Liberals: The Children of Liberty
Introduction
What is a liberal? The word itself is problematic, as are most terms. It’s very general: “a person who believes in liberty.” But what sort of liberty? And for whom? How far reaching is that liberty? Do we go so far as anarchy? What will protect us from a superabundant and unrestrained liberty? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the word was first used as a slur, hurled by the English Tories against their opponents, arguing that their very mode of thinking was “un-English.”[1] It is therefore somehow perversely appropriate that America’s conservatives use the term today in the same way – liberals are un-American – socialists, communists, or worse. We are seen as Shakespeare used the word, as “gross” and “licentious.” For Ann Coulter liberalism is a religion[2]; for Rush Limbaugh, a “psychosis.”[3] Jerry Falwell’s words on the “700 Club” on September 13, 2001, regarding the events of 9/11 really says more about the conservative mindset than about liberalism: ”I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”[4] Outrageous as these words are, there appears to be no level to which the Right will not sink: Ann Coulter’s books take on an increasingly strident and almost hysterical tone: How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (2004), Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2007), If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans (2008), Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America (2009). But Rev. Rick Scarborough’s new book takes top prize for sensationalism: it is entitled Liberalism Kills Kids.
The New Canaanites
Republican rhetoric is approaching, perhaps has even surpassed, the anti-Canaanite rhetoric of the Hebrew Bible. And for good reason: Liberalism is increasingly seen on the Right as something intrinsically opposed to Christianity. This is not surprising in a GOP which has come to be dominated by Conservative Christianity. Take for example the definition found in the Conservapedia: “A liberal (also leftist) is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing. Liberalism began as a movement for individual liberties, but today is increasingly statist, and in Europe even socialistic.”[5] Of course, the truth is that many liberals are actually Christians themselves – but they’re apparently the wrong sort of Christians, not “real” Christians any more than they are “real” Americans. Republican orthodoxy insists on a very narrow set of parameters – everyone falling outside those parameters is part of the “constructed Other” – liberals, as I have argued before, are the new Canaanites. Liberals “whore after foreign gods” and “worship golden calves” – and as you can see, try to destroy a Biblical American paradise that never existed outside the fevered imaginations of the overzealous Right. A brief example will suffice to make my point.
Look first at the Hebrew Bible. The virulent hatred and intolerance of monotheism for polytheism is astounding. See YHWH’s threats espoused at Lev 26.14-17; they are enough to chill anyone’s blood. As R. Joseph Hoffman observes, the God of Abraham “has always threatened vengeance of cosmic proportions for not keeping his laws…The Abrahamic god must be understood in terms of two words: exclusivity and judgment.”[6] Schwartz notes the manner in which the biblical narrative paints “inclinations toward polytheism” as “sexual infidelity” and how Israel itself “is castigated for ‘whoring after’ other gods, thereby imperiling her ‘purity.’” The land itself must be kept clean “or its inhabitants will be ejected, ‘vomited’ out of the land…when Israel is not monotheistic, it is filthy and it pollutes the land” (Lev 20.22-25). When Israel worships a foreign deity, she is a harlot, the land is made barren, and she is ejected from the land” (Jer 3.2-3).[7] The God of monotheism is made the “True” God and the “gods” of polytheism are false. In today’s conservative discourse, liberalism has replaced polytheism and it is the gods of liberalism – diversity, tolerance, and freedom of choice, that are false. The rhetoric, other than the names, is unchanged. Ann Coulter is wrong: It is not liberalism that is a religion, but the Republican Party.
