Faith and Freedom: Why Liberty Requires Christianity
by Joseph Pearce
In an age that seems
to believe that Christianity is an obstacle to liberty it will prove
provocative to insist, contrary to such belief, that Christian faith is
essential to liberty’s very existence. Yet, as counter-intuitive as it
may seem to disciples of the progressivist zeitgeist, it must be
insisted that faith enshrines freedom. Without the shrine that
faith erects to freedom, the liberties that we take for granted will be
eroded and ultimately destroyed. Faith preserves freedom. It protects
it. It insists upon it. Where there is faith there is freedom. Where
faith falters, so does freedom. This truth, so uncomfortably perplexing
for so many of our contemporaries, was encapsulated by G. K. Chesterton
when he asserted that “the modern world, with its modern movements, is
living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths
that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom.”[1]
One of the truths of
Christendom which lays the very foundations of freedom is the Christian
insistence on the mystical equality of all people in the eyes of God and
the insistence on the dignity of the human person that follows
logically, inexorably and inescapably from such an insistence. If
everyone is equal in the eyes of God, it doesn’t matter if people are
black or white, healthy or sick, able-bodied or handicapped, or whether
babies are inside the womb or out of it. It doesn’t matter that people
are different, in terms of race, age or innate abilities; they are all
equal in the eyes of God, and therefore, of necessity, in the eyes of
Man also. This is the priceless inheritance of Christendom with which
our freedoms are established and maintained. If everyone is equal in the
eyes of God and Man, everyone must also be equal in the eyes of the
law.
If, however, the
equality of man is denied, freedom is imperiled. The belief of
Nietzsche, adopted by the Nazis, that humanity consists of übermenschen and untermenschen,
the “over-men” and the “under-men,” led to people being treated as
subhuman, worthy of extermination and victims of genocide. The
progressivist belief of Hegel, adopted by Marx and his legion of
disciples, that a rationalist dialectic, mechanistically determined,
governs the progress of humanity, led to the deterministic inhumanity of
communism and the slaughter of those deemed to be enemies of
“progress.” The French Revolution, an earlier incarnation of atheistic
progressivism and the progenitor of communism, had led to the invention
of the guillotine as the efficient and effective instrument of the Great
Terror and its rivers of blood. The gas chamber, the Gulag and the
guillotine are the direct consequence of the failure to uphold the
Christian concept of human equality and the freedom it enshrines. In our
own time, the same failure to accept and uphold human equality has led
to babies in the womb being declared subhuman, or untermenschen, without any protection in law from their being killed at the whim of their mothers.
Apart from the
connection between freedom and equality, the other aspect of freedom
enshrined by Christianity is the freedom of the will and the
consequences attached to it. If we are free to act and are not merely
slaves to instinct as the materialists claim, we have to accept that we
are responsible for our choices and for their consequences.
Before proceeding to
the paradoxical relationship between freedom and responsibility, let’s
return to the philosophical ramifications of materialism, which is to
say the removal of God from the picture of reality. Materialists are
forced, if they are honest enough to follow the logic of their own first
principles, to believe that none of us are free but that we are all
slaves to our biologically determined instincts. For all such
materialists, commonly known in today’s jargon as the new atheists,
there is no such thing as freedom. It is an illusion. Considering the
historical record of old atheists, such as the terrorists of the French
Revolution, the communist revolution and the Third Reich, it is not
likely that these new atheists, with their belief that we are all slaves
to our genes, will prove any better in the defence of freedom. Why
should they defend something that they don’t believe exists?
In contrast to the
atheists’ philosophical acceptance of slavery, the insistence of
Christians that we are all equal and that we all possess freewill can be
seen as truly liberating. Yet the paradoxical reality is that freedom
is not free. It comes at a price. As already stated, freedom is
inseparable from responsibility. If we want to reap the rewards of our
good choices we must be prepared to pay the cost of our bad ones. It is
for this reason that Edmund Burke insisted, quite correctly, that
liberty must be limited in order to be possessed. If liberty is not
limited it will be lost, or, to put the matter another way, the taking
of liberties by some leads to the taking of liberties from
others. Rapists and murderers and thieves should expect to pay heavily
for the abuse of their freedom and for the taking of the freedom of
those with whom they took liberties.
This is all very well
and may be taken to be self-evident. Yet the whole of contemporary
society and the whole of contemporary politics seem to be based on a
denial of this fact. On the so-called “left” of the political spectrum
the philosophy of the libertine is in the ascendant. This is the belief
that we should be able to do what we like with our bodies and the bodies
of others and to hell with the consequences. If we become pregnant, we
can kill the baby. If children are abused by dysfunctional parents doing
their own thing in dysfunctional relationships, so be it. Nothing,
least of all children in the womb or in the home, must get in the way of
the right of “adults” to do what they want with their lives and their
bodies. Children are the new untermenschen. Broken in mind by the
broken homes and broken relationships of their libertine parents, they
are the forgotten ones. They are voteless and voiceless in a culture of
death in which they are increasingly seen as an expensive inconvenience.
This was the sense in which Oscar Wilde lamented that anarchy was
Freedom’s own Judas, betraying liberty with a lustful kiss.
So much for the
libertines of the so-called “left.” On the so-called “right,” as a
so-called alternative to left-wing libertines, are the right-wing
libertarians, who support the freedom of pornographers to corrupt
everyone they touch, the freedom of drug pushers to deal death to
vulnerable youngsters, and the freedom of global corporations to rule
the world unhampered by political or economic constraint.
The libertines believe
in Big Government to ensure that they can continue to take liberties by
taking the liberties of others, specifically in recent years by taking
the liberties of Christians who wish to live in accordance with their
anti-libertine consciences. The libertarians, on the other hand, believe
that Big Business should be left free to use the bullying powers of the
economies of scale to destroy small businesses. Libertarians believe
that huge corporations should be free to take liberties by taking the
liberties of small corporations, turning downtown into ghost-town.
Faced with the choice
between the libertine and the libertarian we should echo the words of
Mercutio and call down a curse upon both their houses. Instead of
choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or Tweedledumb and
Tweedledumber, we should choose the faith that leads to true and lasting
freedom. After all, as an idiot [2] once said in an entirely different
context, we have nothing to lose but our chains.
Books by Dr. Pearce may be found in in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Essays by Joseph Pearce may be found here.
Joseph Pearce, is a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative and writer in residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire, is the author of eighteen books. His works include: G.K. Chesterton: Wisdom and Innocence, Literary Converts, Tolkien: Man and Myth, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, The Quest for Shakespeare and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. Mr. Pearce has four new books due to be published fall 2013. He is the series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, which focuses on traditional readings of the classics of world literature; he is also executive director of Catholic Courses, and editor of the St. Austin Review.
Mr. Pearce has hosted two thirteen-part television series for EWTN on
Shakespeare’s Catholicism, and is in the midst of filming special
documentaries for EWTN on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.
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