Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 4

Wall Street Journal: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lesson About Evil for Our Time

This article was originally posted at The Wall Street Journal.

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When the Soviet Union sent half a million troops into Finland on Nov. 30, 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien was sharing a glass of gin with his friend C.S. Lewis and reading him a chapter from his new story about hobbits, “The Lord of the Rings.”

It was the 19th-century Finnish epic, “The Kalevala,” that so impressed Tolkien as a young man and helped to inspire his own story. A collection of ancient songs and myths, “The Kalevala” gave the Finnish people a history and a cultural tradition—a national identity—of their own. And it is credited with helping the Finns to break away from Russian rule during World War I.

It seems likely that Finland’s fierce resistance to Russian aggression during World War II also worked on Tolkien’s imagination when he turned again to writing “The Lord of the Rings.” Not unlike the Ukrainians today, the Finns frustrated Russian plans for a quick victory. Moreover, the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Moscow and Berlin shattered European illusions about the preservation of peace in the face of evil—a theme that animates Tolkien’s mythology about the struggle for Middle-earth.

Tolkien was teaching at Oxford in 1933 when students at the Oxford Union Society approved the motion: “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” It was a shock to the political establishment. And it was a bad omen: Adolf Hitler had just become chancellor of Germany and was drawing up secret plans for remilitarization.

Tolkien began writing “The Lord of the Rings” in 1936, the same year Germany occupied the Rhineland and intervened on behalf of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In his introduction to the Shire and its inhabitants, Tolkien might well have been describing isolationist England under Neville Chamberlain: “And there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of sensible folk.”

A combat veteran of World War I, Tolkien watched with dread the rise of ideologies unleashed in the war’s aftermath: communism, fascism, Nazism and eugenics. Almost as soon as he began writing “The Lord of the Rings,” it took on adult themes not found in “The Hobbit.” Although Tolkien denied that his work was allegorical, he acknowledged in a 1938 letter to his publisher that his new story “was becoming more terrifying than the Hobbit. . . . The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it.”

Less than a year later, Britain was at war with Nazi Germany, its policy of appeasement in tatters. As Gandalf the Wizard explains to Frodo Baggins: “Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” Or, as Elrond, the Lord of Rivendell, intones, “And the Elves deemed that evil was ended forever, and it was not so.”

Tolkien’s epic story embodies a moral tradition known as Christian realism: a belief in the existence of evil and in the obligation to resist it. We can hope that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine will prod leaders in Europe and the U.S. to recover this outlook.

In Tolkien’s world, indifference to the evil of Mordor is portrayed as an evasion that can only result in catastrophe. Ending a decadeslong policy of nonalignment, the Finnish parliament recently approved a plan to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—a turnabout that brings to mind a warning from Gildor the elf to the Shire: “The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”

As a writer of fantasy, Tolkien has been accused of escapism. In fact, he used the language of myth not to escape the world but to suggest how humble, ordinary people—the hobbits—could confront with courage the sorrows, temptations and dangers of this world. In his review of “The Lord of the Rings,” Lewis wrote, “As we read, we find ourselves sharing their burden; when we have finished, we return to our own life not relaxed, but fortified.”

When Britain was thrust into the most destructive conflict in human history, Tolkien reached for an older literary tradition to find strength and resilience. He sought to give the English people what “The Kalevala” had given the Finns. The result was a war story, wrapped in myth, that teaches fundamentals about the human condition: harsh realities about the will to power and the virtues needed to stand against it.

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Joseph Loconte is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Grove City College and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. He’s also the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. The trailer for the forthcoming documentary film series based on the book can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com.

National Review: Russia and Realism, American-Style

This article was originally posted at National Review.

At the start of the Cold War, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr addressed critics of his magazine, Christianity and Crisis, who faulted him for taking a hard line against Joseph Stalin’s Russia. Niebuhr recalled that many of America’s domestic critics also believed that Nazi Germany could not be as bad as it seemed because we were not as good as we pretended. In this, he wrote, they failed to see the geopolitical realities staring them in the face.

“America is no shining light of democratic justice,” he wrote in 1947. “But that still does not change the fact that the generous nineteenth century Marxist dream of a universal classless society has changed into a nightmare of Russian tyranny, and that the free peoples of the world hope that they can count on our support in avoiding a new enslavement.”

As Vladimir Putin wages a remorseless war of aggression against Ukraine, the free peoples of the world are no doubt wondering the same thing. Indeed, in his speech to the United Nations Security Council last month, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky exposed the utter moral dysfunction of the U.N. system — an institution that was conceived, designed, and funded by the United States to ensure international peace and security: “I would like to remind you of the first article of the U.N. Charter. What is the purpose of our organization? To maintain peace. . . . Now the U.N. Charter is being violated literally from the first article. And, if so, what is the point of all the other articles?” Zelensky pressed home the point: “We are dealing with a state that turns the right of veto in the U.N. Security Council into a right to kill.” As he spoke, fresh evidence of Russian atrocities against civilians was being uncovered in Bucha and other cities in Ukraine.

In confronting the challenge that Russia now poses to international security, it’s vital to consider the role that America played in establishing a new world order at the end of the Second World War: a burden of leadership unprecedented in modern diplomatic history.

At its best moments, the United States has rejected both isolationism and utopianism and adopted a policy of realism — not a manipulative Machiavellian realism, but something that Niebuhr called “Christian realism.” It is a political outlook that takes seriously the biblical concept of the Fall of man, while avoiding cynicism about mankind’s inherent dignity and capacity for self-government. As Niebuhr viewed it, Christian realism draws upon America’s political and religious ideals — American exceptionalism — to help constrain its immense military and economic power and to deploy this power in the cause of human freedom.

Toward this end, for example, the United States led an alliance of democratic nations that agreed to fight the Axis Powers until final victory. On January 2, 1942, representatives from 26 countries — which Franklin Roosevelt called the “United Nations” — issued a declaration of war aims. They explained that victory was essential in order “to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom and to preserve human rights and justice” in the lands of the signatory nations “as well as in other lands.”

The core doctrine of the U.N. Charter protecting national sovereignty, “based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” owes a massive debt to American constitutionalism and the principle of government by consent. Likewise, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in the wake of Nazi atrocities, draws inspiration from the U.S. Bill of Rights. Indeed, the UDHR’s affirmation of mans’ natural and unalienable rights echoes the natural-rights arguments in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, a favorite among the Founders: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Here is the imprint of American idealism on the political architecture of the United Nations. Charles Malik, the Lebanese ambassador to the United Nations and one of the drafters of the UDHR, confessed his admiration for America’s democratic principles: “I cannot imagine the declaration coming to birth under the aegis of any other culture emerging dominant after the Second World War.”