It may come as a surprise to some (or perhaps not, given what we have seen above), but Thomas Jefferson felt his greatest accomplishment was not the Declaration of Independence, but the Virginia Act for Establishing Religion Freedom (1786). I mentioned above the marriage of GOP to the Bible. Now read Jefferson’s words and you will understand why Jefferson felt the way he did:
By our own act of Assembly of 1705, c. 30, if a person brought up in the Christian religion denies the being of God, or the Trinity, or asserts there are more gods than one, or denies the Christian religion to be true, or the Scriptures to be of divine authority, he is punishable on the first offense by incapacity to hold any office or employment, ecclesiastical, civil, or military; on the second, by disability to sue, to take any gift or legacy, to be guardian, executor, or administrator, and by three years’ imprisonment without bail. A fathers right to the custody of his own children being founded in law on his right of guardianship, this being taken away, they may of course be severed from him, and put by the authority of the court, into more orthodox hands. This is a summary view of that religious slavery under which a people have been willing to remain, who have lavished their lives and fortunes for the establishment of civil freedom.”[8]
Naturally, in our “enlightened age” we would think such requirements primitive, at least. This is, after all, the 21st century. But not so. The Republican Party in its replacement of politics with religion has turned the clock back to the 13th century. In November, 2007, an African American Democrat from Minnesota, Keith Ellison, became the first Muslim was elected to Congress. Unsurprisingly, the Christian Right attacked Ellison for being photographed with the Qur’an rather than the Bible for his swearing-in ceremony (the actual ceremony uses no book of any kind). Interestingly, the copy of the Qur’an used once belonged to none other than Thomas Jefferson. In 2008 the religion of presidential candidates suddenly became very important. It wasn’t enough that they be Christian; they had to be the right “sort” of Christian, and those who were not were accused of “not being like us,” in other words, assigned to the category of “the other.” The past was never more present than when one Democratic candidate was called “godless” by her opponent, marking her as somehow ineligible to hold office.[9] Barack Obama was also challenged on his beliefs, and went to great lengths to “prove” to the electorate that he was indeed a Christian. He may have demonstrated this, but he was still not seen as the right sort of Christian.
Clearly, we do still need these words of Thomas Jefferson today: “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”[10]
Children of Liberty
But what really is a liberal? Ignoring a sea of conservative propaganda, what do liberals embrace? What do we believe? I think it is clear from listening to liberals speak it can be safely said that we liberals know we are liberals. By that I mean we know we are not socialists or communists or some other –ist. We know we are not suffering from a psychosis, and we know we don’t kill kids. And we know we are liberals because of our approach to the world, so utterly different from the phobic and paranoid conservative thought-world. We are liberals as much because of how we think as what, and not because somebody has imposed that label upon us but because we embrace it. We wear the name proudly, as a badge of honor. America was founded after all upon the liberal principles of the European Enlightenment. One could argue that the United States was the ultimate expression of those ideals. What is there to be ashamed of? Liberals do not seek to impose their thought-world on others; the essence of liberalism is the freedom to act upon your own thought-world.
In fact, imposition is itself antithetical to liberalism. Imposition, as I will argue here, is very much an element of modern conservative thinking. Conservatives today often take the position that classical liberalism, from which they seek to divorce today’s liberals, is all about the size and role of government. And Classical Liberalism is concerned with the size and role of government. Even a quick reading of our Founding Fathers will reveal that these issues were very much on their mind during the process that gave birth to our eventual form of government (at it was a process, not an event).[11] But Classical Liberalism does not end there, with concerns for government. Yet in today’s conservative rhetoric every other aspect of classical liberalism is ignored: the importance and role of human Reason, freeing the body-politic from organized religion and organized religion from politics, a movement endorsed by the 18th century’s Evangelicals (in contrast we see above the Conservapedia’s stress on the Bible), and individual human rights, including, importantly, civil liberties and equality under the law.
Freedom vs. Slavery
I will demonstrate here the essential hypocrisy of the conservative position, which claims liberty but which is instead imposition, and not simply imposition, but exclusion and limitation. It is not about extending liberty, extending rights, but restricting them. Individual human rights is something they may pay lip-service to, but only with regards to their own rights, which paradoxically include the right to limit or even abrogate entirely the rights of others.
Liberals embrace the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights. This thinking is a product of the European Enlightenment. It is not a product of Hebrew or Christian thought. It was as a child of the Enlightenment and not of the Bible that Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The following claim too derives from anywhere but the Bible: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The Bible, to which today’s Republicans typically appeal as the origins of American democratic principles, represents a theocracy, a kingdom ruled not by man, not instituted by or for man, but by and for god, to ensure devotion to god and to no other, and to ensure that all citizens live according to god’s will. This is government imposed upon, and not consented to by or for the people.
