributionist policies that burden the middle class but never quite touch the amassed wealth of the very rich. The privileged advocate policies that ostensibly benefit “marginalized communities” but never affect their own power, wealth, or standard of living: indeed, these policies in many cases contribute to the accrual of ever more power, influence, and wealth on the part of those who impose them.  Elites continuously denounce society for its inequities, but all too often benefit themselves by exploiting those inequities.  Many of the most destructive policies currently being promoted by Western elites are justified in the name of equality, or more properly, equity. These policies include high taxation and massive deficit spending on social programs; unrestricted immigration; the undermining of law enforcement and systems of criminal justice; and the promotion of “alternative lifestyles” that undermine the basic family structure and basic morality.  The misuse of the principle of equality, or equality understood as the modern notion of equity, has caused many thoughtful persons truly committed to just, well-governed societies to deprecate the principle of human equality and the natural law foundation upon which it rests.

It would seem easy enough simply to return to that natural law understanding of human equality, and to see quite clearly that equity as the modern left defines it is the polar opposite of genuine human equality.  The kind of equity proposed, mandated, and directed by powerful elites (while managing to exempt themselves from the consequences) has nothing in common with the natural law understanding of human equality and the natural rights that flow from that understanding.  Nevertheless, conservatives across Western societies find themselves rejecting natural law and the concept of natural rights.  They look instead to an embrace of tradition and religion; perceiving both as more solid and reliable foundations for countering the very real devastation brought about by leftist ideology. 

It is all too true that the destruction of norms, customs, and laws accomplished through the “fundamental transformation” promised by former American President Barack Obama happened at an alarming rate, not only in the United States but throughout the Western world.  The encouragement by Western governments of illegal immigration while simultaneously refusing to insist upon any measure of assimilation into societal conventions; the sacrifice of the principle of meritocracy on the altar of  Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity; the race hustle of Black Lives Matters or pro-illegal immigrant groups that has destroyed cities by enervating law enforcement and refocusing prosecutors away from violent crime committed by persons of color: the attempt to destroy the basis of middle class prosperity through draconian and ill-considered “climate change” measures; these and other leftist initiatives have wreaked havoc on civilization and the rule of law.  The demand that we deny nature and even basic biology by recognizing and even celebrating transgender ideology has quickly become de rigueur, and most Western governments bring the full authority of the state to bear against anyone who might question the latest radical LGBTQ+++ agenda. As recently as 2008, both leading Democratic candidates for the U.S. presidency campaigned on the platform that marriage was defined as between a man and a woman: today it is a cardinal offense even to express the idea that there are two biological sexes or that it is inappropriate for males dressed as female prostitutes to read stories to young children in drag queen story hour.

It is therefore no surprise that conservatives dissatisfied with this rapidly evolving political and social consensus are turning to both tradition and religion to try to rescue Western culture and politics from the nihilism that permeates leftist ideology.  The search for truth is said to be a vain or meaningless enterprise, not only because human reason is incapable or impotent but because no such thing as truth exists.  “God is dead,” according to Nietzsche, and all that is left is for humans to create their own truth or to become themselves gods. Of course, it is never enough simply to create one’s own reality and allow others to do the same.  Human freedom, as understood by the left, is freedom from any restraints imposed by nature, but it does not follow that others are similarly free to choose a life lived according to the dictates of nature or of God.  All must join in denying the existence of any natural restraints on human behavior lest there be any question that the “truth” created and imposed is sufficiently authoritative.  One avoids the abyss if one can force others into validating one’s version of reality.  That is why leftist ideology is so insistent upon debasing and destroying human institutions such as marriage, the family, communities, and religion that were central to Western civilization, to say nothing of genuine peace and prosperity, with such force and such rapidity.  Humans are no longer made in the image of God, since of course God is dead, so there is no longer any basis for distinguishing between right and wrong, good and evil, or noble and base action. Neither an appeal to nature nor to reason can be authoritative; humans create their own precepts by which to live, and modern science provides the remedy for any ill-effects that might result.

