The Illiberalism Heresy

A new crusade is afoot. No, it’s not against the civilization-wrecking incendiaries of ISIS. Nor is it against the single greatest threat to life in the West, abortion. Rather, Catholics everywhere are marching off to conquer something much more imminent and menacing: Liberalism.

To the lay observer, it might seem strange to make a big deal of something so basic and wholesome as Liberalism. It’s like saying that apple pie is a heresy. But, to an increasingly vocal contingent, Liberalism has become a matter of the gravest concern.

Traditionalist professors string up piñatas representing America to give their students a chance to “smash Americanism”; Pope Francis famously warns against an “invasion” of libertarians; and bestselling books that denounce the American project like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed are endorsed by archbishops and other faith leaders across the United States.

The crusaders have come from all over—from the Left with its socialists and distributists, and from the Right with its monarchists and rad trads. If there is one thing they can all agree upon, it is that Liberalism is incompatible with the Christian way of life and must be done away with.

How has Liberalism—what many might couple with Christianity as the foundation of our civilization—become so hated? What exactly is so pernicious about Liberalism that so many good Christians have called for its downfall?

The case against Liberalism is teleological. It is assumed that liberals promote Individualism, Reason, and Freedom above all else, including Truth, Community, and God Himself—that Freedom becomes a kind of god and that we must deny the true God to enshrine Freedom.

Consequently, it is thought, Liberalism has opened the door to a slew of problems: moral relativism, atomism, the degeneracy of the arts, a wide disparity of wealth, neglect of the most vulnerable, and a general breakdown of civil society. As such, from the mid-19th century Popes and other Church leaders have denounced Liberalism and ‘Americanism’ as a heresy. The recent crusade against Liberalism is actually just a resurrection of this centuries-old battle.

There is, of course, one problem: No one I know who calls himself a ‘classical liberal’ or ‘libertarian’ thinks that we must reject God in order to promote Individualism, Reason, and Freedom. On the contrary, classical liberals tend to believe that Individualism, Reason, and Freedom are dependent upon and characteristic of the Universal Truth of God. As Lord Acton famously put it, “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”

Indeed, classical liberals are the true defenders of being able to do what we ought these days. It is the opposite of Liberalism—Socialism, Totalitarianism, Tyranny—that’s the real threat to Christianity. By going after Liberalism, the new crusaders are tearing down the only thing that can stop this threat, and thus aiding the destruction of the Church they hold so dear.

How did this come about? Taking a step back, it appears as though the crusade against Liberalism might very well be based on a mistaken conception of the term. The open-eyed observer will admit that there are multiple kinds of Liberalism, some forms clearly unjust or immoral, some quite amenable to the Christian way of life. These days, it’s not quite clear which we’re talking about when we condemn or support it. Accordingly, it will be constructive to break it down and find out exactly what we’re dealing with.

Two ‘Ism’s

‘Liberalism’ stems from the Latin ‘liberalis’ for ‘noble, gracious, munificent, and generous’, literally meaning ‘befitting a free person’. This is where we get the concept of a ‘liberal education’ and the ‘liberal arts’. In the 16th century, ‘liberal’ was used as a term of reproach, meaning ‘free from restraint in speech or action’—the source of ‘libertine’. It was in the Enlightenment when the word returned to a more positive light of ‘free from prejudice, bigotry, or narrowness’.

The ‘ism’ was attested in the early 19th century as a way to describe a liberal party, or one which favored smaller state government. From the start the term could be viewed in many ways and a divergence occurred. By the mid-19th century, two main branches of Liberalism had become manifest, as Jesuit Fr. John Courtney Murray delineated, American Liberalism and Jacobinism.

American Liberalism arose from the American Revolution and can be summed up by the crucial lines of the Declaration of Independence: That all men are created equal by God with unalienable rights including Life, Liberty, and Property, and that government’s purpose is to secure those rights. It is a political freedom, a negative freedom, not to be able to do anything one wants, but to not be coerced or oppressed by others, especially the state. This is what most people mean when they talk of ‘Classical Liberalism’ or ‘Libertarianism’.

