Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 7

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

National Review: What Hong Kong Can Teach the West

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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There is a bitter, Orwellian irony about what’s been happening recently to the cause of freedom in the world. The evaporation of democratic rights in Hong Kong at the hands of Communist China is helping to expose a new malevolence, closer to home. Something of immense consequence is occurring: a civilizational self-loathing, a perverse disenchantment with the concept of government by consent of the governed.

In the two nations that have done the most to advance democracy and human rights over the past century, the United States and Great Britain, political and cultural elites have acquiesced as violent mobs continue to assault the statues, images, and symbols that embody the highest human achievements of our civilization. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Christopher Columbus, and even the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass have all been targeted in America, while in Britain statues of Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria, as well as London’s sacred Cenotaph war memorial, have been attacked by rioters. No one is safe from the guillotine of rage unleashed by the radical Left. Basic civil liberties — including free speech, academic freedom, and religious freedom — are considered disposable by the new Jacobins of social justice.

Meanwhile, as angry crowds gathered in London, Bristol, and Oxford to denounce Great Britain for its imperial past, peaceful demonstrators in Hong Kong rallied to preserve their civil liberties, with some displaying the Union Jack. As petulant protesters marched in Washington, New York, and other American cities to curse the United States as irredeemably racist, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists were flying the American flag.

“Courage is the first of human qualities,” Churchill said, “because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.” The deficit of courage — the failure to honor and defend the ideals and institutions that have built our civilization — is a harbinger of democratic decline. By contrast, the people of Hong Kong have given the West a lesson in moral courage.

Indeed, China’s decision last week to impose its national-security law on Hong Kong is the regime’s latest attempt to silence the brave voices of democratic dissent. Those voices came to a crescendo in 2019 when a third of the city’s 7.5 million people gathered in demonstrations to thwart Beijing’s effort to extend its authoritarian rule. In the 1984 Sino–British Joint Declaration, China pledged to respect Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom of speech, of assembly, and of the press. But Beijing has long viewed the former British colony as a threat to its dictatorial system and a sanctuary of Western cultural influence. The new national-security law, which bans “terrorist activities” and “collusion” with foreign actors, effectively terminates Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” of governance guaranteed by international law.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam claims that “the life and property” and “legitimate basic rights and freedoms” of citizens will be protected. But the thousands who have taken to the streets in the days after the new law went into effect do not believe her. Their agnosticism is rooted in their understanding of the nature of the Communist regime and in the dreary facts on the ground. China will now openly embed its security forces in Hong Kong to identify and silence opposition, including public criticism and peaceful demonstrations against the party’s rule. Beijing also has new powers to intervene in Hong Kong’s legal system: The city’s independent judiciary, one of the legacies of British colonial rule, is effectively over. China’s goal is to emphatically crush all dissent and any hint of free speech in Hong Kong. It even seeks to muzzle companies in the West that do business with China and Hong Kong. In other words, Hong Kong’s Western-style freedoms and institutions are coming to an end.

“From now on,” writes 23-year-old Joshua Wong, the best-known face of the pro-democracy movement, “Hong Kong enters a new era of reign of terror . . . with arbitrary prosecutions, black jails, secret trials, forced confessions, media clampdowns and political censorship.” Benedict Rogers, co-founder of the U.K.-based Hong Kong Watch, agrees. “This new security law is the absolute death knell of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy — both in its substance and effect, and in the way in which it was imposed on Hong Kong, without even going through the pretence of a process of consultation locally,” he says. “This is the arrival of Orwellian repression on the very frontline of freedom, and must be met with a robust, united and coordinated response by the free world, or the Chinese Communist Party will not stop at Hong Kong.”

Hence the dark irony. The purveyors of false and hateful narratives about the United States and Great Britain — from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to the New York Times’ 1619 Project to the upper echelons of the taxpayer-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) — are too obtuse and jaded to grasp it. Twenty-somethings in Hong Kong stand up to tear gas, bullets, batons, arrest, and imprisonment to defend their right to speak their minds. But the editorial mandarins at the Times and other elite journals cannot stand up to the infantile cancel culture in their ranks. Students, writers, artists, and blue-collar workers regularly defy the Chinese security apparatus. But corporate moguls at Apple, Disney, ESPN, Google, and Nike, for example, kowtow like frightened children to the Communist thugs in Beijing. The collective cowardice of leftist elites — in politics, academia, business, entertainment, and journalism — beggars belief.

