Liberalism: our unofficial state religion

In July 2006, in the midst of an earlier crisis in Israel, my reflections on how the Israelis’ indefeasible liberalism made it impossible for them rationally to criticize their government’s suicidal policies led to a comment by Alan Roebuck (then signing as Alan R.), in which he argued that liberalism is the unofficial state religion of America.

Update: By sheer coincidence, two hours after I posted this entry, Alan Roebuck sent this:

My essay “Conservative Reformation” has been published at Intellectual Conservative. In it, I argue that liberalism is America’s Unofficial State Religion and therefore, in the words of IC’s editors, “the conservative movement must deliberately instigate a war of ideas, with the aim of retaking intellectual control of the country.” I point out that the rule of liberalism is sufficiently hidden that most are not directly aware of it, that under liberalism our future is certain to be either Balkanization or the imposition of totalitarianism, and that most conservatism is really a right-leaning liberalism that does not dispute the premises of liberalism.

I also discuss conservative apologetics: arguing in the public square against the premises of liberalism, and forming an intellectual discipline devoted to this endeavor. Since our future leaders (the young) have no great attachment to liberalism, and since most people believe what society’s authorities teach about the basic issues of life, such a campaign of argumentation stands a reasonable chance of making a significant difference. And I conclude with a list of concrete suggestions.

- end of initial entry -

Thucydides writes:

Alan Roebuck sees liberalism as a replacement religion. I think it is rather a continuation of the old Anglo Protestantism in secularized form. The Deity has been discarded, and so have the insights into the limitations of human nature and of the human condition. The eschaton has been brought down to earth in the doctrine of historical progress. We believe in the myth that there can be a collective rational management of human affairs so as to abolish tragedy and contingency from our existence.

Liberalism is for those who no longer believe in religion, but are unable to give up the consolation that traditional theodicy once existed to provide.

LA replies:

Thucydides says that liberalism is “a continuation of the old Anglo Protestantism in secularized form.” Yet his description makes it clear that liberalism is much more, and much worse, than merely a continuation of the old religion or, for that matter, a new religion. Anglo Protestantism guided and informed the society, but did not systematically exclude and forbid all attitudes and thoughts that were not in conformity with itself, as liberalism does.

The remainder of Thucydides’ comment explains why liberalism makes greater claims for itself, and assumes greater power over men’s minds, than Anglo-Protestantism ever did. Christianity looks above itself, to God and God’s order. But liberalism, by discarding the deity and the bibical insights into the limitations of human nature, and instead locating the highest values in secular man and secular society, with no higher principle by which their claims can be judged and restrained, becomes an all-encompassing, not-to-be questioned, quasi-totalitarian ideology. Liberalism is thus much more, and much worse, than a religion.

January 7

Charles T. writes:

Since, as it has been pointed out numerous times on this site, liberals look to man’s wisdom for solutions, liberalism seems to have more in common with atheism than with Christianity. Christianity is simply a cover for liberalism’s true intentions and character.

LA replies:

“Liberalism seems to have more in common with atheism than with Christianity.”

This fits right in with Alan Roebuck’s startlingly bold statement, in his article, “Liberalism 101”:

Liberalism holds that the God of the Bible does not exist. This does not necessarily mean outright atheism; liberals have varying concepts of God. Most liberals believe in some sort of god, but their god is usually “mystical,” that is, a god about whom nothing can be known with certainty, and therefore “God” for them has no ultimate authority. But liberalism definitely denies the existence of the God described in the Bible, because to be compatible with liberalism, “God” must not be “judgmental,” must not require belief in any particular religion, must not send people to Hell (unless they are spectacularly wicked), etc.

Mr. Roebuck’s analysis puts liberals effectively on the side of atheists, since both deny the existence of a God who matters, who is a source of truth that has authority and claim over us.

In this connection see also my article, “Randomness: the god of liberalism,” where I wrote:

Because liberals reject the God of the Bible (as Alan Roebuck showed recently), and because they reject the idea of any inherent moral or teleological order in the universe (because if there’s an inherent moral or teleological order then human beings are not free to believe and do whatever they want), for liberals the ultimate organizing principle of the universe is randomness….

Why then do the liberals persist in calling [various murders] random?

They do so for the same reason that they deny the existence of the God of the Bible and of an inherent moral order in the universe. If God exists, and if an inherent moral framework of the universe exists, then human beings in all their actions are to be understood as attempting to bring themselves into harmony with that moral order, or as rejecting it, or as being indifferent to it, or as being somewhere in between. In other words, if God exists and has a purpose, then all human actions inescapably have moral significance, which is to be either relatively good or relatively bad, either more God-like or less God-like. From the theist or Christian point of view, human beings who accept this moral order and attempt to follow God are truly free. But from the anti-theist point of view, belief in such a moral order crushes human freedom.

On another point, I’m not sure what you mean by your last sentence, “Christianity is simply a cover for liberalism’s true intentions and character.” I guess you mean that liberals use their formal adherence to the thinned-out remnants of Christianity to conceal their actual, anti-God intentions.

January 8

Clark Coleman writes:

An earlier discussion was held about liberal Christianity not really being Christianity, as it exalts the sovereignty of man rather than the sovereignty of God. When most mainline Protestant churches in the USA were being conquered by theological liberalism in the early decades of the 20th century, J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism.

He chose the title deliberately to imply that liberalism is not a variety of Christianity, but another phenomenon altogether. He made this point explicit in the book. Machen was an orthodox believer fighting against the liberals who were taking over the PCUSA (Presbyterian Church USA). He was eventually defrocked by the liberals when they got control, and expelled from their most prominent seminary, at Princeton, a couple of years after the wrote this 1923 book. It stands as a classic for everyone in any church afflicted by liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 06, 2009 03:18 PM | Send