by Adi Schlebusch
In 2006 the humanities scholar affiliated with Marquette University in Wisconsin, Howard Kainz, published an important article in Touchstone magazine entitled Liberalism as Religion, in which he rightly pointed out how the philosophy of Liberalism essentially amounts to a religion, complete with its own dogmas, hamartiology, holy scriptures, holy sites, relics and its own martyrs.[1]
This religious nature of Liberalism is furthermore clearly evidenced in its claim to offer an answer to pertinent ontological questions regarding the nature of reality as well as epistemic questions regarding the origin of authority in particular. Any notion of authority is fundamentally a religious matter, since the ultimate authority in any social order functions as the moral lawgiver of that society, and such a lawgiver demands universal obedience. The liberal response to questions concerning the nature of legitimate authority has always been that man itself is the standard of truth and falsehood and of right and wrong. This is central to the liberal notion of “liberty,” the concept after which the religion in named. Its dedication to its distinct notion of “liberty,” however, stands in direct opposition—indeed purposefully so—to the Biblical proposition that Jesus Christ is the source and cornerstone of true liberty (John 8:36). This is why the great Princeton theologian John Gresham Machen (1881–1937) could declare that “the chief modern rival of Christianity is Liberalism. An examination of the teachings of Liberalism in comparison with those of Christianity will show that at every point the two movements are in direct opposition.”[2]
Indeed, Liberalism purposefully redefined liberty to mean the exact opposite. In the liberal framework, every human being is completely autonomous and there is no authority over him. This of course is radically at odds with reality, not to mention the Biblical notion that of true liberty, namely that we are “free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God” (1 Peter 2:16). In this verse the apostle champions a notion of liberty which was radically at odds with the religion of Liberalism. After all, Liberalism’s philosophical foundation was the Enlightenment’s false notion of liberty as sanctioned by the diabolical social contract theories of Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, defined the natural liberty of man as that egocentric “preference each man gives to himself in accordance with his natural state.”[3]
Therefore, in its unattainable desire to be freed from the inescapable sovereignty of one and only true living God, Liberalism as religion starts with autonomous man as central epistemic axiom. It is man, not God, that creates and defines reality and meaning. Any authority over man is therefore to be rejected as fundamentally at odds with this axiom. From here Liberalism’s heretical egalitarian social ontology logically follows.
But of course, this is radically at odds with the central axiom of Christian epistemology, namely that divine revelation is holistic, universal and inescapable. It encompasses not only all knowledge and facts, but all of created reality which finds its origin and purpose in the divine will. There is no fact whatsoever in the universe that is not dependent upon and mediated by divine revelation. All that is true about anything falls within its scope, not only on an epistemological level, but also on an ontological level, that is, reality not only as we come to know and understand it by revelation, but as it is, for its very existence, dependent upon God’s providential energy as He is the ultimate First Cause behind everything in existence. Since God is the only fully independent and self-causing Reality, all dependent realities in distinction to Him are necessarily his revelation.
Thus, at the heart of that crucial religious distinction between Christianity and Liberalism which Machen refers to, lies the false epistemology of Liberalism. Epistemic authority cannot ever begin nor end with man, but only with an absolutely sovereign God who reveals Himself infallibly in Scripture.
The author is a senior researcher with the Pactum Institute.
[1] Howard P. Kainz, Liberalism as Religion. Touchstone, vol. 9. (2006), p. 22-26.
[2] John G. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (MacMillan: New York, 1923), 53.
[3] Jean Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, ou, Principes du droit politique (Amsterdam: M.M. Rey, 1762), 69: “de la preferance que chacin se donne et par consequent de la nature de l’homme.”