The second kind of Liberalism arose around the French Revolution and was less about freedom from the state as it was about freedom from all restraint. Its purveyors extended the idea to grant license in all realms, including morality and even one’s conception of reality. This brand of Liberalism is more a positive freedom to be able to do anything one wants rather than a limited negative freedom. It is what most mean when they use the term ‘Modern Liberalism’ or what Carlton Hayes called ‘Sectarian Liberalism’.

This distinction is important because it is at the very crux of the argument. First of all, even though they both go by the name ‘Liberalism’, it is clear that they are rather different—maybe even diametrically opposed. While American Liberalism is rooted in belief in God; Jacobinism is atheistic. American Liberalism supports the self-consistent rights of Life, Liberty, and Property; Jacobinism upholds the self-contradictory triumvirate of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité. American Liberalism amounts to self-government; Jacobinism amounts to mob-rule.

From this surface review, we can see that the two Liberalisms are quite different. In some ways Jacobinism is actually a kind of anti-Americanism, and vice versa. If Americanism is Liberalism, Jacobinism is Illiberalism. As Bastiat phrased it, “The second half of your program will destroy the first.” To condemn one would be to support the other, and to condemn them both would be contradictory and absurd.

And this is the very problem with the new crusade against Liberalism. No one differentiates between the several forms, and instead we are to toss them out all together, baby with the bath. Not only is this intellectually lazy, it is counter-productive and dangerous because it confuses the Church’s very sensible rationale against Sectarian Liberalism.

The Liberalism Heresy

The new crusaders get hung up on the fact that there is indeed a heresy called the Liberalism Heresy. It is akin to the Americanism Heresy, and, as all illiberal Catholics know, it proves that we should abolish the Democratic Republic and return directly to Monarchy.

Not quite.

To begin, whenever Church authorities have spoken about the Liberalism or Americanism Heresies, they have first differentiated between the various kinds of Liberalism, and made it clear that they are not opposed to the first kind, American Liberalism or Classical Liberalism. Their concern rests in a specific kind of Liberalism which directly threatens the Church, Jacobinism or Sectarian Liberalism.

This is why Pope St. John Paul II speaks of “true freedom”, the implication being that there are two ways to view liberty, one that is aligned with Church teaching and one that is not. Similarly, in an article condemning Sectarian Liberalism, the Catholic Encyclopedia was sure to differentiate a true and false sense of Liberalism. As it is summarized in the article, “Liberalism may mean a political system or tendency opposed to centralization and absolutism. In this sense Liberalism is not at variance with the spirit and teaching of the Catholic Church.” That is to say, Classical Liberalism is not at variance with Church teaching.

Pope St. John Paul II drives the point home: “The Church respects the legitimate autonomy of the democratic order and is not entitled to express preferences for this or that institutional or constitutional solution.” In other words, the liberal democratic order that serves as the foundation of America and other Western nations is not a heresy—there’s no reason to believe that it is.

What the Church contests—and rightly so—is the imposition of the secular liberal state upon the Church—a problem that was much more imminent with the Jacobins of the French Revolution. As Dr. James Hitchcock has outlined, Jacobins of the French Revolution “relentlessly persecuted the Church in the name of freedom, and various 19th-century governments, notably in France itself, proclaimed liberty even as they tightened the screws on the Church—seizing its property or closing its schools, for example.”

Nor was this persecution limited to the Revolution and outright persecution—it expanded and grew more insidious through the century.

Leo XIII’s Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae explains how this came to be: By the late 19th century, the power and influence of the Catholic Church had declined in Europe and failed to spread in America. Some in the Church claimed that particular stringent doctrines had made Catholicism less palatable in the liberal West and largely Protestant America, and that certain conciliations should be made to better expand the faith.

The issue came to a head when the biography of an unconventional American Fr. Isaac Hecker was translated into French and inspired a movement of modernizing and liberalizing of Church religious. While Hecker had never fallen out of favor with Rome, his ideas were being used to encourage priests in America and France to break from tradition and isolation and take active part in the social amelioration of the day.

This is what is meant by ‘Ecclesiastical Liberalism’ and is the basis for ‘The Liberalism Heresy’ or ‘The Americanism Heresy’. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, Ecclesiastical Liberalism promotes “the abolition of the Divine right and of every kind of authority derived from God; the relegation of religion from the public life into the private domain of one’s individual conscience; the absolute ignoring of Christianity and the Church as public, legal, and social institutions.” Naturally, it is to be condemned by the Church.