Thankfully, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to stand with the people of Hong Kong, offering safe haven to roughly 3 million Hong Kongers (U.K.-passport holders as well as holders of a British National Overseas Passport), who will also have the right to apply to become British citizens after five years if they choose to settle in the United Kingdom. The response from Beijing has been furious and menacing, but Brexit Britain is standing its ground. Johnson, a devotee of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, has adopted a bulldog-style determination in the face of China’s threats, and his outstanding leadership on the Hong Kong issue should be emulated across Europe.

And here in the United States, the Senate has just unanimously passed measures to hold to account Chinese officials and companies complicit in Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong. The bipartisan Hong Kong Autonomy Act sends a clear message to China’s ruling Communist Party that there are consequences for its violation of the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong. Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, put it bluntly in a recent tweet: “China’s goal: Force companies that do business in Hong Kong & individuals who travel to Hong Kong into silence. It’s an assault on free speech in America. American businesses need to stand up to Communist China & lawmakers must take stronger steps to hold China accountable.”

The U.S.–U.K. special relationship continues to be the strongest bulwark in the world against Chinese repression, and it is significant that it is London and Washington that are taking the lead in standing up to the Chinese dragon.

In his farewell address to the American people, Ronald Reagan called for “an informed patriotism” — that is, an understanding of our history that is honest, yet inspiring. He asked, “Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?” He worried about the answer — about the cultural consequences of neglecting or perverting our history. The same question, of course, is being asked today in the United States and Great Britain. The answer coming from the radical Left, however, is an account of history engulfed in resentment and hatred: a visceral, quasi-religious assault against the achievements of these two great experiments in democratic self-government.

Reagan implored his audience to recover and transmit America’s legacy of justice, liberty, and prosperity to the next generation. His description of the United States applies equally to Great Britain, whose influence over America’s political ideals was profound and enduring: “We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise — and freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection.”

Liberty is not self-sustaining: It must be defended. No one understands that truth today better than the citizens of Hong Kong.

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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: What Winston Churchill Understood about America

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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On July 4, 1918, Winston Churchill chaired a meeting in London to deliver a message to the American people celebrating their Independence from Great Britain: “[We] rejoice that the love of liberty and justice on which the American nation was founded should in the present time of trial have united the whole English-speaking family in a brotherhood of arms.”

Churchill, then serving as Britain’s minister of munitions, had good reasons to be grateful for the United States. After four years of slaughter in the First World War, over 900,000 British soldiers lay dead — and Britain and her allies were hardly any closer to declaring victory than when the conflict had begun. The French army was demoralized, the Italians were in disarray, and the Russian army had collapsed. A few months earlier Churchill warned that the entire Allied cause was in peril. But the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force in France in the summer of 1918 made the defeat of German despotism almost inevitable.

Always the historian as well as the statesman, Churchill observed that the Declaration of Independence “is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed” on which the liberties of the democratic West were founded. The Magna Carta (1215), of course, declared that no political leader was above the rule of law. It affirmed the principles of due process and trial by jury. A product of England’s Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights (1689) reasserted the concept of constitutional government, that is, government by consent of the governed. These documents laid a new foundation for individual rights in the Western tradition. Together they shaped the fundamental laws of the North American colonies.

Indeed, the American revolutionaries, demanding their rights as Englishmen, drew on these declarations when they did some declaring of their own. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Here, for the first time in human history, a political society comes into being asserting the natural rights and equality of every human being, a claim rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here is a demand for self-government that builds on the inheritance of the West to launch a radical experiment in democratic freedom.

Few statesmen were as clear-eyed about the triumphs and tragedies of Western civilization. Yet in the history of the English-speaking people, Churchill discerned a legacy of liberty, equality, and justice that eclipsed the failures of Britain and the United States to achieve these ideals. It is in this shared tradition, he said, where people struggling against tyranny can find inspiration to avoid “the shame of despotism” on the one hand and “the miseries of anarchy” on the other.