Nevertheless, idealism requires the ballast of Christian realism. This brand of realism was missing when the permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council included the Soviet Union — the epicenter of atheistic communism, a collaborator with Nazi Germany in the dismemberment of Poland, and a ruthless dictatorship without regard for basic human rights. This Faustian bargain guaranteed that an institution at the heart of the U.N. system would be fatally compromised.

Indeed, the United Nations, for all of the good intentions of its founders, was a project crippled by liberal delusions about human nature and the nature of political societies. “In this liberalism there is little understanding of the depth to which human malevolence may sink and the heights to which malignant power may rise,” Niebuhr wrote in Christianity and Power Politics. “Some easy and vapid escape is sought from the terrors and woes of a tragic era.”

The international crisis set off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed the abject failure of escapism as a substitute for political realism. “Are you ready for the dissolving of the U.N.?” asked Zelensky. “Do you think that the time of international law has passed?” He bluntly challenged America and her democratic allies to help Ukraine check Russian aggression and expel Russia from the Security Council — or dissolve the institution outright.

There is at this hour a critical need for the United States to think and act creatively, with sober moral judgment, as it exercises its leadership responsibilities in light of a resurgent Russia. It has done so in the past — to great effect.

Within months of the end of the Second World War, for example, America acted decisively to hold the Nazi leaders to account for their wartime crimes. Alone among the great powers, the United States insisted upon an international tribunal, the Nuremberg trials, to judge the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. America rejected the call for mass executions or show trials.

Instead, it set a new standard of justice for punishing crimes against humanity — not unlike the crimes now being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg trials, put the case thus in his opening statement: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” The Nuremberg trials are widely credited with helping Germany to confront its Nazi past and reintegrate itself into the democratic West.

When Joseph Stalin launched a Soviet blockade of democratic West Berlin to force the withdrawal of American troops from West Germany, the United States rejected both isolationism and militarism. President Harry Truman ordered American pilots into the city — not on bombing raids, but on a mission of rescue. Over the next 323 days, the Berlin airlift delivered 2.3 million tons of food and fuel to preserve the lives and freedoms of their former enemies. Stalin ended the blockade, and West Berlin remained free and independent.

When the Soviet Union threatened to extend its grip over the nations of Western Europe and reduce their populations to servitude — as it had done in Eastern Europe — the United States stepped into the breach.

General George Marshall, who witnessed firsthand the ravaging effects of war on civilian populations, conceived of an economic lifeline for Europe. Begun in 1948, the Marshall Plan, costing U.S. taxpayers more than $13 billion (about $135 billion in today’s dollars), stabilized the vulnerable economies of 16 nations. Soft power was backed by hard power: the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, the most successful political–military alliance in history. These policies rescued Western Europe from social breakdown and Soviet rule and made possible the astonishing transformation of illiberal societies into peaceful, free-market, democratic states.

America’s Cold War policy was rooted in its civilizational confidence: the belief that the American creed of human freedom and equality, based upon mankind’s unalienable rights, applied to people everywhere. In other words, American exceptionalism carried implications for everyone striving for a more just and humane world.

At the end of the Second World War, the United States was correct to insist that international peace and security depended upon the protection of man’s basic rights and freedoms. In the words of the U.N. Charter, each member state must “reaffirm faith . . . in the dignity and worth of the human person” and “in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” The rejection of this concept leads only in one direction: It invites the forces of disorder, violence, and dictatorship, which thrive on democratic weakness.

Even as the United States and Great Britain were battling Nazi Germany during the Second World War, Winston Churchill worried about Russian imperialism: “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe.”

The shadow of Russian barbarism has returned — and the impulse toward isolationism will not drive it out. As Reinhold Niebuhr warned, the exercise of American power always involves a measure of risk and hubris, but “the disavowal of the responsibilities of power can involve an individual or nation in even more grievous guilt.”

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Joseph Loconte is a Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. The trailer for the forthcoming documentary film series based on the book can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com.

National Review: When Ronald Reagan Sent the Soviet Union to the Ash Heap of History

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In the throes of the Cold War, when the American political and academic establishments almost in their entirety took for granted the continued strength and global influence of the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan delivered a jeremiad against it — a prophecy about the total collapse of the Soviet communist empire.

Forty years ago, on June 8, 1982, Reagan stunned members of the British Parliament at Westminster when he turned Marxist revolutionary theory on its head:

In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.

Unlike today’s political Left and the New Right, Reagan believed deeply that liberal democracy — based on respect for the natural rights and freedoms of every person — was the best vehicle for human flourishing. Regimes founded upon the rejection of God and the negation of individual freedom, he said, would not endure.

Unlike today’s cynics and isolationists who reject America as a standard-bearer for democracy and human rights, Reagan announced a strategy for promoting democratic reform around the globe. “What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term — the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

Like no Cold War president before him, Reagan repudiated the doctrine of containment: The West would not merely restrain the growth of Soviet totalitarianism; it would triumph over it. Reagan’s rhetoric, his belief in American exceptionalism, enraged the apparatchiks in the Kremlin, as well as their liberal sympathizers in the American academy.

Indeed, it’s easy to forget that, to many in the West, the Soviet Union looked unstoppable. The Soviets had achieved strategic parity in the arms race and deployed nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe. Their satellite states were utterly compliant, and Moscow was waging proxy wars in Central America and southern Africa. The United States, by contrast, was still reeling from its catastrophic failure in Vietnam; the American economy was in a deep recession.

Thus, the popular view was one of equivalence: The United States and the Soviet Union had equally flawed, morally ambiguous political systems. They must work to “converge” and compromise for the sake of world peace. “Each superpower has economic troubles,” announced historian Arthur Schlesinger after a 1982 trip to Moscow. “Neither is on the ropes.” Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith parroted the Kremlin’s propaganda: “The Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.” MIT economist Lester Thurow called it “a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.”

Reagan knew this was nonsense talk: He singled out and praised the democratic forces stirring in Poland. Launched in 1980, Solidarity, the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain, had gained more than 10 million members in a country of 36 million people. The movement was devoutly pro-Catholic, anti-communist, and pro-West. Its leaders campaigned for freedom of religion, speech, and the press and for free elections.

Six months before Reagan’s speech, in December 1981, Polish security forces had rolled into Warsaw, set up roadblocks, and arrested 5,000 Solidarity members in a single night. With Moscow’s backing, the communist regime declared martial law, driving the Solidarity movement underground. Reagan’s response to the Soviet crackdown in Poland delivered a clear message about America’s democratic objectives — unlike the mixed messages being sent by America’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We can be grateful that the partisan voices degrading our political discourse today did not occupy the White House in 1982. The progressive Left, after all, views the United States as a racist and imperialist hegemon; the nationalism of the New Right renders it indifferent to human suffering outside our borders. Neither group would have exploited the crisis engulfing the Soviet Union.

