Modern liberalism has a God-shaped hole. To put it another way, modern liberalism is just classical liberalism secularized; it is classical liberalism with God taken out of the picture.
The values of classical liberalism are basically synonymous with the American founding era. Liberalism is basically just Americanism. When America was Christian, the system worked pretty well. When America abandoned the faith, the system no longer worked. We can debate whether or not the American system had the seeds of its own destruction embedded within it from the beginning. I do not think any political system can sustain the faith or virtue of a people — only the grace of God can do that — but there were flaws inherent in the liberal system from the start and over time those flaws were exploited to undermine the system. The system was only going to work as long as the kind of people it was designed for continued to exist and the system could not guarantee that.
Again, in “classical liberalism,” the kind of liberalism that existed at America’s founding, God actually filled that hole and so liberalism worked quite well. It was adequate to the task of governing the kind of people Americans were at the time. The founding fathers claimed the American constitutional system was only suited for a Christian and virtuous people — and they were right. At the nation’s founding and in its early history, the populace was largely Christian in faith and character. The church played a central role — nine of the thirteen original colonies had established churches and even the colonies that did not have established churches were highly ecclesiocentric in that what the church did mattered. The Presbyterian General Assembly rivaled Congress for cultural power, prestige, and influence up into the first third of the nineteenth century. The pulpit was pivotal in the founding of our nation, and continued to be the prow of American culture for quite sometime after the founding.
But something went badly wrong, especially around the time of the War Between the States. This became increasingly evident in the second half of the nineteenth century as the bad fruit started to manifest itself. The veneer of Christian faith was still there. We were still plausibly a “Christian nation” up until the middle of the twentieth century. But the heart of the matter was dissipating, and this became increasingly evident after 1865. In the North, the “burned over districts,” weary from the emotionalism of the Second Great Awakening, turned to a mix of romanticism/mysticism and secularism/rationalism. The mainline northern churches denied orthodoxy, started ordaining women, and turned from the gospel to the social gospel. The South remained more solidly conservative and Christian, but Christians retreated from culture and politics. The South still had faith, but the quality of the faith had changed — it had become privatized. Whereas in the North, the excesses of the Second Great Awakening producing secularism, in the South it produced fundamentalism — and with it, the privatization of the faith. Faith and politics would be kept separate. This had already begun to happen with the “spirituality of the church” doctrine, developed before the war to excuse Southern pastors from having to address the slavery issue. But it went into overdrive after the war. the South did not cease being Christian, but the kind of Christian faith practiced in the region became irrelevant to culture and politics.
The classic liberal order of America’s founding was dealt a severe blow by the War Between the States. The Civil Rights Movement one hundred years later finished it off. We adopted the rolling revolution of cultural Marxism. It wasn’t called that at the time, obviously, but that’s what it turned out to be. While there were legitimate grievances the civil rights legislation aimed to correct, it would have been far better to allow those grievances to be corrected organically, without the force of law, as Chad O. Jackson (following Booker T. Washington) has argued. The real thrust of the civil rights movement was not to make America just, but to make America Marxist. The purpose of a system is what it does, and the system of civil rights adopted in America steered us hard in a Marxist direction, constantly looking for new victims to champion. We turned from a constitutional republic to identity politics. We replaced Christian compassion with toxic/suicidal empathy.
The role of public education cannot overlooked either. At the same time states were disestablishing their churches in America, a new “established church” was taking their place — the public school. Horace Mann, the nineteenth century educator who became known as “the father of American public education” and then John Dewey in the first part of the twentieth century, formed and shaped America’s secularized public education system. A. A. Hodge and Robert Louis Dabney saw it happening and sounded warnings, but they were not heeded. The American public school system quickly became the front lines in the culture war, training American children to think about life as if there were no God. Education has to be secular, democratic, and liberal. The public education system has done more to promote the lie of worldview neutrality than any other institution in America. It’s not that the schools openly propagated atheism — though after the rise of Darwinism, this was certainly an implication — it’s that the schools treated God as if his existence is simply irrelevant to most of life. The public schools were integral in the shift from classical liberalism to modern liberalism, from our nation having a Christian ethos to a secular ethos.
And so, yes, Americanism — our particular brand of liberalism — has a God-shaped hole in it today. It also has a church-shaped hole. God no longer plays the role he played in our nation’s founding and neither does the church. We have a civic religion that continues to borrow language and categories from the Christian tradition — “one nation under God,” “in God we trust,” and so on — but the faith that made liberalism in its classical form work is no longer there en masse as it once was. What God or god are we confessing to trust in with the motto embossed on our money or in our pledge? It’s an unknown god, every bit as much as the one enshrined by the altar Paul encountered in Athens.
America is now at a crossroads. We are faced with a choice. We can continue down the path of woke progressivism (with a dash of Islam thrown in), which will mean the complete disintegration of our nation. Or we can save the classic liberal order by repenting and turning back to Christ. But there’s really no third option: it will be Christ or chaos. We cannot be classical liberals without Christ, because classical liberalism requires a Christian people with Christian faith and Christian virtue. To put it another way, classical liberalism needs some form of Christian nationalism or it is dead. Only some form of Christian nationalism can breathe life back into the classical liberalism of the founding era.
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The definition of liberalism is obviously debated, but an easy way to think about is:
Classical liberalism = America at her founding
Modern liberalism = America today
Classical liberalism could fit within Christendom. It included representative government, but was more than that. Limited civil government, free markets, respect for tradition and the created order (marriage, family, etc.), natural rights (eg, the Bill of Rights, including due process, innocent until proven guilty, trial by jury of peers, right to self-defense), ordered liberty, protection of the minority within the republic, and so on, were all part of it. Its weakness is that the system itself did not provide an explicit common good for society as a whole. The Constitution’s failure to confess the lordship of Jesus over “we the people” left the whole system open to exploitation, including the kind of mob democracy the founders so greatly feared.
Modern liberalism is about radical individual autonomy – liberty without order, liberty defined by personal desire rather than God’s law. It’s summarized by Anthony Kennedy’s famous line in the 1992 Casey decision: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the
mystery of human life.” This is man no longer bound by nature or nature’s God; it is man as a law unto himself, man as the measure of all things, man as his own god. This is why transgenderism is so important to leftists – if man is to be truly free, he must be allowed to even create his own sexual identity.
Another way to get at it:
Classical liberalism = liberalism of the right, rooted in conservatism
Modern liberalism = liberalism of the left, rooted in revolution and radical autonomy
The American Revolution was based on classical liberalism. The French Revolution unleashed modern liberalism.
Adam Smith was, for the most part, a classical liberal, while Karl Marx is a modern liberal because, ironically, radical individualism necessitates statism.
The weaknesses that led to the shift from classical to modern liberalism were already present in America’s founding era, particularly with the way Jefferson and Madison wanted to privatize religion and govern the public square by supposedly neutral reason. Not everyone saw what was happening, but the seeds that later sprouted into a poisonous weed were certainly there.
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