Modern conservativism recognizes that the destruction of these human institutions poses a truly existential threat to civilization.  The question, of course, is how to restore those institutions.  This is the principal basis for the appeal to both tradition and religion, which have long been powerful forces protecting and preserving those human institutions arising out of nature.

Not surprisingly, the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke has become the philosophical authority of many Western conservatives for this embrace of tradition and religion.  They turn to Burke to provide the philosophical foundation for a restoration of morality and decency.  They see in the writings of Burke a well-articulated defense of the importance of family, community associations, and churches.  Religiosity especially is proposed as the alternative to what is clearly viewed as society’s degradation and descent into debauchery and nihilism. Civic virtue, according to this view, can be restored only through a return to the Christian tradition.  So powerful is the authority of Edmund Burke amongst modern conservatives that the National Conservative movement, perhaps the most active and intellectually dynamic conservative movement currently to be found in Western societies, is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation. 

This embrace of Burkean ideals is quite understandable, especially given the severity of the crisis we find ourselves in throughout Western democracies.  However, there are fundamental flaws with an unqualified adherence to Burke’s unique brand of conservatism. Burke’s writings emphatically rejected the radicalism of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on individual natural rights.  The excesses of the French Revolution proved to Burke the danger of abandoning tradition in the name of abstract theories of the rights of man. Burke argued that because human reason is fallible, political societies should evolve slowly, relying upon its institutions that have been the depositories of accumulated human wisdom, contributing to stability and continuity. Moreover, religious institutions specifically would provide the necessary moral guidance and social cohesion capable of promoting virtue and restraining the excesses of political ambition.

The difficulty with this approach is two-fold: on the one hand, embracing tradition for its own sake, and with no reference to transcendent standards of justice, means ultimately embracing historicism.  Indeed, the early historicists were traditionalists who were reacting to the abstract theories animating the French Revolution;^[1] and on the other hand, advancing religion as a cure for the nihilism at the heart of the leftist project necessarily means some level of religious coercion, returning modern societies to the unenviable position of, as Thomas Jefferson noted, making “one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”  Burke is correct that political stability and the accumulation of human wisdom are to be found in custom and tradition as well as in religious ritual, dogma, and practice.  However, history demonstrates quite clearly that not all custom and tradition is wise nor does enforced religious dogma lead to political stability or to human happiness.  

Nevertheless, some refocusing on religiosity as the basis for civic virtue is an attractive alternative, and not necessarily inconsistent with human freedom or freedom of conscience.  George Washington, in his Farewell Address, noted that “[o]f all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…. reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”  Yet it should be remembered that religious or church affiliation is waning across all Western societies; the religious foundation may no longer be there to support civic virtue. The separation of church and state helped to diminish religious persecution and intolerance but also diminished religious devotion and practice, with profound consequences for civic and private virtue. 

Understanding what it is we are battling against is the key to knowing what weapons to bring to the battle.  Certainly the decline of religiosity, and its replacement by secular “religions” of many kinds (e.g., climate change, celebrating authentic self-actualization and one’s “lived experience,” globalization, etc.,), invites the attempt to revive and reinvigorate religious devotion among citizens. That so many are enticed by false or secular ideologies is certainly an indication that the human soul needs and wants to believe in something greater than itself, or at the very least impose its own ungrounded beliefs on others.  But beyond praying for divine intervention, the attempt to reimpose religious faith among western populations through political means is likely to end in failure, or worse tyranny.

There is an alternative provided by our Christian and Western foundations that conservatives looking to rescue their countries can embrace, which provides a cure for the nihilism that masquerades as the quest for equality.  This alternative looks to the modern understanding of human equality and natural rights based upon the Christian concept of human equality before God.  This understanding, after many historical twists and turns that we cannot fully catalog here, led ultimately to the social contract and to constitutional government. 