Reagan understood that America’s security was linked to the security and freedom of Europe — and that Poland was poised to become the catalyst for massive democratic reform. “Poland is at the center of European civilization,” Reagan said. “It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.”

As Reagan made clear in his speech, America’s plan to defeat Russian aggression involved both hard power and soft power. Reagan’s focus at Westminster was the latter:

While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them. . . . The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

Toward this end, Reagan authorized the CIA to funnel tens of millions of dollars in aid to help keep the Solidarity movement alive. He launched the National Endowment for Democracy to create and nurture the civic institutions that make self-government possible. These and other efforts, in the words of John O’Sullivan, editor at large of National Review, “helped to midwife democratic revolutions around the world.” Poland, of course, was the match that ignited the political revolutions in 1989 that overturned the communist governments in Eastern Europe. The Orange and Rose Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia also owe a debt to Reagan’s democratic vision.

After Reagan’s speech at Westminster, historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union — elite thinkers in American higher education — in a book titled “After Brezhnev.” Their conclusion: Any thought of winning the Cold War was a fantasy. “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said in an interview. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.”

Within a decade — on Christmas Day, 1991 — Mikhail Gorbachev announced the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union. The 40-year-old Cold War came to a peaceful end because American democratic capitalism had laid bare the economic, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy of Soviet communism. As Reagan told an adviser when asked about his policy toward the Soviet Union: “We win, they lose.”

Like no American leader since the Second World War, Ronald Reagan at Westminster was “magnificently unreconciled to oppression.” He sought to use the immense resources of the United States to help bring about a world in which “people are at last free to determine their own destiny.” In stark contrast, many voices today — on the left and on the right — seem to have made their peace with despotism, the administrative state, and the erosion of individual freedom.

If history is any guide, however, their outlook may find its final destination in the same tragic ash heap of human failure, disgrace, and sorrow.

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Joseph Loconte is a Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. The trailer for the forthcoming documentary film series based on the book can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com.

National Review: Locke’s Radical Claims for Conscience

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Perhaps the most undervalued quality of a great mind or, at least, an awakened mind is the willingness to abandon cherished ideas that cannot stand up to new evidence. English philosopher John Locke possessed such a mind. And a good thing, too: His revolutionary thinking about political and religious freedom laid the cornerstone for liberal democracy.

This is one of the understated themes of In the Shadow of Leviathan, by Jeffrey Collins. The burden of Collins’s book is to examine the potential influence of Thomas Hobbes on Locke’s early political thought about the rights of conscience. At first blush, it seems an unlikely project. In his most controversial work, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes sought to constrain religious expression and make it subservient to an omnipotent state. Locke, by contrast, viewed religious liberty as an inalienable right and essential to the concept of self-government.

Collins does not substantially challenge this historiography, but he offers the most searching examination to date of the relationship between these two seminal thinkers on the issue of religious freedom. His bold conclusion: “Locke’s liberalized account of conscience had Hobbesian roots but flourished only when planted in new soil.” Many Locke scholars (including myself) would disagree, arguing that Hobbes’s vision of an instrumental, privatized religion never held much appeal for Locke, who considered questions of faith to be of supreme moral significance.

The influence of Hobbes on 17th-century political thought is a hotly contested question in the intellectual history of the early-modern period. Yet it is not an arcane debate. At home, America faces unprecedented challenges to the moral legitimacy of its founding principles of freedom, equality, and government by consent. Meanwhile, the most serious geopolitical threats to liberal democracy involve two Hobbesian states, Russia and China, where religious institutions are either suppressed or function as tools of the regime.

Hobbes and Locke both experienced the trauma of the English Civil War (1642–49) and the political instability of the Commonwealth (1649–60). The execution of King Charles I and the elimination of the monarchy — supported by militant Calvinists inside and outside of Parliament — left a deep impression on them. Hobbes became something of a moral cynic. He believed that individuals were free and equal in the “state of nature,” but that there was no natural moral order to govern society. As he argued in Leviathan, the only way to avoid a “perpetual war of every man against his neighbor” was for every citizen of the commonwealth to surrender his rights to an absolute sovereign.

The same Hobbesian principle of subjugation applied to the institution of the church:

It is the civil sovereign that is to appoint judges and interpreters of the canonical Scriptures; for it is he that maketh them laws. . . . In sum, he hath the supreme power in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil. . . . And these rights are incident to all sovereigns, whether monarchs or assemblies; for they that are the representants of a Christian people are representants of the Church. For a Church and a commonwealth of Christian people are the same thing.

Locke never doubted that there was a “law of Nature,” which originated with God and framed man’s moral purposes. But the sectarian violence of his day made him deeply suspicious of political radicals appealing to the authority of the Bible.

As Locke summarized it in his earliest work, Two Tracts on Government, written in 1660, “there hath been no design so wicked which hath not worn the Vizor of religion, nor Rebellion which hath not been so kind to itself as to assume the name of Reformation.” Collins sees “broad Hobbesian influences” in works such as the Two Tracts, where Locke wrote that the political authority should have “absolute and arbitrary power” over “indifferent actions” of religious believers. In this early stage of his career, Collins argues, Locke shared Hobbes’s view of “a contractual state serving temporal ends, of a monopolistic sovereignty trumping the liberty of the church and constantly watchful of clerical conspiracy.”

Collins makes a painstaking case for a Hobbesian connection to a young Locke, but he seems to overplay his hand. He concludes that “Locke wrote on fundamentally Hobbesian themes in a context saturated with polemical disputes over Hobbes’s influence.” But this presumes too much for Hobbes, who was one author among many, and gives too little attention to Locke’s diverse reading in politics, philosophy, and religion. Although he was familiar with Hobbes’s arguments for political absolutism, in the corpus of Locke’s documented reading and note-taking there remains a striking deficit of explicit references to Hobbes.

What seems indisputable is that Locke broke decisively — radically — from Hobbes on the rights of conscience in political society.

First, political absolutism was a hateful doctrine to Locke, because the purpose of government was to protect man’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property. No rational person should imagine that an absolute ruler — who was not himself subject to the law — would honor this fundamental aim. As Locke wrote in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), anyone who believed “that absolute power purifies men’s blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced of the contrary.” As Collins nicely summarizes it, religious conscience “marked a hard limit to state power and was fundamental to Locke’s theory of popular resistance.”

Second, unlike Hobbes, Locke was not a materialist. Collins correctly observes that “his writings and correspondence revealed a devotion lacking in Hobbes.” That’s something of an understatement, however. Locke devoted enormous energy to exploring the meaning of the Christian faith, collecting sermons and works of theology, and writing commentaries on Paul’s epistles in order to understand better the means of salvation. His singular defense of religious freedom, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), bears the imprint of a devout reader of the Bible. Indeed, Locke believed throughout his life that “every man has an immortal soul, capable of eternal happiness or misery” and that “there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity.”