The thousands who continue to arrive each year in Great Britain and the United States — fleeing political and religious persecution — bear testimony to this simple truth. It is a fact worth recalling in our age of rage.

Indeed, in ways rarely appreciated, American exceptionalism drew its moral strength from British exceptionalism. It is a story of freedom that both countries can celebrate this July Fourth.

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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: Classical Liberals vs. National Conservatives in the Age of Coronavirus

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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Over the past few years, a small but growing cadre of religious conservatives has decided that classical liberalism — grounded in a belief in the natural rights and freedoms of the individual — is a grotesque mistake. The coronavirus pandemic should prompt this crowd to do a little soul-searching.

Despite their differences, liberalism’s right-wing critics are united in their fierce antagonism to John Locke, whose doctrine of government-by-consent inspired the American Revolution and informed the Founding. According to Yoram Hazony, the Jewish philosopher and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, Locke’s account of human nature amounts to “a far-reaching depreciation of the most basic bonds that hold society together.” Similarly, Patrick Deneen, a Catholic political scientist and author of Why Liberalism Failed, denounces Locke’s theory of consent as “one of liberalism’s most damaging fictions,” a solvent of community, morality, and religious belief. Locke’s vision of human flourishing, they say, was really no different than that of Thomas Hobbes.

All of this talk began before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which has given most of us a more intimate taste of what it might be like to live under Hobbes’s Leviathan: “For by this authority . . . he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.”

Most states have imposed severe lockdown measures, constraining and disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Public gatherings — including peaceful protests — have been outlawed. Schools and colleges have closed their doors. Religious services have been banned, and would-be worshippers harassed by local police. Thousands of businesses — in every state — have been indefinitely shut down. Earlier this week, a Dallas woman was arrested, fined, and sent to jail for trying to operate her hair salon in defiance of the Texas governor’s stay-at-home rules. “Feeding my children isn’t selfish,” she said. “I am not closing the salon.”

In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689), he named “life, liberty, and property” as among the natural rights of man that governments were instituted to protect. By property, he 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.”

Locke’s critics, who often appear not to have read his actual works, see only mindless and clawing consumption at the root of his worldview. But the Second Treatise leaves no doubt about the divine prerogative and the moral obligations that flow from it: Our equality “by Nature” forms “the foundation” of “that obligation to mutual love amongst men” and “the duties they owe one another,” namely, “the great maxims of justice and charity.” Locke then cites the golden rule to insist upon “a natural duty” to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. In a slap at political absolutism, he invokes the authority of the God of the Bible: “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker . . . 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.” Locke’s conception of human flourishing ultimately depends upon his belief that every person is endowed by God with creative powers and is called — in freedom — to engage in meaningful, honorable, productive work.

The Leviathan — now embodied in government at all levels — inevitably has other ideas. About 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the onset of the coronavirus. The unemployment rate for April is expected to top 15 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. Tens of thousands of small business have been devastated, and many will never recover. The human suffering involved in this cataclysm — drug abuse, depression, suicide, and the delaying of surgeries, cancer treatments, etc. — cannot be calculated. The virus would’ve taken a severe toll on American society regardless of the public-policy response to it, but evidence is mounting that the government’s Draconian pandemic-response measures have played a role in making things worse.

Said measures have been undertaken in an effort to “flatten the curve” and “save lives.” It’s a rationale Hobbes would surely applaud: “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.” Having lived through the English Civil War, Hobbes did not believe that people could be trusted to govern themselves. Aided by a phalanx of medical authorities, neither do many of our political leaders, regardless of the facts on the ground.

Locke took a different view, devoting his political career to the defeat of the authoritarian forces that were trampling basic civil liberties, ruining economies, and destroying the social fabric of Europe. His remedy was a political society designed — and limited — to preserve our natural, inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.