This imposition exists on a number of levels, not only national. There is the imposition upon the individual, the imposition of a strict and exclusive morality, a morality that violates and contradicts the very principles espoused by Thomas Jefferson and the other great thinkers of the European Enlightenment, Christian and Deist alike. This imposition demands that all men are not created equal. At various times, the Bible has been used to limit the rights of Native Americans, African Americans, Women, and homosexuals. Not only are gender and sexual orientation to be imposed, other behaviors are as well: We are to be told what we can watch, when we can watch it, what we can read, and what we can listen to. In some sense, we are supposed to be better off as a result – it is for our own good. Enlightenment Freedom is illusory - a chimera; true freedom cannot exist without Christ and therefore the believers have a right to override freedom of choice and impose belief and behavior; the duty to spread the Truth overrides tolerance.[12]
Kymlicka offers himself as a spokesman for the liberal position on this sort of paternalism:
But while we may be mistaken in our beliefs about value, it doesn’t follow that someone else, who has reason to believe a mistake has been made, can come along and improve my life by leading it for me, in accordance with the correct account of value. On the contrary, no life goes better by being led from the outside according to values the person doesn’t endorse.[13]
Kymlicka goes on to say,
The decision about how to lead our lives must ultimately be ours alone, but this decision is always a matter of selecting what we believe to be most valuable from the various options available, selecting from a context of choice which provides us with different ways of life. This is important because the range of options is determined by our cultural heri-tage…. We learn about these patterns of activity through their presence in stories we’ve heard about the lives, real or imaginary, of others. They become potential models, and define potential roles, that we can adopt as our own.[14]
The key here, I would argue, is the word “can.” There is a choice implicit in Kymlicka’s viewpoint. The current conservative position is largely ruled by Christian thought. Certain behaviors are to be imposed. Choice is historically, seen as an evil. Choice is synonymous with heresy, a violation of orthodoxy, and orthodoxy is always imposed. Orthodoxy does not act from the bottom up, but from the top down.[15] As Salem-Wiseman expresses the liberal perspective, “life should be lived from the inside,” and not imposed from without.[16] The Founding Fathers, searching for the meaning of individual human liberties, understood this. The Biblical authors appealed to by today’s GOP do not.
Every person on the planet has a point of view, a particular perspective. We are all individually shaped by our experiences, our culture, our economic status, our place in society. We are shaped in a collective sense too, by our families, our peers, by our communities. We each of us have a worldview, a conception of the world, of how it acts upon us and of our place within it. True objectivity is desirable, but it is impossible. That is not to say there is no objective reality out there, whatever postmodernist thinking might insist. But because we all have an ideology, a set of beliefs about the world, subjectivity cannot be ignored. The old saw “perception is reality” has some truth to it. But at the same time, we are who we see ourselves as being, not how others perceive us. We must be aware of perception, but not be ruled by it. In the same way, we must be aware of ideology’s role but we must not surrender to it.
In a world of ideologies and increasing polarization of views, liberalism is surprisingly flexible. It is not an accident that Democrats, when they are in a position of primacy in this country, are seen as bumbling and incompetent. Democrats embrace a diversity of views. There are moderate Democrats (something the Republican Party no longer permits) and there are radical Democrats and many positions in between. A Democrat might be for or against abortion or have one or another of many views on government’s size and role, or on fiscal matters. Such a diversity is absent from Republican ranks where the new orthodoxy has imposed a strict doctrine of what a Republican can and cannot believe. This leaves the Republicans, despite squabbling about leadership positions, in a position of unity ideologically. Those who resist the new orthodoxy are cast aside, like Dede Scozzafava. They are not “real” Republicans at all. Democrats find their strength in diversity of opinion, but this diversity has proven to be a weakness as well as a strength. Any majority in Congress is ephemeral where a monolithic unity is lacking.
Conclusion
The problem today is not liberalism. Liberalism remains what it always was: a philosophical position, born of the European Enlightenment, which embraces liberty. The solution for the problems we face is not that liberals should become something they are not. The solution lies in maintaining our Constitution, that separation of Church and State that set the United States apart from the Old World. The Founding Fathers saw that not only could the State enslave religion, but that religion could enslave the State. Replacing one totalizing discourse with another will not restore the delicate balance established by the Founding Fathers through our nation’s Constitution; liberalism will not triumph by becoming what it resists.