In the ancient world, the gods of a city were the source of the city’s laws; and a citizen’s piety was reflected in his obedience to the law.  There was no tension between following the dictates of one’s conscience, as we might say today, and following the laws of the ancient city. If a city was defeated in war, its gods were defeated as well.  The one exception was the monotheistic God of the Israelites.  Neither they nor their God disappeared when, as so often happened in the ancient world, they were defeated by their enemies. But the God of the Israelites was still the God of, and the lawgiver to, a single people: obeying the laws of ancient Judaism was an act of piety and the path to salvation.

It is likely more than a coincidence that the universality of the Roman Empire made possible the first universal religion.  Rome’s universality paved the way for the replacement of the ancient gods of ancient cities by the one God of Christianity.  Although there were many kingdoms with many kings, there was now but a single God. Jesus came as the promised Messiah of the Jews, but the salvation that He offered, and that his disciples preached, was to the world.  Any person by accepting that Jesus was the incarnate Son of the one true God would be rewarded with eternal life.  Political allegiance was immaterial to salvation; but the consequence of this was a devaluation of political life in favor of eternal life. For almost two millennia, Western civilization was characterized by the conflict for the ascendency of either emperors/kings or popes, meaning that a citizen’s obedience to the laws could be in conflict with one’s obedience to God. Loyalty to the kingdom of this world became a secondary consideration to the promise of the eternal life in the kingdom of God.  Jesus’ admonishment to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to render unto God what is God’s” fully encapsulates this notion of divided loyalty; leaving no doubt that the loyalty to God was primary.  The devaluation of the political that resulted was the source of the Machiavellian project against what he believed were the enervating effects of Christianity. As Machiavelli notes in chapter IV of The Prince,

And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one ought to live which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one should live, that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good.^[2]

If we take as our point of departure the assertion of Leo Strauss that the United States is the first regime founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles, we must then try to discover what about the American founding is unique and, for our purposes, instructive. While Christianity may have made man “less at home in the world,” it also brought about a change of consciousness that revolutionized not only religion but ultimately political rule. The abstract truth of human equality did not originate with Thomas Jefferson—or with the American Founding.  It appears most forcefully in the Gospel of John, where Jesus reveals himself to the Samaritan woman at the well.  Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well is a watershed moment in human history, signaling that God’s grace is available to all human beings without regard to the extraneous or irrelevant characteristics that previously determined one’s worth within a political community and within the sight of God.  Jesus’ recognition of the humanity of the Samaritan woman and the extension of his saving grace to her and to her fellow townspeople indicated in the most forceful way possible that all human beings are equal in the sight of God.  God’s grace is not limited to the rich, the powerful, the religious authorities, nor to a specific group of people based on their race, their sex, their tribe, or their lack of sinfulness.  It took a very long time for the fundamental truth of human equality revealed in Jesus’ encounter at the well to find its way into a political system.  But as Harry V. Jaffa notes, “[t]hat the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself.”^[3]

It indeed took several millennia for this concept of equality to become politically significant. Moreover, persecution and intolerance characterized the Christian world, and despite Machiavelli’s best attempts to remove the its influence from political life, Christianity’s authority continued. There have been many Christian nations throughout the centuries, but none whose very foundations were built on the fundamental truth that Jesus revealed at the well. In 1776, a single people formed themselves as a people and proposed a nation built on the universal principle that all human beings, being endowed by their Creator equally with equal natural rights, are equal in the eye of the law. 

What was unique, not to say exceptional about the American founding, was its appeal to the authority of the laws of nature and nature’s God as the justification for forming a political community. In other words, what we see in the American Declaration of Independence is a universal rationale (employed in the service of the American colonists but applicable to all mankind) based upon both reason and revelation. The self-evident truth that human beings by their nature are not born “with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God” is accessible through unassisted human reason, but is supported by revelation. This is illustrated nicely by the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms issued by the Continental Congress the American colonies in 1775:

If it was possible for men who exercise their reason to believe that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out be his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these colonies might at least require of the parliament of Great Britain some evidence that this dreadful authority over them had been granted to that body.^[4]