Government by consent involves risks, but the alternative is a life of dependency, passivity, and servitude. Progressives, ever restless for centralized authority, have tried to negate Lockean ideals for decades. In a recent editorial, “The America We Need,” the New York Times derided classical liberals for taking “an impoverished view of freedom,” and called for a “muscular conception of liberty” that would make government the “guarantor” of universal health care, housing, and employment. What is new, and worrisome, is that some prominent religious conservatives are now singing a similar tune, while blaming Locke’s principles for unleashing selfish individualism at the expense of the common good.

According to Patrick Deneen, classical liberalism has produced “an acquired ability to maintain psychic distance from any other human.” It apparently does not occur to him that Locke’s conception of freedom — rooted in reason and Revelation — might be the best protection against a state, say, forcefully mandating our physical isolation from one another. Meanwhile, conservative Catholics such as Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule want the Church’s theological tenets to guide the state, “because strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.”

In short, these religious conservatives have sought an approach to political life that would treat Lockean freedoms with contempt. And the pandemic has given us a fearsome preview of what such an approach might look like.

No one should treat the lethality of this contagion lightly: We must do everything feasible to protect the most vulnerable among us. Seventy thousand deaths in a matter of months are a shocking tragedy. But only a rank materialist would disregard the social, moral, and spiritual consequences of the government’s unprecedented efforts to fight the virus. Indeed, the greater tragedy may turn out to be the subjugation of a free, prosperous, and just society by the nightmarish political creature Hobbes imagined, “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City 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 Hill: Pandemics and the survival of the fittest

This article was originally posted at The Hill.

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When the influenza virus first struck down a soldier in March 1918 on a military base in Kansas, much of the country was mesmerized by The Black Stork, a silent film advocating the elimination of children born with severe illnesses or disabilities. The eugenics movement — the effort to improve the human gene pool by isolating and sterilizing those considered “unfit” to reproduce — was in full swing. Today, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, the dominant theme is saving lives, regardless of the economic cost. Yet a century ago, medical and scientific authorities, egged on by religious leaders, supported a violent form of social Darwinism.

Soon after Charles Darwin published his evolutionary theory based on the “survival of the fittest,” anthropologists such as Francis Galton seized upon its social implications: Use the tools of science to improve the human species. “What Nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly,” Galton told a London society in 1909. Galton coined the term eugenics — “good birth” — to promote his social vision. “It must be introduced into the national conscience,” he said, “like a new religion.”

Eugenics advocates proceeded with missionary zeal. A year after Galton’s speech, Charles Davenport, a professor of zoology at the University of Chicago, with grant money from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, created a national Eugenics Record Office. The aim: to gather scientific data to support the eugenics agenda. Beginning in 1912, a series of international conferences was held in London and New York, creating a global venue for a burgeoning class of eugenicists and their supporters. They built ties to institutions such as Harvard, Princeton and Columbia universities and New York’s Museum of Natural History. What began as a fringe, pseudo-scientific idea became mainstream thinking in premier scientific and academic institutions.

The 1918 influenza pandemic, despite killing the young and healthy as easily as the old and sick, did nothing to curb enthusiasm for eugenics. In Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu and How It Changed the World, Laura Spinney writes that one of the big lessons of the catastrophe was that “it was no longer reasonable to blame individuals for catching an infectious disease.” That’s not exactly right: The lesson for many scientific authorities was that the racial stock was in grave danger of degeneration.

In fact, it appears that the devastating effects of the influenza virus — killing at least 50 million people worldwide in a matter of months — stirred an apocalyptic gloom in educated circles. Book titles in the 1920s tell the story: The End of the World; Social Decay and Degeneration; The Need for Eugenic Reform; Racial Decay; Sterilization of the Unfit; and The Twilight of the White Races. Population planning was promoted by psychiatrist Carlos Paton Blacker, longtime general secretary of the Eugenics Society, who warned in a 1926 book, Birth Control and the State, of “a biological crisis unprecedented in the history of life.”