Third, while Hobbes made a pragmatic or political argument for limited toleration — he agreed that the magistrate had no interest in policing private beliefs — Locke framed his case for religious freedom in decidedly moral terms. If neither Jesus nor his apostles coerced people into the kingdom of heaven, he reasoned, neither could the magistrate. “If the Gospel and the apostles may be credited,” he wrote, “no man can be a Christian without charity and without that faith which works not by force, but by love.” Hobbes expected citizens to ignore conscience if it clashed with the edicts of the magistrate. Locke railed against this view, declaring that it endangered men’s souls: “No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience, will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.” These beliefs anchored Locke’s defense of religious liberty as a natural and unalienable right.

Finally, Locke utterly rejected Hobbes’s vision of a Christian commonwealth, in which the church was dutifully subservient to the political authority. Hobbes claimed that “in every Christian commonwealth the civil sovereign is the supreme pastor.” Under this view, ministers enjoyed no powers independent of the sovereign. A national church, functioning as an arm of the state, would enforce orthodoxy and criminalize dissent. This, according to Hobbes, was the only way to check the religious divisions that had fueled the English Civil War. This, he wrote, was the basis for political and social stability.

Locke’s repudiation of the Hobbesian project was blunt and unambiguous: “There is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth.” In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke argued for a sharp separation between the church, with its spiritual aims, and the state, whose purposes were confined to earthly affairs. Neither conferred privileges upon the other. No matter what church the magistrate chose as his own, he wrote, it “remained always as it was before, a free and voluntary society.” Locke called this “the fundamental and immutable right” of religious communities. While Hobbes regarded religion as an institution to serve the secular interests of government, Locke declared that “the end of a religious society . . . is the public worship of God, and by means thereof the acquisition of eternal life.”

Locke’s redefinition of the purposes of church and state would accomplish a Hobbesian goal: political and social stability. In this, Locke turned conventional thinking about religious pluralism on its head. It was government meddling in religion, he wrote, that caused social unrest and civil war. “It is not the diversity of opinions, which cannot be avoided; but the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions . . . that has produced all the bustles and wars, that have been in the Christian world, upon account of religion.”

Thus emerged the Lockean ideals that ultimately defined his political career: religious freedom as a universal, natural right; equal justice for all citizens, regardless of religious belief; religious diversity as a source of social strength; and the application of the Golden Rule in civic and political life. Here are concepts completely absent from Hobbes’s political thought.

The book jacket for In the Shadow of Leviathan claims that Collins’s account “establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration.” In fact, the exact opposite conclusion should be drawn.

It is true that, in the immediate aftermath of civil war, Locke shared Hobbes’s opposition to religious toleration and the sectarian strife it apparently invited. “It would prove only a liberty for contention, censure and persecution,” he wrote in 1660, “and turn us loose to the tyranny of a religious rage.” But as England once again employed policies of persecution during the Restoration (1660–89), Locke reversed himself. He concluded that religious uniformity, enforced by the state, was a dead end.

What is remarkable is that Locke not only divorced himself from Hobbes and the Locke of the 1660s, but from the established norms and assumptions that had governed church–state relations for centuries. “I cannot but own that men’s sticking to their past judgment, and adhering firmly to conclusions formerly made,” he wrote, “is often the cause of great obstinacy in error and mistake.”

What changed Locke’s mind?

This is not a question that Collins seeks to address. He concedes that Locke’s mature view of freedom of conscience was not derived from Hobbesian premises. It required “a theory of equality understanding humanity in imago dei rather than a raw Hobbesian equality of bestial strength.” Yet it obviously required much more than this, since Locke’s contemporaries who defended Hobbesian-style conformity shared many of his core religious beliefs.

As historians such as John Marshall (and this reviewer) have argued, a likely catalyst for Locke’s role as a champion of religious freedom was his close association, personally and intellectually, with the Christian humanist tradition of Desiderius Erasmus. The “philosophy of Christ” articulated by Erasmus, which Locke encountered in England and in the Netherlands during his political exile, was itself a reaction against the violent, authoritarian impulses of Christendom. “Let us not devour each other like fish,” wrote Erasmus. “The world is full of rage, hate, and wars. What will be the end if we employ only bulls and the stake? It is no great feat to burn a little man. It is a great achievement to persuade him.”

Whatever its intellectual sources, Locke’s religious outlook profoundly shaped his liberal politics. This fact alone represents a stiff rebuke to the secular account of the rise of democracy and human rights in the West: A core tenet of the American political order — freedom of conscience — traces its origins to biblical religion. As no thinker before him had ever attempted, John Locke united liberal political principles with the teachings of Jesus. You won’t find that in Leviathan.

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Joseph Loconte is a Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. The trailer for the forthcoming documentary film series based on the book can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com.

National Review: Putin’s Bloody Leviathan

This article was originally posted at National Review.

The rise of authoritarian regimes, wars of aggression, the erosion of basic human rights, a bloody civil war, a refugee crisis in the heart of Europe — welcome to the 17th century.

Out of the turmoil of this period — what historian Paul Hazard called “the crisis of the European mind” — emerged two visions of political society that are once again competing for dominance on the world stage. One belongs to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who saw unconditional obedience to an all-powerful state, a leviathan, as the only path to security and political stability. The other belongs to John Locke (1632–1704), who argued that freedom and equality were mankind’s birthright.

Russia has become Europe’s Hobbesian nightmare. Vladimir Putin’s regime is often compared to that of the Romanov czars. But he seems more a mix of England’s Stuart kings and the absolute monarchy of France’s Louis XIV. Charles I dismissed Parliament and cracked down on political and religious dissent, sparking England’s Civil War. Louis XIV, who dubbed himself “the Sun King,” launched a series of aggressive wars in a bid to make France the dominant power in Europe.

The violence and instability of that period produced some deep thinking about the nature of man and political society. When Hobbes pondered the realities of European society, he saw a “state of nature” in chaos: a ruthless war of all against all. The only remedy, he believed, was universal submission to an absolute political authority. As he put it in Leviathan: “And though of so unlimited a power, men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse.” Throughout much of the 17th century, the Hobbesian view seemed to be on the winning side of history.

Locke stood against it. No stranger to political strife, Locke was a teenager when Charles I was executed. He watched with dismay when the Act of Conformity criminalized dissent from the established Church of England; nonconforming churches were shut down and tens of thousands of citizens were harassed and arrested. Catholic France followed suit when Louis XIV ended the policy of toleration toward its Protestant minority, sending hundreds of thousands into exile. “I no sooner perceived myself in the world,” Locke wrote, “but I found myself in a storm, which hath lasted almost hitherto.”

