Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 7

National Review: For the Love of Country, Pull Back from the Brink

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Before the outrageous assault on the U.S. Capitol, before the rancor of the 2020 presidential election, before the mob violence that engulfed cities across our nation last year — long before all this, Americans had been engaged in a fierce struggle over the history, meaning, and future of the United States. The American Founders, it is worth recalling, faced an even more fearsome challenge: to bring together different views and competing factions to build a unified, federal, and democratic republic. The possible consequences of failure focused many minds in Philadelphia in 1787.

Just so, the minds of many conservatives today are focused on another great task: defeating the progressive attack on our constitutional order and the moral legitimacy of the American Founding. Indeed, the ascendance of the progressive Left in politics and culture, and now the fury that has engulfed parts of the Right, can have only one result: an even more embittered and fractious society.

America was the first nation in history founded on a creed: a fundamental belief in the liberty and equality of every human soul. “The sacred rights of mankind,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in 1775, are imprinted in human nature “by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” The political expression of these self-evident truths is government by consent, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. These ideas are central to America’s political identity and represent a standing rebuke to those who would tear our nation apart. James Madison summarized the American achievement with these words: “The happy Union of these States is a wonder; their Constitution a miracle; their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world.”

Yet the American creed, and all its accomplishments, is under vicious assault. We have entered a season of identity-based politics and tribalism. It is dissolving the idea that Americans are, for all their differences, one people.

Although there are real dangers from abroad, much of the threat to our republic now comes from within. The ideological wolf is at the door: The separation of powers is giving way to judicial supremacy and the administrative state. Belief in free markets is denounced, while socialism is openly embraced. Meanwhile, the Left is ruthlessly pursuing its core objective — the liberation of the self from the universal moral norms embedded in the Western tradition.

In the midst of all this, we now face significant rifts within the conservative movement itself. While these divisions began to emerge at the end of the Cold War, they were deepened in the 9/11 era by the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Economic globalization, the Great Recession, and failure to enforce immigration laws have sparked intense arguments about capitalism and free trade. The abuse of judicial power — by which the Supreme Court has effectively manufactured abortion on demand, redefined marriage, and reimagined sex and gender — has caused many social conservatives to become disillusioned with politics altogether.

Some conservatives have even rejected key propositions of the American Founding, especially those articulated by moderate Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Montesquieu, and William Blackstone. They complain that the emphasis on individual liberty — as mediated by the American Founders — poisoned American democracy from the beginning. Other conservatives want an imperial presidency working together with the administrative state.

The conservative movement has never been monolithic. But the emergence of thinking in some conservative circles that rejects the bedrock propositions of the American experiment shouldn’t be merely lamented; it must be strenuously opposed. A unified conservative movement cannot be forged around old labels; the pull of nostalgia must be resisted. Nevertheless, we can draw lessons from recent history. As Winston Churchill once put it, “the future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope.”

At the height of the Cold War, Frank Meyer proposed a synthesis of the traditionalist and libertarian strains of conservatism that came to be called “fusionism.” William F. Buckley embodied this synthesis in his own person: his belief in individual liberty and free markets was bracketed by his commitments to family, virtue, and communities of faith.

In a similar way, the traditionalist and classical-liberal streams also moderated each other. This helped to create the bonds that brought together social conservatives, foreign-policy hawks, and free marketeers. Led by Ronald Reagan, they forged a formidable alliance against the fearsome assault of Soviet communism on liberty, America, and civilization itself.

Today, our challenge is to confront and defeat progressivism by uniting around the principles of the American Founding: limited government and the separation of powers; responsible freedom, in which liberty is distinguished from license; a vibrant civil society, where individuals are neither radically atomized nor herded into tribes; a market economy, where men and women can use their talents to create wealth and value; and a strong national defense and a foreign policy that serve American interests. Therein lies the distinctiveness of American conservatism.

At this moment of crisis, conservatives must come together to defend our constitutional system of self-government. Here are some suggestions for a way forward.

Family, Faith, and Civil Society

All conservatives can embrace a renewed devotion to the family as the bedrock of a healthy civil society. Many of the nation’s greatest social ills are traceable to family breakdown. We must nurture the associations and faith-based organizations that strengthen families and unite individuals to tackle social problems with ingenuity, reason, compassion, and common sense.

During his trip to America in the 1830s, the great French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at what he called “the science of association,” the American habit of citizens’ coming together to solve common problems. “The same spirit pervades every act of social life,” Tocqueville observed. Organizations that help the poor, reach at-risk children, combat drug and alcohol abuse, educate the young, build hospitals, protect our parks, organize sports leagues, and bring people together to pray — these civic actors alongside the family have been the lifeblood of republican self-government in America. The Founders believed that such communities demanded special protection. Thus, they enshrined the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of association in the First Amendment.

Education

Education is concerned with the pursuit of the truth — veritas — wherever that truth is to be found. That is the authentic meaning and goal of liberal education. For conservatives, it also means equipping people with the knowledge, skills, and habits they need to become responsible citizens. As Samuel Adams explained: “For no people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved.”

Against radical revisionist histories, educators must teach the truth about America’s heritage — its failings as well as its remarkable achievements. Every citizen should understand the nation’s roots in the concepts of freedom and virtue; study the great minds that have shaped the practice of self-government; and embrace the rights and obligations that accompany citizenship.

Every American family should also have the right to choose how and where its children are educated. This is why educational choice is supported across racial and economic lines. Whether it is through public, private, or charter schools, conservatives can agree that parents are the key decision-makers for their children’s education.

A Commercial Republic

The United States is not a European social democracy — rather, it was conceived as a commercial republic. American capitalism is based on our natural rights to life, liberty, and property. It is nourished by the rule of law and the freedom to trade freely within and outside America’s borders. It has been built from the bottom up on the practical wisdom and experience of generations. The result: Our system of democratic capitalism has lifted millions of people out of poverty for over 200 years.

Some imagine that experts should direct the American economy in particular directions. But American conservatives do not look to the government or technocrats for the economic salvation of the American people. Aggressive government intervention always undermines the creation of wealth over the long term, and experts cannot outguess markets.

We also know that big government — whether through widespread regulation or large welfare systems — produces the diseases of cronyism and soft despotism. It would have been inconceivable to the Founders that Americans would trade their liberties for the lie of perpetual economic security via the state. Conservatives must show how markets lead to long-term growth and upward economic mobility for all.

An American Foreign Policy

Throughout the 20th century, the concept of American exceptionalism was a motive force behind the defeat of Nazi Germany, the creation of NATO, the democratization of Japan and West Germany, the defense of Western Europe throughout the Cold War, and the defeat of Soviet communism. None of these achievements is explainable apart from America’s commitment to human freedom.

Isolationism became unthinkable after the Second World War. Just so today: Whether from China, Russia, North Korea, other nation-states, or non-state actors, the United States faces undeniable threats to its national security. And America’s national security depends upon its ability to effectively project its military power.

The progressive dream of internationalism — with its denigration of national sovereignty — would weaken American military and economic power. An America in decline, however, can neither serve the national interest nor remain a leading force for freedom on the world stage. In the ceaseless struggle between barbarism and civilization, the United States must tip the scales toward civilization. It is in our national interest to do so, and it reflects our deepest values.

This does not translate into endless military interventions abroad. America should not be in the business of nation-building. We cannot make anyone want to be free. Nevertheless, just as America played a decisive role in defeating totalitarianism, it remains indispensable in the West’s struggle against fundamentalist Islamist terrorism and authoritarian regimes seeking hegemony in the Middle East and Asia.