If we go for a moment back to the idea of perceptions, it is interesting that the conservative perception of liberalism is that liberalism is not for anything, rather, that is defined by what it is against. This is an inversion of the facts. Liberalism is defined by what it is for: liberty;, freedom of choice, not only in matters of health but also, especially, in matters of belief; individual human rights, including not only our own but those of others, particularly minority groups. In truth, it is today’s conservatism that is defined by what it is against, and it is against almost everything. Just as the Hebrew Bible is defined by a rejection of everything Canaanite, so the Republican Party is defined by a rejection of everything liberal. Conservative totalizing discourse allows no other possibility: in a world dominated by a Biblical worldview, a world of either/or, for or against, good vs. evil, there can be no compromise, there can be no choice.
But liberalism is ultimately about choice. The choice to embrace liberty. And that is what the American experiment was about in 1776: the embrace of liberty. And not the false liberty of the right, which seeks to embrace a narrow set of rights while abrogating all others, imposing enslaving rather than freeing. True liberty, the liberty embraced by our Founding Fathers, does not demand a complete rejection of government interference in our lives: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men” Jefferson wrote; significantly, he did not write “to restrict these rights.” Today’s Right may argue that the government has failed in its purpose, but this is true only if the Founding Fathers intended a theocracy, and that, demonstrably, they did not. They created instead a Republic, where American citizens, not God, got the vote, where not only does government not impose on religion but religion does not impose on government, where the national motto, E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One” embraces plurality and diversity and does not restrict it. The Right’s position is therefore invalid. The liberal origins of the United States of America negate the fantasy of a conservative Biblical government. Because they look to a past that never existed, the Right is agitating for a revolt not to restore, but to destroy, to enslave, not to liberate. This is the same struggle fought in Germany in the 20’s and ‘30s of the last century, a liberal democracy faced with the Big Lie, the yearning for a false past, a past that never was. It is a struggle liberalism cannot afford to lose again.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson is a Minnesota native, polytheist, and webmaster of A Heathens Day. He has written extensively on progressive issues primarily focusing on religious tolerance.
[1] Paul Edwards, ed. The Encylopedia of Philosophy (New York and London 1967), 4:458.
[2] Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2007).
[3] Rush Limbaugh, CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), February 28, 2009.
[4] 700 Club, September 13, 2001.
[5] http://conservapedia.com/Liberal. Accessed 11.14.09
[6] R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed. The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, & Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 10-11. Among this god’s enemies are, as Hoffmann identifies this group’s composition, “a blend of idolaters, foreigners, sorcerers, heretics, homosexuals, drunken sons, dismissed wives, disobedient slaves, and above all the catch-all remainder of ‘those who do not do his will.’”
[7] Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent History of Monotheism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 18, 63.
[8] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 234-237. Drafted in 1779 and passed by the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1786. James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments was written in 1785, just a few months before the General Assembly passed Jefferson’s bill.
[9] Elizabeth Dole in an add which ran Thursday, October 30, 2008, accused Kay Hagan, her opponent, who was a Sunday School teacher, of being “godless” and of accepting donations from the “Godless Americans Political Action Committee.” Interesting, the group she is accused of taking money from advocates separation of Church and State – something enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Further Justifying Jefferson’s fears, Pat Robertson believes the Constitution is for Christians only (The 700 ClubThe 700 Club television program, January 11, 1985). television program, December 30, 1981) and that only Jews and Christians should hold public office (
[10] The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/vaact.html See also James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785) http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/madison_m&r_1785.html It should be noted here that it was Thomas Jefferson who is the author of the Declaration of Independence and Madison who is the author of the Constitution – a fact today’s conservatives would do well to remember when they appeal to the intent of our Founding Fathers.
[11] See in particular Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford University Press 2009).
[12] See, for example, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (Ignatius Press 2003).
[13] Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 33.
[14] Kymlicka (1989), 164-165.
[15] For how this worked in ancient Israel, the standard to which today’s Conservatives appeal, see William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (William B. Eerdmans 2005).
[16] Jonathan Salem-Wiseman, “Heidegger’s Dasein and the Liberal Conception of the Self,” Political Theory 31 (2003), pp. 533-557
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