Like Hobbes, Locke had no illusions about the dark tendencies of human nature. Yet unlike Hobbes, he saw something beyond it: a divine plan for human flourishing that supplied the moral bedrock for government by consent of the governed. Locke’s most important political work, Two Treatises of Government, which profoundly influenced the American revolutionaries, made this religious idea its lodestar.

For Locke, the state of nature was rooted in a moral law, the obligation to protect human freedom so that every individual could pursue his God-given calling and serve his true sovereign: “Men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business, they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure.”

In his feverish imagination, Vladimir Putin views the Ukrainians not as citizens of a sovereign, independent state but rather as the property of Russia. In Locke’s words, he would “reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power.” More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions of ordinary citizens have taken up arms to resist Russian tyranny. As Locke warned, whenever political rulers treat basic human rights with contempt, they “put themselves into a state of war with the people.”

Ukraine was not a model of liberal democracy before the Russian invasion. But the Ukrainians, in their words and deeds, have demonstrated to the world that Locke’s vision of human freedom remains deeply compelling. Even Putin, when he took the oath of office for his second term as president of Russia, felt it necessary to invoke the language of Lockean liberalism. “Only free people in a free country can be genuinely successful,” he declared. With his right hand resting on the country’s constitution, he gave a nod to pluralism and rejected authoritarian rule.

Many in the West wanted to believe him, wistfully imagining “the end of history,” that is, the unchallengeable triumph of democratic ideals. But there can be no holiday from history, because there is no escaping the tragedy of the human condition: The spirit of leviathan is never finally defeated.

Hobbes naïvely believed that an absolute monarch could simultaneously preserve order and justice. He might have pondered more carefully the ancient symbolism of the leviathan. In Jewish mythology, Leviathan was a primordial sea serpent, something malevolent, chaotic, uncontrollable, and beyond human comprehension.

Such is the regime in Moscow, a 21st-century version of this creature, armed with weapons of mass destruction. It presents a fearsome challenge. As the author of the Old Testament book of Job warns his readers, those who oppose it will “curse the day, who are prepared to rouse Leviathan.”

—

Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

RealClearHistory: Realism, Religion, and the Republic

This article was originally posted at RealClearHistory.

When George Washington sought to warn Americans about the most fearsome threats to their liberty, he did not cast his eyes toward Europe, where nations were waiting, like vultures, to pounce upon the carcass of a failed experiment in self-government.

Instead, Washington challenged Americans to look within. Their greatest enemy, he wrote in his Farewell Address (1796), was “the spirit of party.” By that he meant the relentless desire to form political tribes, or factions, in order to gain advantage over others. “This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature,” Washington wrote, “having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.”

Here we are reminded of one of the great forces tearing apart contemporary America: the scourge of identity politics and the “cancel culture” that supports it. And herein lies the genius of the American Founders. They anticipated this threat to self-government because they took seriously both the nobility and the tragedy of human nature. They remained deeply sober about the prospects of liberty, even as they described their experiment as a “new order for the ages.” Like no other generation of political revolutionaries, the Founders lived in the shadow of the biblical doctrine of the Fall.

Revisiting The Federalist Papers

In The Federalist Papers—the political essays defending the U.S. Constitution — James Madison defined a faction as a group of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Echoing Washington, he insisted that “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.”

When Alexander Hamilton, another contributor to The Federalist Papers, asked why governments were formed in the first place, he answered his own question thus: “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” Hamilton denied that benevolence was the natural drift of political societies. “Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice?”

No gathering of statesmen in history reflected more carefully on the human motivations that shape political societies. Indeed, most of the Founders were as clear-eyed as the New Testament about the tendency of selfish ambition to corrupt our judgment and create “discord,” “dissensions,” and “factions” (Galatians 5:20) and thus destroy human communities.

Hamilton, who helped to draft Washington’s Farewell Address, was acutely aware of the historic tendency of republican governments to devolve into tyranny or anarchy. Despite his trust in “the science of politics,” Hamilton worried about “splitting ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt.”

Virus of tribalism ravaging politics

For the Founders, everyone’s political ambitions — no matter how noble-sounding — were suspect. “Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these,” Madison wrote, “are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.” It takes a measure of humility to suggest that your own political camp is as prone to bad motives as the opposing camp.

The Founders’ insight into the origin and persistence of factions is enduringly relevant. Unchecked, they warned, factions would become the “mortal disease” of republicanism. It is now a truism to say that the virus of tribalism is ravaging our political and civic life.

George Washington saw it coming. The spirit of party, he wrote, “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against the other, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption…through the channels of party passions.”

The Founders were not prophets, but they were students of human nature — and, to one degree or another, students of the Bible.  John Jay, another contributor to the Federalist Papers, went on to become the president of the American Bible Society. John Adams, the second president under the Constitution, argued that the Bible provided “the only system that ever did or ever will preserve a republic in the world.” 

“The Bible was the most referenced work in the founders’ political discourse,” writes Daniel Dreisbach, author of Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers. “The Bible figured prominently in the founders’ political project because they thought it fostered the religion and morality essential for republican government.” Indeed, it was their familiarity with the Scriptures, especially its teachings about human pride and selfishness,  that led them to search for political remedies to the vices that had terminated other experiments in self-government.

Religion the foundation of good politics

Thus, the Founders’ solution to the blight of factions was two-fold. First, they established a republican form of government that put hard checks on the abuse of power. Second, they insisted upon a citizenry nourished in the civic virtues that could sustain self-government. Washington captured precisely this outlook in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

For Washington — and for nearly all the Founders — the two dispositions were deeply connected. “And let us with caution,” he wrote, “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” As John Avlon observes in Washington’s Farewell, the first president of the United States “wanted America to have the steadying benefits that come from religion writ large rather than the amoral anarchy that can come from a vast vacuum of belief.”

Here we encounter what might be called the biblical realism of the Founders. They worried that religious belief could instigate deep social divisions. In Washington’s words, differences over religion were often the cause of “the most inveterate and distressing” animosities. This was one of the reasons the Founders declined to establish a national church. Nevertheless, they considered religion indispensable to nourishing the virtues that could tame the most violent political passions.

The success of their experiment in self-government depended upon it.

As Washington implored the American people: “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” The Founders gave us the political tools to reign in our worst impulses. But it remains the task of each generation to rediscover the virtues that help us put those tools to work.

—

Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

Wall Street Journal: Christendom’s Greatest Satirist

This article was originally posted at Wall Street Journal.

“I do not deny that I seek peace wherever possible,” Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) wrote at the start of the Protestant Reformation. “I believe in listening to both sides with open ears. I love liberty. I will not, I cannot serve any faction.”