Restoring Confidence in the American Story

As important as these commitments are to our republic, many Americans, especially black Americans, remain alienated — not only from conservatism, but from the American story. We have made profound strides toward a more just society. Yet a sober view of human nature — a hallmark of conservatism — requires honesty about the history of slavery and the persistence of racist attitudes in the United States.

The conservative vision of a just society is utterly consistent with that of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his campaign to overcome racial injustice. King consciously rejected the politics of tribalism and resentment, as well as Marxist schemes for economic empowerment. He believed in the dignity of work and the essential value of a quality education as the gateway to human flourishing. Unlike today’s Left, King understood that the demand for equality, justice, and opportunity is embodied in the American Founding. He sought to bring the nation “back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” King reached for an American solution to the problem of racism, one that all conservatives must embrace.

Also among those disillusioned with the promise of America are young people. This, in part, represents a crisis of memory: Our nation’s schools and colleges are failing miserably to teach the next generation the often tortuous yet rich and inspiring story of America’s journey toward a more just and democratic society. Young people also have experienced several traumas over the past 20 years — economic and financial crises, terrorism, a pandemic, and foreign wars — and have carried much of the burden. To the young, the Left offers socialism, “cancel culture,” and the legitimation of envy. Therein lies the path to cultural decline and eventual collapse.

Conservatives must challenge the next generation with a vision of life that speaks to their deepest aspirations: their longing for community, their entrepreneurial spirit, and their desire to invest their lives in noble causes. Abigail Adams expressed this outlook beautifully in a letter to her son, John Quincy Adams, during the Revolutionary War. She implored him to make the risky choice to join his father in Europe to advance the cause of freedom: “It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.”

Some Americans are inclined to resign themselves to a nation that slowly devolves into soft despotism or becomes a laboratory in which the Left can pursue its utopian delusions. We must resist these paths. “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us,” warned Abraham Lincoln. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Only the distinctly American path of ordered liberty offers the prospect of healing old wounds and renewing our democratic institutions. Our republic, this bold experiment in self-government, is still ours to keep, but only through our own untiring efforts will it remain “the hope of Liberty throughout the world.”

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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

The Federalist: How the Suffering of World Wars Seeded the Creativity of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

This article was originally posted at The Federalist.

“The next few years will be ghastly,” wrote C.S. Lewis in September 1939, just two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Although a man of faith, Lewis confessed to a friend that his nerves were “often staggered” by the news from week to week. A combat veteran of World War I, Lewis described “the ghostly feeling that it has all happened before.”

Writing at about the same time, an Oxford University colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien, explained to his publisher that “the anxieties and troubles that all share,” coupled with new responsibilities in “this bewildered university,” had made him “unpardonably neglectful” of his efforts to finish his sequel to The Hobbit.

Even if 2020 goes down as the year of the pandemic, the year that everyone wanted to forget, it also brought a cure as we forge through 2021: The next few months may be ghastly until it fully arrives, but there is a distant light in the night sky.

There were not many bright spots in the years 1939-1945 when it seemed that not only Great Britain but Western civilization itself sat on the edge of a knife. Yet these years proved to be among the most creative and meaningful for two of the 20th century’s greatest Christian authors. Indeed, those uncertain times were the crucible for a friendship that helped to ignite their astonishing literary imagination.

The war that brought unspeakable suffering also contributed to the creation of some of the most beloved and heroic literature of modern times. Gloom and defeatism were the order of the day. From the moment Great Britain declared war on Germany, the military situation went from bad to worse. Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, France — all collapsed before the German blitzkrieg.

Within days after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill was forced to evacuate 338,000 British and French troops at Dunkirk, what he called “a colossal military disaster.” All of Britain braced for an invasion as Adolf Hitler sent his bombers to destroy London.

‘Between Wolves and the Wall’

Although Oxford was mostly spared from air attacks, the war still touched close to home. Tolkien and Lewis served in the home guard; both had family members in harm’s way. Tolkien’s son, Michael, served as an anti-aircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain. Tolkien wrote to him in January 1941: “Hitler must attack this country direct and very heavily soon, and before the summer … God bless you, my dear son. I pray for you constantly.”

Lewis’s brother, Warren, also a WWI veteran, was recalled and sent to France: “a sad business for us both,” Lewis wrote to a friend, “since he was retired and we had both hoped these partings were over.”

Despite these anxieties, both authors entered a season of intense creativity. Tolkien had begun writing The Lord of the Rings in 1937, shortly after The Hobbit was published. But the story languished for months. He picked it up again in earnest in late August 1940, at the start of the Blitz on London.

Over the next several months, Tolkien brought the story as far as “the mines of Moria.” Due to wartime shortages, his writing was done on the blank side of student examination paper. At Moria, the Fellowship found itself divided over whether to venture forward into the blackness: “All choices seem ill, and to be caught between wolves and the wall the likeliest chance.”

Amid committee meetings, lectures, and tutorials, not to mention more than one bout with the flu, Tolkien pressed on with his “mad hobby.” He told his publisher in March 1945 that he could probably finish The Lord of the Rings in three weeks if he had adequate rest and sleep. However, he wrote, “I don’t see any hope of getting them.”

‘To Fill the Universe’

The idea for Lewis’s children’s series, The Chronicles of Narnia, probably entered his mind in 1939, soon after children evacuees came to live in his Oxford home. On the back of a manuscript, he scribbled what would become the opening lines of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a story about four English children “when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor.”

Lewis also conceived his diabolical satire, The Screwtape Letters, after he heard Hitler on the BBC, a speech simultaneously translated into English. The Nazi leader promised to deal mercifully with Britain when he conquered the island. “While the speech lasts,” Lewis wrote his brother, “it is impossible not to waver just a little.”

The next day, Sunday, July 21, 1940 — during a service in Holy Trinity Church, of all places — Lewis imagined a book consisting of letters between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his junior tempter, Wormwood. “He [God] really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself,” lectures Screwtape. “Our war aim is a world in which our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself.”

‘We Shall Have to Write Them Ourselves’

Tolkien and Lewis first met at Oxford in 1926, both instructors in English literature, and soon realized that they shared a love of ancient and epic mythology. One of the sources of their inspiration was, quite plainly, their friendship.

Lewis recalled a lively conversation in his college rooms about the gods and giants of Norse legend: “I was up till 2:30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo-Saxon professor Tolkien … Who could turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good.” They began meeting regularly to discuss their writings, joined by other authors who eventually formed “the Inklings.”

Tolkien and Lewis were deeply dissatisfied with the post-war literature of the 1920s and 30s, awash in themes of alienation and moral cynicism. The writings of authors such as Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That), Erich Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), and T.S. Eliot (The Hollow Men), captured the mood of disillusionment.

In Modern Heroism, literary critic Roger Sale wrote that World War I “was the single event most responsible for shaping the modern idea that heroism is dead.” The onset of another world war deepened this outlook but also stirred a sense of urgency in both authors. “If they won’t write the kinds of books we want to read,” Lewis announced to Tolkien, “we shall have to write them ourselves.”

That’s exactly what they did. Against the literary establishment, they reasserted the supreme importance of the individual in combating the evils of his age. They used the language of myth and fairy tale to communicate hard truths about the human condition. Like no other authors of their time, they retrieved the concept of the epic hero — and reinvented him for the modern mind.

Throughout the war years, Tolkien read each new chapter of The Lord of the Rings out loud to Lewis, who sometimes wept over the poignancy of a passage. “But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more,” Tolkien later explained, “I should never have brought the The Lord of the Rings to a conclusion.”

After Lewis read the finished manuscript, he described in a letter to Tolkien what it meant to him: “So much of your whole life, so much our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away … into the past, is now, in a sort made permanent.”

