Diagnosing the disease

Some diseases are fatal. If you start to exhibit suspicious symptoms, a natural response is to get to a doctor to see if the symptoms actually indicate a real problem. Of course, to identify an illness, a ­physician must first know what a healthy person looks like. Similarly, our society has developed a serious malady that some say is fatal. To understand why the classical liberal consensus seems to be collapsing in Western societies (see “Cracks in the foundation” in this issue), you have to know what a healthy polity requires.

What came to be called “classical liberalism” is actually a remarkable marriage. In it, a particular view of man and law combined with the institutions associated with our republican form of government: rule of law, separation of powers, federalism, respect for private property, and freedom of speech. These were developed over centuries in England and then transported to America. There they took root in a culture shaped by centuries of Christian thinking about the nature of man and the nature of law. The result was unprecedented freedom, but it was an ordered freedom characterized by self-­restraint and self-government.

The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled throughout America in 1831, understood that the American republic was in many ways an experiment, but a remarkably successful one. In his monumental work Democracy in America, he argued that this was due to three factors. First, America’s geography insulated the United States from the pressures of foreign aggression that typified Europe. Second, American laws, exemplified in the U.S. Constitution and ­characterized by such principles as republicanism, federalism, separation of powers, and the rule of law, provided a legal structure supporting political liberty. Third, a particular constellation of mores—a term Tocqueville uses to describe the moral, intellectual, and cultural life of a people—is essential.

The mores of a culture are key, Tocqueville said. A nation might have favorable geography or wise laws, but without the right mores the project will fail. And for Americans, he observed, mores are fundamentally derived from religion, which is “the first of their political institutions.” Democracy in America, then, depends on the Christian culture that gave birth to it.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, showing George Washington presiding at the Philadelphia Convention Howard Chandler Christy

THERE ARE TWO FOUNDATIONAL, pre-political questions that every political system answers either explicitly or implicitly: What is a human? What is law? At the time of the American founding, American culture found the answer to those questions in its Christian consensus (although that consensus was beginning to erode on the edges even then). First, a human is a person possessing inherent dignity. In the Founding era, this dignity was most often expressed in terms of natural rights. Political thinkers in the 18th century seldom used explicitly theological language to discuss natural rights, but underlying the concept was the Christian idea that humans are created in the image of God.

Second, at the time of the Founding, law was conceived as a fixed moral order, most often expressed in terms of natural law. The concept was developed over centuries of Christian thinking, and again while the explicit theological language was sometimes muted, there was a strong consensus affirming, at the very least, that moral principles are objectively real and are discoverable by men.

As Tocqueville understood, laws alone—that is, a Constitution—will not suffice to maintain the free society envisioned by America’s Founders. So it is sobering that today the answers to these two fundamental pre-political questions are shifting. Rather than affirming that humans have inherent dignity because they are created in God’s image, many are coming to doubt that humans have dignity at all. Rather than seeing law as an expression of a fixed moral order, we increasingly see law as reflecting merely what is expedient or what the majority desires.

In short, today many in our culture understand human nature and law in ways that would be foreign to late-18th-­century Americans. Humans are seen as radically free agents with no essential nature, and we have no obligation to live according to a created order. In such a world, the strongest desires within the individual and within society will prevail. Morality is reduced to personal preferences (“my morality”), identity is merely a matter of choice (“I can be whatever I desire”), and law is therefore a competition for the power to define reality.

In a culture that abandons the idea of objective truth, language itself undergoes a radical transformation. It is not a conveyor of truth but a blunt instrument for controlling other people. Of course, language has always been abused. However, without a Christian account of moral law and human nature, these abuses cannot be criticized as shortcomings. Instead they must be embraced as the only game in town.

Increasingly our situation resembles what C.S. Lewis described in his famous book The Abolition of Man. A culture that refuses to affirm objective moral truth can have no consensus about what’s right or wrong, good or evil. The society fragments into factions, allowing an elite leadership class to seize more and more power. In practical terms, the individual or group that most effectively leverages the mechanisms of power will invariably dominate. That is why both sides tend to see every election as an existential struggle for survival, and every crisis must be used to secure and amplify the only really meaningful prize: power.

Of course, many Americans remain faithful Christians. But those unclear about the idea of objective moral truth easily can fall into—and many have—a watered-down version of the faith that amounts to what sociologist Christian Smith calls moralistic therapeutic deism. It is moralistic, for people still speak passionately about right and wrong, but they make those judgments based on emotion or desire. Modern religion is increasingly therapeutic because people interpret faith primarily in psychological terms rather than in terms of truth: People want to feel good or fulfilled or self-actualized, and truth claims fade into a morass of pop psychology jargon. Finally, modern religion is deistic: God is an undemanding deity who wants people to be happy, and if they behave, they will go to heaven when they die.

If even Christians are losing the foundational ideas that liberalism requires to function and survive, it’s not hard to imagine how our political disease will worsen. Classical liberalism was a delicate balance of free institutions and the capacity to self-government rooted in a basic consensus on what constitutes a human and what constitutes law. With that consensus breaking apart, classical liberalism, as we have come to understand it, cannot long survive. To be sure, for a while the shell will remain, but once a Christian account of reality is abandoned, eventually the politics of power will be all that remains.

The upshot of this is an important, though often forgotten truth: A free society is not automatic. It is, in fact, a remarkable achievement. We Americans have been blessed beyond measure. But we risk squandering our blessing if we fail to recall, and embody, the basic Christian principles upon which our liberal constitutional order was built.

—Mark T. Mitchell teaches political philosophy and is Dean of Academic Affairs at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of several books including Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class.