But, this in no way condemns Liberalism, American Liberalism, or even what might be called Americanism. It is better called ‘American Particularism’ or ‘Liberal Imposition’ as it is clear that the problem is not the American way of life, but the effort to conform the Church to the American way of life.

As Leo XIII puts it, “If by [Americanism] are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to various other nations, and if, moreover, by it is designated your political condition and the laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name.” But, “there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.” And that cannot be ordained.

Interestingly, from a post-Vatican II perspective, what is referred to as the Liberalism Heresy might seem a trifle. Traditionalists would contend that the Second Vatican Council not only dealt in the same issues brought up by Hecker and the Sectarian Liberals, but rather codified them. Some might even argue that the effect of Vatican II was to make the Liberalism Heresy official Church doctrine. Ironically, it is those who consider themselves classical liberals who most vehemently contest the extravagances of ecclesiastical liberals and Vatican II. It might be said, Classical Liberalism is Orthodoxy’s greatest ally.

While it is clear that the critics of Liberalism are misguided due to their lacking etymology and Church history, there is another, more profound problem with their logic: The fact is that Liberalism is at the core of the Christian way of life, and the effort to do away with Liberalism is to do harm to Christianity itself.

The Inherent Liberalism of Christianity

It is fashionable these days to suggest that Liberalism is a product of the Enlightenment and that anything born of the Enlightenment is atheistic and thus anti-Christian.

But this is to neglect the fact that Liberalism is mostly based on the work of pre-Enlightenment Christian thinkers. It could be said that the architects of Liberalism did little more than to gather and consolidate the ideas and work of the great Christians and Pre-Christians, Plato and Aristotle, the authors of the Old and New Testaments, Tertullian and Aquinas, the Spanish Scholastics, John Locke, and Frédéric Bastiat. Fr. John Courtney Murray said it best when he asserted “The American Bill of Rights is not a piece of eighteenth-century rationalist theory; it is far more the product of Christian history.” The same might be said for most of Classical Liberalism’s foundational texts.

True, Liberalism is a socio-political construct based in Individualism, Reason, and Freedom, but it is folly to suggest that Individualism, Reason, and Freedom are at all at variance with the Christian faith. Indeed, an honest appraisal will show that these key components of Liberalism are likewise foundations of the Church.

Consider Individualism: Liberalism is built on the fundamental principle that all men are created by God with inherent dignity and worth. This is the Imago Dei, the notion that man was created in the image and likeness of God, which serves as the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian faith.

Consider Reason: Liberalism asserts that Reason is the faculty that differentiates man from the beasts and is the only legitimate basis for socio-political order. This is what Augustine called Capax Dei, that Reason is the way in which we image God, that it is our faculty which is capable of Him and a partaker in Him.

And consider Freedom: Liberals assert that from their inherent dignity and worth persons are endowed with certain freedoms and rights that must be protected by the state. This is the Natural Law, the basis for the Church’s structure and social teaching.

As we can see, the fundamental tenets of Liberalism are in a straightforward way the fundamental tenets of Christianity. Promoting Liberalism is to promote Christianity. And, at the same time, condemning the Individualism, Reason, and Freedom of Liberalism is to condemn Imago Dei, Capex Dei, and the Natural Law that serve as the foundation of the Church.

As Leo XIII put it in Libertas, “As the Catholic Church declares in the strongest terms the simplicity, spirituality, and immortality of the soul, so with unequalled constancy and publicity she ever also asserts its freedom.” And as John Paul II put it in Centesimus Annus, “In constantly reaffirming the transcendent dignity of the person, the Church’s method is always that of respect for freedom.”

Certainly, there are those who raise Individualism, Reason, and Freedom above their proper places, and thus defy God and Church. But there is no reason to suggest that this is necessary or even likely in those who consider themselves classical liberals. Philosopher Gerard Casey explains that liberty is foundational, not aspirational: “For libertarians, liberty is the lowest of social values, lowest in the sense of most fundamental, a necessary condition of a human action’s being susceptible of moral evaluation in any way at all.” The notion of classical liberals saying ‘Liberty is god and all is permissible’ is a straw man propped up by the enemies of Liberalism to more easily defeat it.