Perhaps Tolkien had his friend in mind when, in a scene from The Lord of the Rings, he expressed the power of friendship to help us discern, even in the darkest moments, flashes of grace and moral beauty. Frodo Baggins, frightfully aware of the forces threatening to defeat him in his quest to destroy the Ring of Power, is overcome with gratitude for the help others have given him. “Certainly, I have looked for no such friendship as you have shown,” he tells Faramir. “To have found it turns evil to great good.”

Here is a story of fellowship, of crisis and creativity, that can cheer our weary souls, whatever trials and sorrows this next year may bring.

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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

National Review: Reagan’s Fight for American Renewal, Revisited

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Forty years ago, on January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan was sworn in for the first time as president of the United States. He faced turmoil at home and abroad: His Democratic predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had presided over the worst recession since the Great Depression, staggering rates of inflation and unemployment, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran hostage crisis, and a mood of defeatism and exhaustion in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Watergate.

Despite all this, Reagan laid out a bracing vision of American renewal in his inaugural address. In language both plain and stirring, he appealed to the “moral courage of free men and women,” asking Americans to rededicate themselves to noble purposes. Rejecting the dreary politics of national self-loathing practiced by the Left, he revived the concept of American exceptionalism to unite and embolden a dispirited citizenry.

Though Carter’s campaign against Reagan devolved into personal attacks, Reagan never responded in kind. He thanked Carter, sitting stone-faced behind him, for offering “gracious cooperation in the transition process.” In a stunning reminder of how profoundly America’s political culture has changed, he said to Carter: “Mr. President, I want our fellow citizens to know . . . you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees liberty to a greater degree than any other.” Reagan never missed an opportunity to educate the world about America’s democratic achievements.

Anticipating a rising tide of identity politics and tribalism, Reagan defended the common good. He lauded the American democratic ethos that, in times of crisis, knows no ethnic or racial divisions. “All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden,” he said. “The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.” The key was to recover a vibrant, dynamic free-market economy. This objective — not massive government spending and tax increases — was the surest path to providing “equal opportunities for all Americans with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination.”

Though it’s easy to forget at this historical distance, Reagan spoke to the populist and egalitarian impulses that continue to shape American political life. He decried the stagnant economy that “crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike” and “threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.” The unemployed, he said, had been plunged into “human misery” and “personal indignity,” while those who work faced a punitive tax system that harassed them and held them back.

Reagan praised ordinary citizens — the “men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick: professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck-drivers” — for their quiet courage in serving others. This was more than campaign rhetoric; it was an outlook on American civic life forged from the experiences of being born into a poor family in a small Midwestern town, living through the Great Depression, and witnessing the nation’s resilience during the Second World War.

In one moment, Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In the next, he pledged that “your dreams, your hopes, your goals are going to be the dreams, the hopes, and goals of this administration, so help me God.” Long before George W. Bush coined the term “compassionate conservatism,” Reagan envisioned a government in partnership with its citizens, one ready “to stand by our side, not ride on our back.” Together, they would care for the neighbor in need: “We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup,” he said. “How can we love our country and not love our countrymen; and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they’re sick, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?”

It is worth remembering that Reagan began his political journey as a Democrat and voted four times for Franklin Roosevelt. As he saw it, however, the party of FDR had gradually abandoned the concept of personal responsibility for the false security of the paternalistic state. Here, perhaps, was his attempt to realize, on conservative terms, a political society that takes care of its most vulnerable.

For the first time in American history, the inauguration event was held on the west side of the Capitol, thus facing the direction that had always symbolized the American future. (“We go westward as into the future,” wrote Thoreau, “with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.”) Looking out over the crowd of half a million people, Reagan could see the monuments to Washington and Jefferson. Beyond the Reflecting Pool sat the Lincoln Memorial, the marble temple of the Great Emancipator, the man who embodied both the tragedy and nobility of the American story like no other. Reagan’s simple tribute seems deeply relevant in our age of rage: “Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln.”

Gazing beyond the monuments, Reagan drew attention to the graves at Arlington National Cemetery, representing “only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom.” He praised the American heroes who fought and died at the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Guadalcanal, Pork Chop Hill, “and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam.” The reference to Vietnam touched a nerve: Reagan despised the Left for treating Vietnam veterans with contempt; he was determined to valorize them instead.

America would be prepared to defend its democratic way of life on the world stage, Reagan declared, just as it always had done. “As for the enemies of freedom . . . they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it, now or ever.” The principle of “peace through strength,” important from the earliest days of his political life, would undergird his entire foreign policy. The world was already getting the message, too: Historians debate the circumstances, but even as Reagan spoke the Iranians were putting their 52 American hostages on a plane home.

Reagan’s liberal critics were wrong about him and about nearly every important political issue on which they opposed him: the dynamism of free-market capitalism, the power of democratic ideals, the nature of Soviet communism, the strategy for peacefully ending the Cold War. The progressive Left, to this day, remains in a state of denial about the man and his achievements. Some conservatives, too, seem to have forgotten Reagan’s political and moral insight. They have no memory of the fearsome cultural opposition he faced — or how he overcame it. They deride those who seek a return to his political philosophy, accusing them of dispensing “Reagan bromides” and engaging in nostalgia to evade present-day realities.

Yet, as Reagan liked to say, “facts are stubborn things.” After his first term in office, with the American economy roaring back to life and the Soviet Union in steep decline, he won a second term, prevailing in 49 out of 50 states — one of the greatest electoral landslides in American political history. Behind these facts are lessons for the intellectually curious.

Like no other political leader, Reagan united all of the major currents of modern conservatism: free-market economics, individual responsibility, limited government, a strong national defense, patriotism, populism, civic virtue, and faith. He made American exceptionalism his lodestar. Viewed objectively, his oratory — his natural eloquence, historical awareness, and moral clarity — rivals that of the greatest statesmen of the last century. Reagan neither bullied the American people nor treated them as hapless victims. He proved that the best way to move hearts and minds was to articulate a political philosophy: clearly, compellingly, and with a touch of humor that could disarm even his toughest critics.

Reagan wrote the first draft of his inaugural address and made sure that every line bore his imprint. He closed the speech with a story about sacrifice for a noble cause. As he quoted from the diary of Martin Treptow, an American soldier in the First World War, his voice cracked with emotion: “America must win this war. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”

In the aftermath of last week’s riot in the Capitol, it is blindingly clear that the promise of America — the concept of government by consent of the governed — is under attack. Thus, Reagan’s vision is needed more than ever. Indeed, the outcome of this struggle depends upon its revival: on ordinary Americans, united by their love of country, fighting to preserve the world’s most daring experiment in human freedom.

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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

National Review: Walter Hooper, R.I.P.

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Near the end of his life, C. S. Lewis, although well-known as a Christian author and apologist, wondered whether his books would continue to find an audience. “What happens after a man dies is that his books stop selling,” he told his secretary, Walter Hooper, in the summer of 1963.

“You don’t have to worry,” Hooper assured Lewis.

“What is it about an American secretary who tells me I don’t need to worry?” Lewis replied.

“The reason you don’t need to worry is because your books are so good, and your readers are not that stupid,” Hooper insisted.

Hooper devoted the remainder of his life — nearly five decades — to fighting to retrieve and publish virtually everything Lewis ever wrote, proving that he’d been right about the great man’s enduring appeal. When he died at 89 this morning after contracting the coronavirus, the world lost its foremost authority on Lewis and his writings.

Hooper’s was an epic intellectual and spiritual journey that began in the 1950s, when he was studying English at the University of North Carolina and read Lewis’s defense of J. B. Phillips’s modern translation of the New Testament. Against those who insisted upon the Authorized Version of the Bible (King James translation), Lewis warned that its majestic style could easily blunt the fearsome themes it contains. “Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls,” he wrote.