No one else was talking that way from the pulpits or in the courts of Europe. In 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg, he was an obscure monk pleading for the church to reform itself. Four years later, his defense of the rights of conscience at the Diet of Worms—“Here I stand!”—created a social movement that terrified and incensed the Roman curia. Erasmus—philosopher, scholar, satirist—emerged as a singular voice urging peace, charity and mutual respect. “No one can deny that Luther calls for many reforms which brook of no delay,” he wrote. “Luther’s abrasiveness can be condoned only on the ground that perhaps our sins deserve to be beaten with scorpions.”

The authorities disagreed. The day after Luther’s act of defiance at Worms, the emperor declared him an outlaw. The Catholic Church excommunicated Luther; religious and political authorities burned and banned his writings. Princes began to choose sides in the widening Catholic-Protestant dispute. Soon all of Europe was poised for a religious-cultural war.

While declaring his fidelity to the Catholic faith, Erasmus came to Luther’s defense. Luther’s writings could not be suppressed, he said, without suppressing the gospel itself. Although Erasmus had no intention of being a martyr for Luther, he refused to call him a heretic: “The world is full of rage, hate, and wars,” he wrote. “It is no great feat to burn a little man. It is a great achievement to persuade him.”

Erasmus led a reform movement known as Christian humanism: a revival of classical learning to draw others into a deeper knowledge of Scripture and more authentic experience of faith. His philosophia Christi, “the philosophy of Christ,” was aimed at the individual believer, with an eye to the moral and spiritual transformation of society. “What else is this philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls being born again, but the renewal of a human nature well formed?”

In his satirical blockbuster, “The Praise of Folly,” Erasmus exposed the pretensions of clerics as scornfully as those of the political class. Referring to the academic hats of theologians, he warned, “Don’t be surprised when you see them at public disputations with their heads so carefully wrapped up in swaths of cloth, for otherwise they would clearly explode.” An unprincipled individual could not be a good governor, he said, because his venality would spread “like a deadly plague.” The just prince—rejecting the rage of factions and his own selfish ambition—must “give no thought to anything except the common good.”

As Christian unity began to disintegrate, Erasmus tried to avert violence. “You cannot conceivably address a credible prayer to the father of all men,” he wrote in “The Complaint of Peace,” “when you have just driven a sword into your brother’s bowels.” Erasmus constantly invoked the example of the love and mercy of Christ toward sinners, but he couldn’t prevent the religious wars of the 16th century. Protestants despised him for remaining loyal to Rome, while Catholic leaders condemned his pro-Lutheran sympathies. Luther called him “the king of amphibians,” and his works ended up on Rome’s Index of Prohibited Books.

Yet Erasmus’ spiritual outlook survived. The Netherlands, his birthplace, produced the most tolerant society in 17th-century Europe, and the English Reformation was shaped by his appeal for rational argument and moderation. English philosopher John Locke, an admirer, wrote his most important defense of religious freedom while in exile in Holland and in close contact with Erasmus’ disciples. Eventually, the Catholic Church embraced much of his spiritual vision. For decades the religious journal First Things, influential among Catholic intellectuals, has hosted an annual Erasmus Lecture.

The willingness to forsake partisanship in the pursuit of moral truth: Here is a partial remedy for the political and cultural rifts that seem to threaten our democratic republic. Jean Le Clerc, a Protestant scholar in Amsterdam, summarized the influence of Erasmus: “It cannot be doubted that he has contributed greatly to the enlightenment of his age and to preparing men to accept a day of which he himself has seen only the dawn.” America could benefit from another enlightenment, this time in the spirit of Erasmus.

—

Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Gorbachev’s Christmas Farewell to the Soviet Union

This article was originally posted at National Review.

The Soviet Union’s revolutionary experiment in Marxism-Leninism was launched, at least in part, as an assault on the beliefs and ideals of biblical religion. Religion, according to Karl Marx, was “the opiate of the masses,” a fantasy enlisted to exploit the working class. Yet, on Christmas Day, 1991, it was Soviet communism that proved to be illusory: the day when Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as president of the Soviet Union, marking its complete dissolution.

“This society has acquired freedom,” Gorbachev said. “It has been freed politically and spiritually, and this is the most important achievement that we have yet fully come to grips with.”

The irony should not be missed. Gorbachev, a lifelong atheist, personified the materialist assumptions of a political system that made its collapse virtually inevitable. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, following the 1989 democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe, was complete by the time Gorbachev made his farewell speech. Yet even in their final days, the communist leadership failed to grasp the importance of religious faith to the health of a political society.

Gorbachev entered office in 1985 as a reformer. His political manifesto, Perestroika, promised to make the Soviet Union “richer,” “stronger,” and “better.” With perestroika—restructuring—there would be “no stopping” Soviet society, and a “golden age” was ahead of them. At the same time, Gorbachev considered Marxism the inexorable force of the future. “We are motivated by the ideas of the 1917 October Revolution,” he said, “the ideas of Lenin.”

At the heart of the communist vision, however, is a degrading reductionism. Human beings, we are told, are motivated supremely by material needs. Communism strips them of those qualities that distinguish the human person from all other creatures: individualism, creativity, sacrificial love, the longing for transcendence.

“Capitalism can be utterly vanquished, and will be utterly vanquished,” Vladimir Lenin predicted, “by the fact that socialism creates new and much higher productivity of labor.” Joseph Stalin, who worshipped Lenin, accelerated the Soviet policy of converting “backward, individual farming” into large-scale “collective agriculture.” In a 1929 speech, “The Year of Great Change,” Stalin denounced the “sacred principle of private property,” which, he claimed, was “collapsing and crumbling to dust.” Two years later, the Soviet Union descended into a period of severe famine and horrific political violence.

What communism treated with contempt has proven to be one of the greatest sources of human flourishing in world civilization: the constitutional protection of private property, in all of its various expressions. This was one of the key insights of English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism.

In Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), he named “life, liberty, and property” as among the natural rights that governments were instituted to protect. By “property,” Locke meant much more than a person’s wealth and belongings. “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself,” he wrote. “The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Socialist critics of capitalism see only a clawing consumption, an economic theory fueled by greed. They ignore the profoundly religious outlook from which it emerged. Lockean liberalism insisted that every person was endowed by God with creative abilities and was called—in freedom—to engage in meaningful, honorable, productive work. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property.”

If God was the sovereign authority over all human life—the ultimate property owner—then robbing anyone of the fruit of his labor represented a crime against heaven. The West designed a political system centered on the individual as the sacred handiwork of the Creator. The chief aim of consensual government, therefore, was to safeguard individual rights, freedoms, and possessions. As Locke summarized it, “the supreme power cannot take from any man, any part of his property, without his own consent.”