By refuting the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which Jefferson noted had “through “monkish ignorance and superstition” persuaded men to “bind themselves,” the American founding instituted the “blessings and security of self-government” based upon the “unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.”^[5] It is important also to recognize that while the principles to which the American Declaration of Independence appeals are universal, their political efficacy is possible only within the context of a single people exercising their sovereignty. What that means in simple terms is there must be a social contract of equals agreeing to form themselves into a single body politic, necessarily excluding those who are not a party to that contract.  While geography plays an important role in determining who becomes part of that social contract, the critical element is agreement with and commitment to the terms of the contract, which are first and foremost a mutual recognition of the fundamental truth of human equality and the concomitant rights that flow from that equality.   In practical terms, this means at the very least that a sovereign nation founded on the principle of self-government can indeed “secure its borders,” and refuse to admit those who would undermine peace, prosperity, and the rule of law.

It must be stated that a return to this understanding of human equality, supported by both reason and revelation, is not a return to the excesses of the French Revolution, which Burke rightly decried, nor is it an opening for the kind of social engineering toward equality of results/equity currently being imposed on the left.  Rather, a deepened understanding of equality that is supported and limited by both reason and revelation provides the only sure foundation for the restoration of constitutional government.  Equality mandates the rule of law, which is to say that those who are subject to the laws share in making the laws and those who make the laws are equally subject to the laws they make.  The manifestation of this simple understanding of the rule of law has disappeared to a more or less degree in almost all Western societies. By returning to the natural law understanding of human equality, a principled stand can be taken against those petty bureaucrats and educated elites who practice their soft tyranny: promoting their utopian vision at the expense of the individual rights of other citizens and severely undermining the rule of law.  Western societies can unleash the vast human potential currently being impeded by heavy-handed regulation, over-taxation, and veiled threats of censorship.  The result, based upon experience, will indeed be inequality, that is to say inequality of result. A commitment to natural law principles of equality can never bring about perfect equality of condition, but prudence dictates that such a utopian end would not be desirable even if it were possible. Of course, inequality of result is really what the left wants—as long as the government they control gets to pick winners and losers, leveraging both to obtain and remain in power.

Tyranny and oppression have of course been the rule, not the exception, throughout human history.  But never before had a people dedicated themselves to an idea—an idea that because humans were created equal they deserved to rule themselves.  The American founding demonstrated that legitimate  government can be specifically designed to protect and secure our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—rights that are endowed by our creator—not given to us by government. As Alexander Hamilton noted in the first Federalist Paper, it was up the American people, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.”  That their conduct and example proved worthy meant hope for the rest of mankind. The resulting “good government” was for many decades a continuous effort to bring about true equality before the law, to unleash human potential, and to bring about the greatest amount of freedom and prosperity the world has ever known.  This is why Abraham Lincoln, at the time of America’s greatest crisis, argued that

We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

The belief in human equality limited the ends of government—it did not limit the ends of man and opened up opportunities to pursue happiness in ways that had never existed before, opportunities that remain open to Western democracies.

In short, a commitment to the natural law principle of human equality, accessible by unassisted human reason and supported by the understanding that natural rights are divinely endowed equally upon human beings, creates the conditions for a just constitutional order.  Reason and revelation are not in conflict, but provide both the supports for and the limitations inherent in constitutional government. The best weapon for defending against the nihilism and will to power of the left is to understand and fulfill our nature as beings created in the image of God, rather than continuing the pretense that we are beings who create ourselves, uninhibited by nature or by the divine order of the universe.

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^[1] The early historicists were traditionalists who were reacting to the abstract theories animating the French Revolution.^[1]   As Leo Strauss notes in Natural Right and History,

The founders of the historical school realized more or less clearly that the acceptance of any universal or abstract principles has necessarily, as far as thought is concerned, a revolutionary, disturbing, unsettling effect. For the recognition of universal principles forces us to measure the actual by the ideal, and the actual is more likely than not to fall short of the ideal.

^[2] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 2^nd. Ed., Trans. by Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 93.

^[3] Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), P. 151.

^[4] Documents of American History, ed., Henry Steele Commager (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1948) P. 92.

^[5] Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Roger Weightman,” June 24, 1826, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed., Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984).