“Well, that absolutely changed me,” Hooper told me during a recent interview at his Oxford home. He began reading everything by Lewis he could get his hands on, and, after the two corresponded for nearly a decade, he visited Lewis in Oxford. The meeting went well: “He was a great drinker of tea,” and they finished three pots of it. His health failing, Lewis asked Hooper to stay on and help with his correspondence. Hooper agreed, making a decision that was as daring as it was life-changing.

The two men spent many hours together in conversation, especially during the last weeks of Lewis’s life. Soon after Lewis died on November 22, 1963 — the day John Kennedy was assassinated — Hooper got to work. He negotiated with publishers to make sure books such as Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, and The Great Divorce remained in print. For the next decade, working without a salary and scraping by as a part-time teacher, Hooper began a search for all of Lewis’s essays. He scoured libraries, journals, magazines, and newspapers to produce more than two dozen collections of Lewis’s writings. He also located virtually all of Lewis’s letters, producing four annotated volumes with revealing biographies of the recipients.

Hooper’s work transformed him, drawing him into a more rigorous Christian commitment. He became a minister in the Anglican Church, and eventually converted to Catholicism. After an afternoon with Hooper, it was obvious that his love and admiration for Lewis still shone like a beacon across a night sky. “I have decided to go back and re-read everything in the order it was published,” he told me. “And I’m stunned — I’m stunned at how good everything is.”

I was stunned as well when, as a college undergraduate, I first encountered Lewis’s writings in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited (naturally) by Hooper. “Foolish preachers, by always telling you how much Christianity will help you and how good it is for society, have actually led you to forget that Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity claims to give an account of facts—to tell you what the real universe is like,” Lewis wrote. “If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.” Like Hooper, I was hooked.

Articulating the case for the Christian gospel — what Lewis called “mere Christianity” — became an urgent task during the 1930s and ’ 40s, when it seemed that the Christian churches had little to offer as the ideology of Nazism swept Europe. Over a pot of tea, Hooper related the moment, during the Battle of Britain, when Lewis conceived of his diabolical satire, The Screwtape Letters. “The day before [Lewis] started writing The Screwtape Letters, Dr. Havard [Dr. R. E. Havard, Lewis’s physician] came out to see him, and together they listened to Hitler’s talk over the air, and Hitler said he would deal very mercifully with Britain when he takes it over.” Lewis admitted to his brother that “while the speech lasts, it is impossible not to waver just a little.”

The next day, Sunday, July 21, 1940, while attending a service in Holy Trinity Church, Lewis imagined a book consisting of the correspondence between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his junior tempter, Wormwood. He dedicated the work to his Oxford colleague and friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, who shared his passion for fantasy and mythology. Published in 1942, it became a bestseller and helped put Lewis on the cover of Time magazine. Even one of Lewis’s critics admitted that he “possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.”

It was this quality that Hooper believed set Lewis apart and would ensure his continued popularity. As it turned out, the American tar heel was right: The Chronicles of Narnia series alone has sold over 100 million copies and been translated into at least 47 languages. Like no one else, Hooper absorbed the vast corpus of Lewis’s work: fantasy, satire, science fiction, literary criticism, essays, sermons, apologetics, and poetry. His reputation as a Lewis scholar once got the attention of Pope John Paul II, who invited him to the Vatican. “He had just finished reading The Four Loves . . . and he said, ‘Walter Hooper, you are doing very good work,’” Hooper recalled.

Hooper never tired of drawing attention to Lewis’s talent for making Christian thought persuasive to the layman. In his encyclopedic book C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, Hooper relates how Lewis gained national attention for his BBC broadcasts defending Christianity during World War II, receiving many speaking invitations. He engaged with fellow dons, members of the Royal Air Force, factory workers, and university students. “It was partly due to this varied experience,” Hooper writes, “that he came to see why the professional theologians could not make Christianity understandable to most people.” In the Protestant tradition to which he belonged (the Anglican Church), Lewis combined reason and imagination to translate the gospel into terms everyone could grasp.

“At times it embarrassed me, when Lewis was talking about God, that I hardly believed in the same way that he did,” Hooper told me. In this case, admiration generated a lifelong calling: What Christopher Tolkien achieved in excavating the work of his famous father, Walter Hooper accomplished for C. S. Lewis. At a recent conference in Slovakia, Hooper was asked to explain why he invested so much of his life quietly serving someone else’s legacy. He did not hesitate in answering: “I said, ‘It’s been wonderful. I wish to God I could do it all again.’”

Wall Street Journal: Preserving the Legacy of C.S. Lewis

This article was originally posted at Wall Street Journal.

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When illness forced C.S. Lewis, the celebrated author and Christian apologist, into a nursing home, he wanted his secretary to retrieve some books. “You know which two books you must bring me?” he asked. “Yes,” his secretary replied. The books were E.R. Eddison’s “The Worm of Ouroboros” (1922), a heroic romance that Lewis absorbed as a young man, and “The Aeneid,” Virgil’s epic tale of the founding of ancient Rome.

Walter Hooper, the secretary, first discovered Lewis’s writings as a university student in 1954. Today, at 89, he is the foremost Lewis scholar in the world. His life’s work has ensured that the diverse Lewis corpus—poems, novels, satires, sermons, essays, apologetics—remains in print.

The scholar was smitten when he read Lewis’s preface to “Letters to Young Churches,” a colloquial translation of the New Testament epistles by J.B. Phillips. In defending the work, Lewis argued that the same “divine humility” that sent the Son of God into the world as a baby also delivered his message in a “vulgar” and “prosaic” language: “If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other.”

“I’d never met anybody who believed that way,” Mr. Hooper recalls in a recent conversation at his Oxford, England home. “I was determined to have more words by this man.” Over the next 50 years, he got his hands on virtually everything Lewis wrote.

The two men first met at Oxford in the summer of 1963. “We had three pots of tea,” he says. “If you met Lewis, the chances are that he would like you very much.” As Mr. Hooper prepared to return to the U.S., Lewis stopped him: “You’re not getting away! You’re coming to the Inklings meeting.” This was a group of Christian authors and friends—including Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield—who met at a pub weekly to discuss literature.

With his health failing, Lewis asked Mr. Hooper to stay and help maintain his correspondence. He agreed, left his teaching job in Kentucky, and moved to England. They spent countless hours together during Lewis’s final months.

“I remember talking to him about going to France,” Mr. Hooper tells me. “He said, ‘Of course I did. I was there during 1917 and 1918.’ I said, but that was serving in the army. He said, ‘Well, that was enough. Why go back to the site of all that slaughter?” A second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force, Lewis was nearly killed in combat. Most of his close friends died. “He once said ‘I think some of the best friends I would have made were those soldiers that I trained with,’ ” Mr. Hooper says. “He knew that we just hold onto life through a thread.”

The cataclysm of World War I helped to bring Lewis and the Inklings together in the postwar years. “I can’t think of anybody who was a dedicated member of the Inklings who was not in the war,” he says. “It caused you to really love these remainders, these friends who got through.” Chief among them was Tolkien, who shared his taste for fantasy and mythology.

Mr. Hooper once found a letter in which Lewis recounts Tolkien reading him a story about “Middle-earth.” The letter was dated 1929—nearly 20 years before Tolkien completed the “The Lord of the Rings.” Lewis never stopped encouraging Tolkien to turn his “mad hobby” into an epic romance. “I never had any inclination to write a story. What I liked was building up languages,” Mr. Hooper remembers Tolkien telling him. “But you know what Jack Lewis was like. He was such a boy. He had to have a story. And that story, “The Lord of the Rings,” was written to keep him quiet!”