To many religious leaders, the “science” of eugenics was a “progressive” solution to a raft of social, moral and spiritual ills. Writing in the journal Eugenics, Harry F. Ward, a professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in 1919, explained that eugenics, like Christian morality, was aimed at “removing the causes that produce the weak.” In a 1928 winning entry for a national “eugenics sermon contest,” Rev. Kenneth MacArthur intoned: “If we take seriously the Christian purpose of realizing on earth the ideal divine society, we shall welcome every help which science affords.” The Rev. W.R. Inge, a professor of divinity at Cambridge University and one of the best-known clergymen of his day, was a devout believer in eugenics. In books, essays, and a weekly newspaper column, Inge complained about “humanitarian legislation” that assisted “these degenerates,” who possess “no qualities that confer a survival value.” They posed a mortal threat to Western civilization, he argued, and should be quarantined and eliminated.

The scientific community used its immense cultural authority to persuade democratic lawmakers to get on board. The American Eugenics Society — founded in 1922 and supported by Nobel Prize-winning scientists — hoped to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population. California led the way, using its 1909 sterilization law to target the “unfit” and “feebleminded,” i.e., the poor, the infirm and the criminal class. Today, in battling the coronavirus, California has scrambled to acquire more hospital ventilators and even considered the mass release of its inmate population. But in the aftermath of the influenza outbreak, groups such as the Human Betterment Foundation lobbied for the involuntary sterilization of thousands of California residents in state hospitals and prisons. Thirty-two other states adopted similar eugenic policies.

What turned the tide of opinion against eugenics? The racist barbarism of Nazi Germany — the cries of the victims of Auschwitz — revealed to the world the appalling logic of eugenics. Yet there were other voices as well: the conservative and traditionalist Christians who never were taken in by the promises of a human biological paradise. In 1922, the influential Catholic thinker G.K. Chesterton published Eugenics and Other Evils, the only book of its time unabashedly opposed to the movement’s claims and objectives. Indeed, Chesterton anticipated the totalitarian direction of the eugenic agenda, which he derided as “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.”

William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical Christian — often caricatured for his opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial — is also worth recalling. The textbook that Bryan denounced, A Civic Biology, openly promoted the ideology of eugenics. After reviewing case studies of families with significant numbers of “feeble-minded” and “criminal persons,” the book’s author rendered a judgment: “They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.” In his closing argument in the trial, Bryan insisted that he was not opposed to science, but to science without the restraints of religious belief.

“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals,” he explained. “If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.”

Perhaps civilization has learned that lesson, at least partially. The heroic efforts to rescue as many people as possible from the current pandemic — regardless of their age, identity or physical condition — is evidence that the teachings of Jesus, the Nazarene, have not been fully forgotten.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City 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: The Queen’s Speech

This article was originally posted at National Review.

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On this side of the Pond, her sober and steady voice was drowned out by a cataract of fear and recrimination that has sullied America’s national life during the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking on Sunday evening from Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II delivered a message of hope and solidarity to the United Kingdom, even as the nation’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, lay stricken with the virus. “Today we are tackling this disease, and I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it.” A bare 522 words, the queen’s speech was imbued with quiet dignity, with insight that comes from a life dedicated to a nation’s highest ideals through its darkest hours.

The queen recalled those hours: the beginning of the Nazi blitz in 1940, when the 14-year-old future monarch made her first broadcast to an anxious nation. In a moment of existential crisis, she offered words of comfort for the thousands of British children sent overseas — to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States — to escape the deadly bombing raids on London and other cities in England. “Before I finish, I can truthfully say to you all that we children at home are full of cheerfulness and courage. We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war.”

This threat is different, she explained, and in doing so revealed how a national leader can use an intimate knowledge of the past to offer perspective and wisdom for the present.

The virulent pandemic of Nazism divided the world into warring camps. And it was made more lethal and more sinister, in the words of Winston Churchill, “by the lights of perverted science.” Not so today: Hardly any region of the world has escaped the contagion, and most of the world is united in defeating it. “This time we join all nations across the globe in common endeavor. Using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed, and that success will belong to every one of us.”

Most Americans, understandably, don’t appreciate the decisive role of the monarch in England’s history of constitutional government: Without a monarchy, there would have been no Magna Carta, no Glorious Revolution, no English Bill of Rights, no Act of Toleration, no triumph over the international scourge of Napoleonic France. When the queen spoke of the qualities of the British people — “the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humored resolve and of fellow feeling” — she did so as a participant in an institution that has helped to shape the national character over centuries.

