Do not murder

Back in November, the British House of Commons took a definitive step toward legalizing euthanasia. The decision to sanction the judicial murder of Britain’s dying people enjoyed broad support from the Labour Party. A sizable number of Conservative members of Parliament joined Labour in support. The former Tory prime minister said he supported the change.

What is galling about Britain’s embrace of a thoroughly pagan practice—exterminated in Christian societies until the rise of secularism in the latter part of the 20th century—is that it is sanctioned as a natural outgrowth of studied debate in so-called liberal societies (meaning societies committed to classical liberty). The House of Commons would have the rest of the world believe that liberal society can condone any expansion of human autonomy and that limiting that autonomy is somehow a return to the era of near-medieval limitations on basic human liberty. Sadly, modern Britain does not understand human life, liberal government, or the relationship between the two.

With the election of Donald Trump to a second term as president of the United States, we’re going to hear a lot about threats to constitutional government, supposedly about threats from Trump and conservative evangelicals. But true liberal governments never war with the natural course of human life because true liberals historically committed themselves not to revolutionizing human nature but to removing unnatural obstacles to natural society and natural human flourishing. Conservative evangelicals approximate this in their understanding of the relationship between politics and issues of life. Britain’s current government might be many things, but it isn’t liberal in that sense.

The development of liberal governance in the late 16th and early 17th centuries by French and English Protestants stemmed from their responses to the rise of absolutist monarchies in the same era. When French King Louis XIV claimed that he was the state, he overturned centuries of medieval practice that limited the power of government. Early modern totalitarianism brought about new measures of oppression, especially for the Calvinist Huguenots in France. In A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants (or Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos), French Protestants rightly declared in 1579 that the state could only govern them according to specific natural precepts laid out by God. Any government that transgressed those natural boundaries was not a government at all but a tyranny, and citizens had a right to overthrow tyrants who demanded unnatural allegiances or acts that God prohibited. Likewise, governments that set themselves up as God also transgressed divinely ordained natural boundaries and likewise could be justly overthrown.

The 17th century saw ideas leading to liberal government take deep roots in the Kingdom of England, particularly in the aftermath of Stuart rule, the English Civil Wars, and the restoration of the monarchy. Charles I defied fundamental natural rights when he ignored Parliament’s Petition of Right in 1628, which attempted to limit the king’s ability to pass taxes at will. When his son James II came to power in 1685 and tried to restore absolute rule, the English Parliament rebelled. The Glorious Revolution brought King William III and his wife, Mary, to the throne. While maintaining the English monarchy, they did so with the understanding that their government was regulated by natural prescribed limitations codified in the English Bill of Rights in 1689. Britain successfully limited the power of monarchs, and liberal government developed with relative success. By the middle of the 18th century, however, British colonists discovered that parliaments could be enemies of liberal government as easily as kings could be.

The United States remains the oldest government in the world with a constitution predicated on liberal political foundations. The U.S. Constitution of 1789 codified broad liberal freedoms in the now-famous affirmation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s words were not meant to license an endless search for human autonomy or governmental intervention in the normal course of human life. The declaration and Constitution were committed to removing unnatural obstacles to natural human life. It was for that very reason that most of the founders believed that slavery would die even if they did not specifically legislate against it in the federal Constitution. Seven decades after the Constitution was promulgated, President Abraham Lincoln believed that secession and a slaveholding republic were enemies of liberal government because slavery was an unnatural obstacle to black men and women having natural families and earning normal livelihoods.

Rightly understood, liberal government upholds natural human life and affirms natural human liberties. In the last two decades in particular, some on the left who are bent on new forms of totalitarianism have duplicitously used the language of “liberalism” to assault the very foundations of liberal government’s protection of natural law and natural human society. The British Parliament’s recent grotesque legislation is just another example of post-Christian, post-liberal society assaulting the very foundations of ordered liberty that liberals fought for hundreds of years to secure. Government-endorsed killing of the weak is a perversion of liberal order.