Mr. Hooper’s grasp of Lewis’s work—he has edited two dozen collections of his writings and edited and annotated four volumes of his personal letters—is staggering. And his admiration has not dimmed. In Lewis, Mr. Hooper says, he met a Christian pilgrim who discovered in great literature “an avenue to holiness.”

Lewis earned fame in the 1940s and 50s for books such as “The Screwtape Letters” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” But when he died on Nov.22, 1963—the same day President Kennedy was assassinated—his legacy was uncertain. No one knew if stories about an epic struggle between good and evil would maintain an audience in an increasingly secular world.

“Right after he died, I went to Blackwell’s and saw a whole table of his books remanded,” he says, meaning they were being taken from the bookshop and warehoused. “I thought, this calls for a fight.” Millions of people around the world have encountered the imaginative mind of C.S. Lewis—and been transformed by the encounter—because Mr. Hooper jumped into the fray.

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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

National Review: Resisting the Leviathan: The Mayflower Compact

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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In his famous Leviathan, the 17th-century theorist Thomas Hobbes argued that members of a political society should submit themselves to an absolute sovereign to preserve their lives and security. Without an absolute ruler, Hobbes warned, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Four hundred years ago, on November 11, 1620, a small group of zealous Puritans washed ashore near Cape Cod, Mass., and proved him wrong.

To be sure, for the 102 men and women who traveled from Europe on the Mayflower, the world they encountered looked like a Hobbesian nightmare. William Bradford, who later became governor of the colony, described “a hideous and desolate wilderness.” The first bitter winter brought death — from disease, malnutrition, and exposure — to more than half of the company. Without help from the area’s native people, the Wampanoag, probably none of the colonists would have survived.

There were also threats from within: Only 41 of the company were Protestant separatists or “saints,” those fleeing religious persecution and seeking freedom of worship outside the Church of England. The remainder, called “strangers,” were a mix typical of the middle and lower classes of 17th-century English society. Many came for purely commercial reasons; others may have been trying to escape their past. One of them, John Billington, became the first colonist executed for murder.

The long, miserable journey across the Atlantic did not create a unified body of pious believers. Bradford saw trouble brewing when “several strangers made discontented and mutinous speeches.” Because they had landed hundreds of miles north of their destination in Virginia — outside of the territory under charter by King James I — the colonists did not have a clear understanding of what laws would guide them. They faced the real possibility that factionalism would destroy their community.

Yet their differences impelled them to reach for a radical solution to hold the company together. The Mayflower passengers decided that their freedom and security would not depend upon an all-powerful Leviathan. It would depend upon their ability to govern themselves, to submit to laws that they themselves had written. The Mayflower Compact, signed on November 11, 1620, broke ranks with English political theory and practice, in which unelected monarchs issued decrees and ruled by divine right.

The Mayflower Pilgrims, as they came to be called, were committed to “the advancement of the Christian faith” and designed and signed their compact “in the presence of God.” But no one seemed to have a theocracy in mind; rather, they sought to form “a civil body politic.” Importantly, their new political community would be framed by “just and equal laws” — laws that would apply without discrimination to all their members. Here, at the very beginning of the American story, one can discern the concepts of equal justice and government by consent of the governed.

We need not romanticize the Pilgrims. These Puritans were seeking religious freedom for themselves, and for themselves alone. Moreover, not everyone signed the compact: Only the adult male passengers, including two indentured servants, were invited. The women, who would do so much to help the company survive, were excluded.

Nevertheless, they all participated in the civic affairs of the colony. After the Mayflower anchored again at Plymouth Rock, the survivors created a largely self-sustaining economy. Their faith gave them a raw determination to succeed, and the political consensus held: Plymouth became the first permanent European settlement in New England. More importantly, the Pilgrims introduced into the West an unprecedented experiment in consensual government, involving not a monarch but individuals acting on their own initiative.

The architects of the problematic 1619 Project have suggested that the year 1619, when enslaved Africans were first brought to America’s shores, should be viewed as the authentic date for the American Founding. We should hold fast to 1776. Yet the seeds of that Revolution were indeed planted in 1620: the year when a rugged group of men and women, in a moment of existential crisis, resisted the Leviathan and gambled on self-government.

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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

Law and Liberty: The Rule of Law vs. the Militias

This article was originally posted at Law and Liberty.

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In no presidential election since 1860 has the fear of post-election violence been so palpable. Indeed, the politically inspired violence ravaging many of our cities over the last several months marks the beginning of a new and dangerous chapter in American history: the potential unravelling of the rule of law.

The plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is among the more outrageous episodes. In cities such as Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Kenosha, Louisville, and Washington, D.C, the threat or recourse to force has been the order of the day.

This situation is untenable. In a healthy democratic system, citizens must make up their minds on public matters and elections free from intimidation and coercion. Such is no longer the case in America, where representative democracy is now in trouble.

Militia Politics

Descriptions of the turn to the use of force in democratic systems—which is nothing new, sadly—range from the outbreak of a “mobocratic spirit” to the advent of “militia politics.” In one of his earliest public speeches, Abraham Lincoln, reacting to the sudden rise of violence in Missouri and parts of the South, addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. He spoke of people gathering “to burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers…and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity.”

The spread of mob action in the 1830s, redolent of what is occurring today, was a spontaneous spasm born of anger, boredom, and the opportunity to loot and pilfer. The ensuing chaos, Lincoln went on, might feed on itself, gather momentum, and spiral out of control, until the public’s attachment to the political order disintegrated. The result, he warned, is that “government cannot last.”

“Militia politics” calls to mind a more deliberate kind of activity, in which groups form with a clearer chain of command and a more fixed set of tactics. Historical accounts of the role of militias in the collapse of political regimes sometimes assign more structure for these groups than they actually possessed in their initial moments, when things were in flux between mobs and full organizations.

Two infamous instances in Europe in the aftermath of the first World War illustrate the rise of militia politics.

In Italy, the constitutional monarchy was widely unloved. Beginning in 1919, disgruntled former soldiers gathered into different groups, with those from the Right engaging in street violence against socialists and groups from the Left. All over Italy, strikes and riots against the cost of living broke out. Mobs attacked banks and public buildings. Eventually the Right came together under Benito Mussolini, a disillusioned socialist. These Fascist “black shirts” went on to stage a massive march on Rome in 1922, which led to Il Duce’s taking full control of the government in 1925. Mussolini later boasted that his revolution had “curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential.”

In Russia, Vladimir Lenin had no power base before the Marxist revolution in October 1917. Even after the toppling of the Tsarist regime, in the waning hours of the Republic, there was no mass support for a “revolution of the proletariat.” But Lenin understood how to use terror to mobilize disaffected peasants, factory workers, ex-soldiers, and other groups. “We’ll ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If he’s against it, we’ll stand him up against a wall.” He wasted no time in establishing his own security force, the Cheka, to engage in “counter-revolution and sabotage.” A vicious civil war raged until 1923, when Lenin’s Red Army emerged triumphant.

After more than 230 years of living with success under the same constitution, few Americans have any inclination for authoritarian government, coming from either the Right or the Left. But in today’s climate with mayors and governors acquiescing to or siding with the mobs and militias, and with so many citizens abandoning the cities for safer havens in the suburbs or in more orderly states, it is none too soon to begin to worry.

Corporate America, sports moguls, advertisers — they all seem to be focusing on their own immediate well-being while ignoring the social disintegration occurring outside of their gated communities. In an upper-class version of fiddling while America burns, they are ceding to extortion while hoping that a change of national leadership will buy them a return to normalcy.

Mainstream media sources have likewise adopted an approach of promoting the interests of their favored political party. Instead of reporting on the disorder that has been occurring in cities like Portland and Seattle, they have chosen to deliberately censor reality.