Having dispensed with God, however, Soviet communism destroyed the “sacred principle” of private property. By treating individuals as means to an end—a workers’ paradise of equal social outcomes—the Politburo rationalized the systemic repression of human rights. Censorship, surveillance, show trials, purges, and reeducation camps became the norm. The result was economic stagnation and the collapse of civil society.

Most Western observers, however, failed to see what was happening. In his book After Brezhnev (1983), Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union. Their conclusion: “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.” Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed as late as 1984: “The Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

Ronald Reagan, whose deep Christian beliefs are often overlooked, discerned a religious dimension to the Cold War. “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written,” he said in 1983. “I believe this because our source of strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual,” and “it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.”

In the end, even Gorbachev seemed to agree with him. In an astonishing confession, he renounced the entire communist apparatus as both a political and a moral failure. “The totalitarian system has been eliminated, which prevented this country from becoming a prosperous and well-to-do country a long time ago,” Gorbachev said. He praised the steps being taken toward democracy, privatization, and economic freedom. “We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union was not merely a vindication of democratic capitalism, however. It offered a sober and ongoing warning to the West: Materialism, elevated to an ideology, destroys political and social life. Like any other idol, it breaks the hearts of its worshipers. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” declared the child of Bethlehem, “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

—

Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The Heritage Foundation: Gorbachev’s Christmas Farewell to the Soviet Union

This article was originally posted at The Heritage Foundation.

The Soviet Union’s revolutionary experiment in Marxism-Leninism was launched, at least in part, as an assault on the beliefs and ideals of biblical religion. Religion, according to Karl Marx, was “the opiate of the masses,” a fantasy enlisted to exploit the working class. Yet, on Christmas Day, 1991, it was Soviet communism that proved to be illusory: the day when Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as president of the Soviet Union, marking its complete dissolution.

“This society has acquired freedom,” Gorbachev said. “It has been freed politically and spiritually, and this is the most important achievement that we have yet fully come to grips with.”

The irony should not be missed. Gorbachev, a lifelong atheist, personified the materialist assumptions of a political system that made its collapse virtually inevitable. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, following the 1989 democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe, was complete by the time Gorbachev made his farewell speech. Yet even in their final days, the communist leadership failed to grasp the importance of religious faith to the health of a political society.

Gorbachev entered office in 1985 as a reformer. His political manifesto, Perestroika, promised to make the Soviet Union “richer,” “stronger,” and “better.” With perestroika—restructuring—there would be “no stopping” Soviet society, and a “golden age” was ahead of them. At the same time, Gorbachev considered Marxism the inexorable force of the future. “We are motivated by the ideas of the 1917 October Revolution,” he said, “the ideas of Lenin.”

At the heart of the communist vision, however, is a degrading reductionism. Human beings, we are told, are motivated supremely by material needs. Communism strips them of those qualities that distinguish the human person from all other creatures: individualism, creativity, sacrificial love, the longing for transcendence.

“Capitalism can be utterly vanquished, and will be utterly vanquished,” Vladimir Lenin predicted, “by the fact that socialism creates new and much higher productivity of labor.” Joseph Stalin, who worshipped Lenin, accelerated the Soviet policy of converting “backward, individual farming” into large-scale “collective agriculture.” In a 1929 speech, “The Year of Great Change,” Stalin denounced the “sacred principle of private property,” which, he claimed, was “collapsing and crumbling to dust.” Two years later, the Soviet Union descended into a period of severe famine and horrific political violence.

What communism treated with contempt has proven to be one of the greatest sources of human flourishing in world civilization: the constitutional protection of private property, in all of its various expressions. This was one of the key insights of English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism.

In Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), he named “life, liberty, and property” as among the natural rights that governments were instituted to protect. By “property,” Locke meant much more than a person’s wealth and belongings. “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself,” he wrote. “The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Socialist critics of capitalism see only a clawing consumption, an economic theory fueled by greed. They ignore the profoundly religious outlook from which it emerged. Lockean liberalism insisted that every person was endowed by God with creative abilities and was called—in freedom—to engage in meaningful, honorable, productive work. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property.”

If God was the sovereign authority over all human life—the ultimate property owner—then robbing anyone of the fruit of his labor represented a crime against heaven. The West designed a political system centered on the individual as the sacred handiwork of the Creator. The chief aim of consensual government, therefore, was to safeguard individual rights, freedoms, and possessions. As Locke summarized it, “the supreme power cannot take from any man, any part of his property, without his own consent.”

Having dispensed with God, however, Soviet communism destroyed the “sacred principle” of private property. By treating individuals as means to an end—a workers’ paradise of equal social outcomes—the Politburo rationalized the systemic repression of human rights. Censorship, surveillance, show trials, purges, and reeducation camps became the norm. The result was economic stagnation and the collapse of civil society.

Most Western observers, however, failed to see what was happening. In his book After Brezhnev (1983), Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union. Their conclusion: “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.” Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed as late as 1984: “The Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

Ronald Reagan, whose deep Christian beliefs are often overlooked, discerned a religious dimension to the Cold War. “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written,” he said in 1983. “I believe this because our source of strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual,” and “it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.”

In the end, even Gorbachev seemed to agree with him. In an astonishing confession, he renounced the entire communist apparatus as both a political and a moral failure. “The totalitarian system has been eliminated, which prevented this country from becoming a prosperous and well-to-do country a long time ago,” Gorbachev said. He praised the steps being taken toward democracy, privatization, and economic freedom. “We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union was not merely a vindication of democratic capitalism, however. It offered a sober and ongoing warning to the West: Materialism, elevated to an ideology, destroys political and social life. Like any other idol, it breaks the hearts of its worshipers. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” declared the child of Bethlehem, “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

—

Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: A Brief History of Individual Rights

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In his opening address at the 1945 war-crimes trials at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson accused Nazi leaders of assaulting “all those dignities and freedoms that we hold [as] natural and in­alienable rights in every human be­ing.” The horrific negation of those rights — by the agents of totalitarianism — threatened the fabric of world civili­za­tion. “The wrongs which we seek to con­demn and punish,” Jackson warned, “have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

The modern human-rights movement began almost as soon as the Second World War concluded. The scale of the calamity — 75 million people dead, most of them civilians — made a mockery of the ideals of liberal democracy. The remedy, in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, was to reassert the “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights” of all people as the basis for international peace and justice.

Over the next several decades, how­ever, liberal elites detached themselves from the moral bedrock of the civilization they hoped to defend: the literary and political canon of the West. Central to this canon is the concept of the individual. Uniquely made in the image of the Creator, mankind was endowed with reason, natural rights, and the desire to live in freedom. These ideas developed over centuries, in the interplay between the classical and the biblical traditions that have defined Western civilization and set it apart.