The Church is built on liberal principles of Individualism, Reason, and Freedom, and attacking these amounts to an attack on the Church.

By the same token, Freedom is essential to the faith. The purpose of the Church is to make saints and we make saints by believing in Christ and doing good. But, in order to believe in Christ and do good, you must will it, and you cannot will it if you are coerced to doing it. You cannot force someone to have faith; you can’t impose holiness. It must be voluntary.

As it is said in Dignitas Humanitae, “It is one of the major tenets of Catholic doctrine that man’s response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act.“

It is tempting in the quest to spread the Word and produce goodness to oblige others to profess the faith, to urge them along, or punish them for failing to meet their moral expectations. Some are fine with the notion of an absolute monarch, state religion, and even burning heretics at the stake.

Not only would this go against the basis of Liberalism, but so too would it go against the very basis of the Church. Not only does coercion fail to save the person, it necessarily negates their own chance of salvation because it prevents them from making the crucial decision in the matter.

The Illiberalism Heresy

In what has had the resonance of a death knell, bestseller Why Liberalism Failed author Patrick Deneen continually asserts that Liberalism failed because it succeeded. It would be an interesting paradox if it made any sense.

The implication is that Liberalism could only be successful if it brought about selfishness, atomism, and moral relativism that would inevitably destroy the society which housed it. The fact that we see our society falling apart all around us means that Liberalism succeeded and thus failed.

A telling example given is the Obama 2012 campaign piece titled The Life of Julia, an interactive advertisement that shows how successful a woman can be in college, at work, and at raising a child without a husband, thanks to the assistance from state government. Deneen says that this Orwellian dystopia is only possible with the hyper autonomy of Liberalism, and that it represents its ultimate manifestation.

Other examples of Liberalism’s triumph are equally peculiar: the Obamacare mandate that forced the Little Sisters of the Poor provide contraception for their religious employees; the decision that bakers and florists must participate in a same-sex wedding or else pay a crippling fine; and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s infamous line in defense of abortion that “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”. According to the new crusaders, all of these signify the pinnacle of Liberal Democracy—the great triumph of Liberalism which has caused its own demise.

The problem is that The Life of Julia, Obamacare, anti-discrimination laws, and Kennedy’s voluntarist existential Supreme Court musings have absolutely nothing to do with Classical Liberalism—their dominance in our culture marks, not the triumph of Liberalism, but the triumph of its enemies.

To suggest that Julia is autonomous, for instance, simply because she can make her way through modern society without a husband, is like saying that she is Catholic because she doesn’t read the Bible. The fact is Julia is dependent upon the state government. She’s not a free individual at all; she’s a cog in the wheel, a statistic of the state. It’s not Liberalism that makes Julia’s successes possible (and so creepy), but Illiberalism.

Likewise, Obamacare, anti-discrimination laws, and on-demand abortion are about as illiberal as you can get. To say that they are due to Liberalism is a sign of ignorance or sophistry.

This tactic has an odd counterproductive effect. We can agree that cultural constructs like the Life of Julia and the Obamacare mandate are deleterious to society. But they are deleterious because they are illiberal, and the only way to counter them is by means of Liberalism. By labeling the constructs as liberal, and condemning them as such, the enemies of Liberalism have effectively nullified the only mechanism that we can use to overcome them.

Talk about a paradox. What the new crusaders call ‘Liberalism’ is actually Illiberalism, which can only be defeated by Liberalism, which they condemn. By condemning all of Liberalism, they are tearing down the only thing that can prevent the Illiberalism they are fighting, and are therefore helping to support the very evils they aim to defeat.

It is possible that they are unaware of their folly. After all, the words themselves are awfully confusing. But it is possible that they seek to precipitate the demise of Liberalism because they are hoping for a more illiberal society. If this is the case, Heaven help us. Because it won’t be Constitutional Monarchy that replaces the Liberal Democracy when it goes, it will be Socialism, Totalitarianism, Tyranny. And on the Socialism Heresy, there can be no question.