Incredibly, the greatest loss in property in civil disturbances in the last century, the large-scale destruction of local businesses, and the injuries and deaths of citizens have been swept under the rug. Only in those instances where it is thought that a killing is the work of a right-wing activist, or where it is alleged that federal action initiated by President Trump has precipitated the disorder, or where a white nationalist group is charged with a plot against the governor, are the events given serious attention.

For the most part, however, it is no secret that the greater part of the recent violence in the cities has originated from mobs linked to Leftist militias affiliated in some fashion with Antifa activists and Black Lives Matter. It is perhaps to be expected in an election year that liberal political leaders would not acknowledge this fact, but place the emphasis, in Michelle Obama’s words, on the “overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity.” This observation may be soothing, but it does not obviate the amount of real violence that has taken place.

Nor does it deny that the groups bent on creating disorder have often blended themselves into the larger demonstrations, and used them to supply cover and—let’s be honest—to receive, up to a point at least, a measure of political support.

In the presidential debate in Cleveland, Joe Biden continued the same general strategy by insisting that Antifa—a self-proclaimed anti-fascist movement that employs tactics that most Americans understand to be fascist—should be considered an “idea,” not an “organization.” This contention was intended to diminish fears of any real danger from this group. Attorney General William Barr has taken a contrary view: “I’ve talked to every police chief in every city where there has been major violence, and they all have identified Antifa as the ramrod for the violence.”

Rule of Law or Rule of Mob?

The main objective in the study of mobs and militias is not, however, to decide which political disposition is most responsible for instigating violence. From what analysts in this field have surmised, the principal actors in America over the years have moved from side to side, as the actions of right-wing groups in Charlottesville in 2017 might indicate. The most important lesson to consider transcends partisanship. The U.S. Constitution authorized the establishment of the national guard and state defense forces, dedicated to upholding the rule of law. The actions of these militia groups, by contrast, represent law’s negation.

Indeed, an increase in militia activity, whether coming from the Left or the Right, together with the growing belief that such activity is inevitable, saps public confidence in government and in its ability to quell disorder. Unless it is resolutely countered by legitimate political authority, it opens the door to the disintegration of public order, as events in Europe in the 1920s showed.

The highly publicized incident in Portland at the end of August that preoccupied partisans on both sides—in which U.S. Marshals gunned down a fugitive who allegedly murdered a Trump supporter during a protest—was in the larger scheme of things a distraction. It missed what was most important for defending the government.

The more that the militias on the Right and Left are involved in open struggles with each other, the better the chances that one of them, and not the legitimate government, will win out. Militia group activity from one side tends to boost militia group activity on the other.

Nothing better illustrates the loss of legitimate government authority than what has been on open display in Portland and Seattle. The feckless politicians in both cities, with the assistance of their governors, pulled back from using the power of government to defend law and order, sold out their police departments, and caused the “retirement” of their police chiefs. They preferred to garner political support from those who favored the militia forces of the Left.

From the point of view of the militias, it has become clear that maintaining their own following is best served by continuing the struggle and the use or threats of use of violence. They gained local influence by showing that they were in charge of many of the streets and that they exercised as much or more control over parts of the city as the police. They could compel local officials to de-fund the police and “re-imagine” the local system of prosecuting what were once counted as crimes. They intimidated and in instances humiliated the politicians, showing the influence they had with large parts of the local populace.

In short, beneath the surface, the militias, not the government, were running the show.

The activities of militias on the Left are often linked to forces on the Left in the universities and to those in intellectual circles exercising the sanction of the so-called cancel culture. No doubt in many instances this connection is direct, as some of those active in the immediate political arena are themselves former or current students. The canceling of speeches and events on university campuses by “enemy” intellectuals, sometimes by the threat or use of coercion, has also involved participation by those connected to militias.

And yet, as important as it is for those who oppose these actions on campuses to resist them, it would be a mistake to think that by defending a speaker or protecting the right of a university event to be held, the battle against leftist militias is materially affected.

Tragically, we have moved beyond symbolic conflicts on campus to real struggles in the streets. New forces have been set loose, not unlike those that were unleashed in Italy and Russia a century ago. What will be the results of this presidential election? Will we reap the whirlwind from the growing contempt for the rule of law? We should ponder carefully Lincoln’s Lyceum address, delivered during another season of violence and lawlessness: “Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children’s liberty.”

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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

National Review: John Locke and the Fight over Judge Barrett’s Catholicism

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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The controversy over the Catholic faith of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has exposed a fierce argument underway over the nature of American democracy. Two myths about the historical relationship of religion to liberal values — freedom, equality, justice, tolerance — are competing for dominance. Both must be resisted. For if the United States was not founded as a Christian nation, neither was it the product of a secular Enlightenment.

The great political thinker who first navigated between these two extremes was John Locke. Locke is considered one of the fathers of the liberal project, and his work influenced the American Founders perhaps more than any other writing outside of the Bible. His Two Treatises of Government (1689), in which he makes the moral case for rebellion against tyranny, is credited with igniting the American Revolution. But his writings on church and state have shaped the American Creed even more profoundly.

Even so, Locke’s conception of the role of faith in public life is as misunderstood by the religious Right as by the progressive Left, because unlike any other Enlightenment figure, he combined liberal political principles with a bracing commitment to the life and teachings of Jesus.

“Toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind,” Locke wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), “that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.” This was revolutionary stuff in 17th century Europe, where political and religious authorities alike enlisted the Bible to enforce orthodoxy and crush dissent.

Progressives see in Locke an Enlightenment skeptic who sought to check the baleful influence of religion on political life, and they celebrate him for it. They take his anti-Catholicism for granted, as an understandable prejudice against religious doctrines at odds with liberal principles. “Locke notably excluded Catholics from the religions meriting toleration,” New York Times columnist Elizabeth Bruenig wrote recently, “because he suspected they could not be trusted to leave their faith in the appropriate sphere.” Hence the infamous remark of Senator Dianne Feinstein during the 2017 hearings that led to Barrett’s confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit: “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.”

Like such progressives, many religious conservatives mistakenly believe that Locke swung open the door to the privatization of religion, and they despise him for it. They regard Lockean liberalism as the great enemy of morality, tradition, and faith. “Both politically and theoretically, hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth,” writes Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule. Vermeule and other Catholic “integralists” seek a partial return to the idea of a “godly commonwealth,” in which government would promote explicitly Christian ideals and purposes. They worry that Barrett, under the influence of Locke’s ideas, will succumb to “the dominant liberal ethos of our age.”

Locke was indeed a severe critic of religious authoritarianism. “There is no such thing as a Christian commonwealth,” he declared. But he was no skeptic, either. His essentially Protestant outlook — revealed in his published works, journals, and private correspondence — emphasized the spiritual obligations that God’s love and mercy placed on every person.

In offering advice on child-rearing to his friend, Edward Clarke, for example, Locke urged parents to teach their children acts of devotion to God as the “Author and Maker of all things, from whom we receive all our good, who loves us and gives us all things.” He collected the sermons of his favorite ministers, produced a scholarly commentary on the New Testament epistles, and published a treatise defending the rationality of faith in Jesus as the Messiah. “It is not enough to believe him to be the Messiah,” he wrote in The Reasonableness of Christianity, “unless we also obey his laws and take him to be our king to reign over us.” A philosophical society he founded while in exile in the Netherlands had this rule for entry: “Proposing to ourselves and others the example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, as the great pattern for our imitation.”

For Locke, Christian faith carried moral obligations as consequential to the public square as to private life. Both spheres, in Locke’s view, needed massive reform. Living during a period of renewed religious persecution and social unrest, he searched the Scriptures carefully for principles upon which to build a more just and stable society. His reform project began with a defense of the rights of conscience.