The ancient Greeks, despite their belief in fate, regarded the individual citizen as possessing moral agency and as a vital participant in the city-state, or polis. Thus, the Greeks were the first to break ranks with the accepted model of government — the monarchy — and chart a path toward demokratia, government by consent. The idea of individual agency, though left undeveloped, can be discerned in the trial of Socrates, even as Greek democracy was faltering. The legal establishment — the cancel culture of the day — accused Socrates of “corrupt­ing the youth” of Athens. His real crime: teaching people to think for themselves.

The Apology, as recorded by Plato, his student, is a bracing defense of the individual in search of truth:

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong. . . . I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.

What was implicit in Greek philosophy was made explicit by Rome’s greatest statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. As Cicero explained in The Republic, something other than the capriciousness of the gods was at work in the world: a moral law, of divine origin, woven into human nature:

There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be, as it were, one lord and master of us all — the god who is the author, proposer, and interpreter of that law.

The doctrine of a divinely ordained natural law, accessible to everyone and demanding our obedience, informs the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible. According to the Jews, God had a moral purpose for the human race, and Israel was the chosen actor in the historical drama. Yet the Bible is the history not only of a religious community but of individuals in community. The characters in its pages are emotionally complex, sharply drawn, utterly realistic. We know their names: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Rahab, Ruth, Moses, Luke, John, Judas, Paul, Mary Magdalene, to name a few. Much of the vitality of the Bible is found in the flesh-and-blood personalities who are part of a larger story.

The emphasis on individuals is consistent with the radical message of Jesus, proclaimed by his disciples throughout the Roman Empire: The God of the universe sent his Son to suffer for the sins of the world, to offer the gift of forgiveness and eternal life to every human soul. “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men” (Titus 2:11). Here, like nowhere else in the ancient world, the individual stands at the center of divine love. Here, in the words of C. S. Lewis, we encounter “the weight of glory,” the staggering significance of every human life.

These two fundamental concepts — of natural law and the worth of the individual — existed side by side as the Christian Church helped to build a new society upon the ruins of the Roman Empire. The ideas began to coalesce when Eu­rope developed a distinctively Christian legal system in the twelfth century, as the canon lawyers of the Catholic Church sought to reform Ro­man law to reflect the equality of souls in God’s sight.

The pagan world, despite its view of natural law, assumed the natural inequality of persons. But in the in­troduction to his influential legal commentary, the Decretum (1140), Johannes Gratian redefined the concept: “Natural law is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel, by which each is to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself.” As Larry Siedentop explains in Inventing the Indi­vidual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Gratian and the scholars who followed him “fused Christian moral intuitions with a concept inherited from Greek philosophy and Roman law.” The Gol­den Rule was being applied to political life: For the first time, individuals, rather than established hierarchies based on class, tribe, or ethnicity, became the focus of a developing legal system.

Yet despite its Christian ideals, the Catholic Church ran roughshod over the rights of individual believers. Christen­dom preserved its spiritual unity only by coercion: Dissent from orthodoxy was criminalized, heresy was rooted out and punished by fire and sword.

Into this maelstrom stepped Martin Luther, a theology professor at Witten­berg. In 1517, his posting of 95 grievances against the Catholic Church was only a hint of how the status of the individual was changing. Luther’s most revolutionary act was his defiance at the Diet of Worms, where he elevated the solitary believer — armed only with the Bible and his conscience — above any earthly authority. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand.” Luther’s campaign transformed the relationship of the individual to society. Writes Alec Ryrie in Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World, “This was the true and enduring radicalism of Protestantism: its readiness to question every human authority and tradition.”

Although Protestants could be as intolerant of dissent as their Catholic counterparts, the Reformation set the template for nearly every successful campaign for political and religious liberty in the West. The elevation of in­dividual conscience galvanized the 17th-century revolution in natural rights, for example, embodied in the writings of English philosopher John Locke.

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to argue that everyone was born “equal and independent, . . . the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker.” In A Letter Concerning Toler­ation (1689), Locke called freedom of conscience a “fundamental and immu­table right” of every person, regardless of social rank. “No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.”

The foundation for liberal democracy, which makes the protection of individual rights the basis for political society, was thereby established. A century later, in Great Britain — where the conception of rights was tightly bound to biblical teachings — the defeat of the inter­national slave trade became a national priority. William Wilberforce, an Evan­gel­ical who led the parliamentary campaign for abolition, concluded his opening address to the House of Com­mons thus: “I could not believe that the same Being who forbids rapine and bloodshed, had made rapine and bloodshed necessary to the well-being of any part of his universe.” The first concerted challenge to the institution of slavery came from within the centers of political power.

The new doctrine of natural rights also fueled the two great political campaigns for freedom in the 18th cen­tury: the American and the French Revolutions. Colonial Americans were fluent not only in the rhetoric of natural rights but also in the language and assumptions of the Bible. Herein lies the source of the majesty of the Declaration of Independence: “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.”

The French revolutionaries, inspired by the Americans, also produced a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which formed the preamble to their constitution. Lynn Hunt, author of Inventing Human Rights, makes much of this, claiming that, unlike the American Declaration, the French document “provided the basis for government itself.” The American Bill of Rights, she notes, was composed after the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

But this ignores the astonishing achievement of the Framers in Phil­adelphia. The American Declaration became the ultimate preamble to the Constitution, in that the entire structure of government was designed to protect the rights and freedoms it proclaimed. Moreover, both documents were fully embraced by the moral custodians of the revolution, the nation’s clergy. “The genius of the authors of the United States Constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radi­cal Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledg­ling nation,” writes Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

By contrast, the French revolutionaries, especially the Jacobins, were guided by a militantly secular strain of the Enlightenment: For them, religion was the enemy of reason and human rights. “De-Christianization” was their policy. France quickly descended into social chaos, abolished basic civil liberties, and crowned a dictator for life.

Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Hav­ing denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Charles Malik, the Lebanese ambassador to the United Nations. An Arab Christian, Malik warned of the danger of “inverting man’s place in the universe” by demanding one’s rights while ignoring “the dominion of God over the course of history and of human life.”

The history of the struggle for freedom in the West teaches an incon­venient truth: that there is no coherent view of human personality stripped of the imago Dei. Britain’s former chief rabbi, the late Jonathan Sacks, ex­plained that the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence were anything but self-evident. “They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hier­archical society the world has ever known,” he said. “They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible.”

If this is true, then the cause of human rights cannot prevail in an utterly materialistic culture. The sublime doctrine of human dignity emerged from the rugged soil of biblical religion — and nowhere else. If it is to be renewed, it must draw life from the waters of Sinai and Jerusalem.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com