Locke collected every book and tract on religious freedom he could get his hands on. His personal letters are filled with references to the “dictates of conscience” and the importance of authentic faith. A 1688 journal entry under the heading “Tolerantia Pro” lists 21 passages from the Bible, including a climactic scene from Luke’s gospel in which Jesus asks God to forgive his executioners. Locke’s political outlook thus developed after decades of reflection on one of the central questions of our own age: How can we live together with our deepest differences?

The result was A Letter Concerning Toleration, a document of remarkable persuasive power, now considered part of the canon of the liberal-democratic tradition. Probably no other single work defending religious freedom exerted greater influence over the American mind.

Locke began the Letter with an indictment of intolerant religion, citing the humble example of Jesus as “the Prince of Peace” and “the Captain of our Salvation.” In the end, his political argument for freedom of conscience was inseparable from his Christology: a theology of charity and forgiveness, even toward those considered religious opponents and heretics. “The sum of all we drive at,” he explained, “is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” By combining reason and revelation, Locke envisioned a political society framed by the golden rule: equal and impartial justice for all citizens, regardless of religious belief.

In his list of religious groups that deserved equal rights, Locke included some of the most persecuted religious minorities in Europe. “Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither Pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth, because of his religion,” he wrote. “The gospel commands no such thing.” A lifelong member of the Anglican Church, awash with fears of “popish tyranny,” he nevertheless went on to argue that even Catholics deserved equal justice: “If a Roman Catholic believes that to be really the body of Christ, which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor.” Written in the winter of 1685, just as Catholic France under Louis XIV had launched a campaign of intense persecution against the Protestant minority, it was a breathtaking claim.

The only set of ideas that did not deserve to be tolerated by a liberal regime, Locke argued, were those that threatened its very foundations. Militant religion, to be sure, was one such threat. This was a key reason Locke sought to separate church and state, “to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion.”

Yet, for Locke, more worrisome than the temptation to theocracy was the threat of atheism. “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bond of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist,” he wrote. “The taking away of God, though even in thought, dissolves all.” Locke consistently denied toleration to atheists, a seeming contradiction of his otherwise principled arguments for pluralism. Yet only recently have political theorists decided that democratic societies must remain indifferent about God’s existence. Neither Locke, nor the American Founders, imagined that republican government could be sustained without the civic virtues that are nurtured by religious belief.

The Lockean view has found allies in high places. “Judges cannot — nor should they try to — align our legal system with the Church’s moral teaching whenever the two diverge,” Barrett wrote in a 1998 law-review article. “They should, however, conform their own behavior to the Church’s standard.” If confirmed, Barrett would replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was not shy in declaring that her Jewish faith profoundly influenced her approach to the law: “The demand for justice,” she wrote, “runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition.” John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court and one of the authors of The Federalist Papers, would have agreed with her. Jay’s Christian faith anchored his own sense of justice, including his arguments for the abolition of slavery: “Till America comes into this Measure her Prayers to Heaven for Liberty will be impious.”

Locke’s wise and generous approach toward religious belief is embedded in our constitutional order — in the separation of church and state, in the First Amendment protections of religious liberty, and in the Constitution’s prohibition against religious tests for public office. But Lockean liberalism also inspired an ethos of freedom, pluralism, and equal justice. “I will not undertake to represent how happy and how great would be the fruit, both in church and state, if the pulpits everywhere sounded with this doctrine of peace and toleration,” he wrote.

For over 230 years, the pulpits of America have indeed resounded with this doctrine, helping the nation to turn religious diversity into a source of cultural strength and renewal — an achievement unmatched in the history of the world. Amid the fierce battle over Barrett’s confirmation, we’ll do well to remember that achievement and the necessity of preserving it.

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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

National Review: Churchill, the Blitz, and Moral Leadership

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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Within weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, triggering the Second World War and throwing the survival of Western civilization into doubt, Oxford scholar C. S. Lewis delivered a sermon at St. Mary the Virgin Church urging his audience to maintain “an intimate knowledge of the past.” Without such knowledge, he warned, they would be vulnerable to “the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone” of their age.

Those words have become a prophecy. Last week we observed the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, but the high priests of our cancel culture do not even dimly perceive what was at stake and how our civilization ultimately survived. They do not understand that Nazism was first dealt a serious blow — perhaps an ultimately fatal one — because of the fierce resistance of the British people at a moment of existential crisis, led by a prime minister of indomitable courage.

Beginning on September 7, 1940, the citizens of London endured 57 consecutive nights of bombing raids, otherwise known as the Blitz. On the first night of the attack, 200 bombers struck the city, killing 300 Londoners. By the end of the month, 6,954 civilians would perish. Before the Nazis relented, at least 40,000 lay dead; thousands more became homeless. Every night, fires illuminated the London skies, while residents sought shelter in the city’s underground. But Londoners refused to yield.

Many explanations have been offered for their resilience, but at the heart of their story was a singular leader: Winston Churchill.

The radical Left, of course, despises Churchill as a “racist” and “imperialist.” Mobs have threatened his statue in London’s Parliament Square, which was boxed up in June ahead of a Black Lives Matter protest in Westminster. But even some conservatives downgrade Churchill’s famous eloquence as a “popular cinematic explanation” for Britain’s capacity to endure the Nazi onslaught. Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks argues that a key to Londoners’ resilience can be found in the “intense social connections” they shared during the onslaught. “In 1940, Britain faced a uniquely evil foe. Building a sense of moral purpose was relatively easy.”

Of all the myths surrounding the triumph of Great Britain during the Second World War, perhaps this one is most removed from historical realities. Every country that had been invaded by the Nazis by the summer of 1940 — Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland — was aware of the unique evil of Nazism. Every one of them collapsed, most in a matter of days. France — which had battled Germany for four ferocious years during the First World War and possessed the largest army on the continent at the start of the war — succumbed in six weeks. France’s leaders, reflecting the mood of most of the population, were under the sway of military defeatists.

Building and sustaining a sense of national purpose in the jaws of Nazi terror, rather than being “relatively easy,” was one of Churchill’s most stunning achievements. His task was made more difficult by the pacifist and progressive assumptions that fueled the culture of appeasement throughout the 1930s. Horrified by the industrial slaughter of the Great War, an entire generation of Europeans viewed Western society, in the words of T. S. Eliot, as a “wasteland” of capitalist greed, sham patriotism, and spiritual hypocrisy. Churchill was appalled when, in February 1933, the Oxford Union Society approved by a wide margin the motion: “This House will under no circumstances fight for King and country.” Oxford’s C. S. Lewis recalled the mental climate thus: “A man whose mind was formed in a period of cynicism and disillusion, cannot teach hope and fortitude.”

Moral purpose? Even after Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Britain was deeply divided over its purposes on the world stage. The socialist Left was a prime source of the confusion: Having rejected democratic capitalism, they saw little distinction between Great Britain and its fascist enemies. In The New World Order (1940), H. G. Wells perfectly captured the progressive-socialist outlook: The “Chamberlain-Hitler War,” he wrote, was being fought by the “influential ruling-class people” whose “uncontrolled business methods” were facing a new reckoning. The problem, Wells explained, was not the Nazis. “It is the system of nationalist individualism and uncoordinated enterprise that is the world’s disease, and it is the whole system that has to go. . . . For in the world now all roads lead to socialism or social dissolution.”

Try to imagine Britain’s prime minister rallying his nation to fight the Nazi war machine armed with this progressive pabulum. Indeed, after the heroic but humiliating evacuation of British and French forces at Dunkirk, Churchill faced enormous pressures to meet Hitler at the negotiating table. But even such a “colossal military disaster” brought out the best in him: an iron will to meet the difficulty, whatever the costs, and carry on the fight. “Churchill repeatedly said both during the war and after that all he did was to reflect and articulate the British people’s determination to fight on until victory,” writes Andrew Roberts in Churchill: Walking With Destiny. “But he did much to create, sustain, and direct it too.”

The playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham was just one of many who experienced the force of Churchill’s vision upon the population once he became prime minister. “It was a very different England from the England I had left a few weeks earlier,” he recalled. “It was more determined, more energetic and more angry. Winston Churchill had inspired the nation with his own stern and resolute fortitude.” In Churchill: A Life, Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, emphasized Churchill’s stubborn faith in the British people. “His finest hour was the leadership of Britain when it was most isolated, most threatened and most weak; when his own courage, determination and belief in democracy became at one with the nation.” William Manchester in The Last Lion (Vol. 3, the last volume in the series), concludes thus: “Churchill’s defiant spirit set the whole kingdom afire.”

How did he do it? We need not exaggerate the sway of Churchill’s radio broadcasts during this period. From May until December 1940, Churchill delivered only seven speeches over the BBC. Erik Larson, in The Splendid and the Vile, downplays their effect on British morale, pointing instead to symbolic actions such as the introduction of anti-aircraft guns into London. Nevertheless, by virtually all accounts, the combined impact of his wartime speeches was enormous. Churchill’s address on September 11, 1940 — a speech quoted by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack that killed 3,000 Americans — was a sublime example of his wartime leadership. Warning soberly about the likelihood of a Nazi invasion, Churchill praised the Home Guard, “determined to fight for every inch of the ground in every village and in every street.” Hitler, he said, believed falsely that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians would turn the British people against their government:

What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out in Europe . . .

Churchill’s physical presence in London during the Blitz — his frequent visits to scenes of intense human suffering — connected him to the British people in ways that Franklin Roosevelt would never experience with the American public. The morning after the first raid on London, Churchill spoke to people at a bombed-out air raid shelter where 40 had been killed. When he got out of the car, survivors and relatives mobbed him, saying: “We thought you’d come. We can take it. Give it ’em back.”

It was a scene that repeated itself throughout the Blitz, and it surely contributed to the resonance of his message to ordinary Londoners. Indeed, his words conveyed a moral authority unlike that of any other wartime leader of the 20th century. Like no one else, Churchill had a mastery of the English language, a profound historical sense of Great Britain’s contribution to Western civilization, and an unshakeable confidence in the capacity of the English-speaking people to confront with nobility and bravery the darkest forces of their age.

“Churchill possessed the ability, through his oratory, to invest with majesty the deeds and even failures of mortal men,” writes Max Hastings in Winston’s War. His weaknesses could be worrisome; he did not always command the respect of the entire British population. “But he empowered millions to look beyond the havoc of the battlefield, and the squalor of their domestic circumstances amid privation and bombardment, and to perceive a higher purpose in their struggles and sacrifices.”

His words were not without effect. As soon as Hitler realized he could not bend England to his will, he turned his gaze eastward. His invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, proved to be his undoing. Historians of this epochal moment agree: The high moral purpose of the British people did not emerge spontaneously, as if it were a sociological inevitability. In fact, it is impossible to imagine the citizens of London standing firm during their supreme hour of crisis without Winston Churchill in the center of the storm. Their unexpected defiance bought the Allies the precious gift of time: the time required to turn the tide of war.

Perhaps Churchill’s daughter, Mary, expressed better than anyone the debt the world owes to Britain’s greatest prime minister. “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father,” she wrote, “I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does — Liberty itself.”

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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

National Review: Truth Is a Casualty in Our Culture War

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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Americans seem to be in the throes of a struggle to define not only the history but the meaning of our democratic republic. With the stakes so high, the temptation to impose ideological conformity, by vilifying dissenters and shutting down debate, is fearsome. In her resignation letter to the New York Times earlier this month, former columnist Bari Weiss warned about a new consensus among media elites: “that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” Yet the “Enlightenment” project of human freedom depended on courageous individuals who, on a quest for truth, defied the orthodoxy of the establishment.

The obstacles to this quest were daunting. Seventeenth-century Europeans cheered when the wars of religion came to an end. But the Catholic and Protestant states that emerged maintained a tight control over dogma of all kinds — religious, political, and scientific.

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) didn’t launch the scientific revolution, but he made its cultural triumph nearly inevitable. His Principia (1687), by establishing the universal laws of motion and gravity, crushed any lingering belief in the geocentric model of the universe. That model had stood for centuries, despite manifest difficulties, because it carried the unquestioned authority of Aristotle, known simply as “the philosopher.” The authorities of Christendom had ensured that no theory of the universe that contradicted Aristotle’s earth-centered cosmology could be taught or legally published.

Yet Newton, like all of the early scientists, was driven by a passion to understand the world around him. He believed that God had written two books — the book of Holy Writ and the book of Nature — and that the study of the natural world illuminated God’s character. The Creator, he wrote, was apparently “very well skilled in Mechanics and Geometry.” Nevertheless, it was an uphill fight to overcome entrenched, conventional thinking. “Plato is my friend, and Aristotle is my friend,” he said, “but my greatest friend is truth.”

Protestant England in Newton’s day took as dim a view of “unorthodox” teachings as did any Catholic state in Europe. Government control of printing, introduced under Henry VIII, was in full swing when John Milton (1608–1674) learned of the flogging of political agitator John Lilburne, arrested for importing subversive books. Milton fired off a pamphlet in protest, the Areopagitica (1644), titled after the Areopagus, the hill where the council of Athens met to debate and execute justice.

Milton’s missive, which took the form of a speech “to the Parliament of England,” is regarded as the first comprehensive plea for freedom of speech in the West. “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image,” he wrote. “But he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”

It is hard for us to appreciate the radicalism of Milton’s argument: that a healthy society required the give and take of conflicting ideas, even ideas that challenged our most deeply held beliefs. The effect of censorship, he wrote, will be “primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by . . . blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.” In other words, everyone must be open to the possibility of having his mind changed, because no one had an absolute monopoly on the truth.

Milton’s plea initially fell on deaf ears, especially after England endured a sectarian Civil War. For the next 30 years, until the Glorious Revolution of 1689, church and state worked together to uphold Anglican hegemony and punish dissent: England became a persecuting society.

Like no one before him, John Locke (1632–1704) sought a solution to the political-religious problem. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689) and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke vigorously defended the concepts of human freedom, equality, and government by consent. He laid the philosophical foundation for the liberal, democratic state. And he did it by defying the prejudices and dogmas of establishment elites. “To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of humane perfection in this world,” he wrote, “and the seed plot of all other virtues.”

This idea was the motive force behind Locke’s lifelong struggle to protect the rights of religious conscience in an age of rage. Citing “the Gospel of Jesus Christ” and “the genuine reason of mankind,” Locke argued that every person must be free to pursue truth without fear of censure. “It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions; and that light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.” In Locke’s vision of a just and pluralistic society, there was no place for the cancel culture.

He practiced what he preached. In establishing his “Rules of a Society,” for example, Locke insisted that no one could be admitted unless he agreed that he “loves all men” regardless of their religious identity or “speculative opinions.” When any topic engaged Locke’s mind, he read everything about it he could get his hands on. His personal library numbered over 3,641 volumes and included works of theology, medicine, classical literature, philosophy, economics and the natural sciences. His longtime friend (and romantic interest) Damaris Cudworth described him as “the most faithful follower, or indeed the slave of truth, . . . which he loved for its own sake.”

The free exchange of ideas in the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads: This was the freedom that fired the imagination of the individuals who helped to build our liberal democratic order. We dare not turn our backs on their achievement when we need it most.

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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