Many of America’s leaders, by contrast, have forgotten the purpose of the institutions they inhabit: to serve the common good, especially in times of crisis. Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, wisely explains the massive breakdown of trust in America’s political, economic, and media institutions. Rather than allowing themselves to be shaped by the moral aims of our institutions, he explains, today’s leaders use them “as a stage to elevate themselves, raise their profiles and perform for the cameras in the reality show of our unceasing culture war.”

For sixty-eight years, from the day she was crowned in 1953, Queen Elizabeth II has resisted that temptation. She has conformed her own desires to the highest purposes of the institution she serves. As a result, she can be trusted. She can remind Britons, as she did on Sunday, that their finest moments as a nation, their unique identity as a people, “is not a part of our past. It defines our present and our future.” We call this an act of statesmanship, made possible by trust.

The collapse of trust in the United States coincides with our near contempt for meaningful, let alone inspiring, political speech. When the queen speaks, the nation listens, because behind her words is a life of substance, duty, faith, and moral purpose: a life that has seen up close how a nation can struggle and fight against a great evil — and not lose heart. When our politicians speak, their vaporous words dissolve like ants in a blazing furnace. Instead of statesmen, we have groomed a generation of vipers. The democratic spirit, unconstrained by virtue, creates a tyranny of egos, a monarchy of megalomania.

The queen ended her speech with a message of hope, rooted in history and memory and tradition. Pity the heart that could not be moved and lifted by it. “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return,” she said. “We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.”

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City 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 Interest: America Has a History of Pandemic Denial

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

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Donald Trump wasn’t the first president to misunderestimate a national threat. Franklin Roosevelt played his part in the collective denial and dishonesty of the age—until the “ideology of fascism” contagion came knocking.

FDR, we are told, realized early the threat of Nazi Germany and worked relentlessly to shake the United States out of its isolationist slumber. David Nasaw described in a book review for the New York Times that “almost from the moment he entered office, Roosevelt set out to educate the nation to the fact that the United States was threatened not only by economic depression at home, but also by fascist aggressions abroad.” Likewise, Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed that long before America went to war, Roosevelt could “recognize the future” and sought to prepare the United States for its role as the “arsenal of democracy” against fascism.

This is hagiography masquerading as history. From almost the moment FDR became president, in 1933, he adopted a foreign policy of denial, deception, and indecision: a vain attempt to insulate the United States from a new pandemic—the scourge of totalitarianism—that was spreading around the globe.

Consider that in November of 1933, after less than a year in office, Roosevelt became the first American president to formally recognize the Soviet Union—at a high-water mark of communist barbarism. In 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture, seizing the land and assets of the peasant population. Anyone resisting was sent to labor camps or executed. The result: famine and mass starvation. By the spring of 1933, twenty-five thousand people were dying every day in Ukraine, which was the grain belt of the Soviet Union. From 1929 to 1934, between ten million and fourteen million Soviet citizens perished.

Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who rejected Marxism and inspired the Solidarity movement, has called this episode “probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens.” Instead of isolating the communist contagion, FDR extended an open hand: an act of genocide denial. Once he became a wartime ally, Joseph Stalin—a sadistic and murderous psychopath—was transformed by the American president into “Uncle Joe.”

Roosevelt’s posture of magical thinking stiffened throughout the 1930s as another fearsome “pandemic”—the ideology of fascism—began to threaten the freedom of Europe. Promising to tear up the Treaty of Versailles when he became chancellor in 1933, Adolf Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations. In 1936, the German military occupied the Rhineland, a flagrant violation of the Versailles Treaty. The demilitarized zone in the Rhineland had been established by three separate articles in the treaty: It forbade military forces, maneuvers and mobilizations. Any breach of the treaty was considered an act of war.

The United States had never ratified the Versailles Treaty, and FDR’s response, delivered through his Secretary of State, made clear that Hitler’s intervention was not America’s problem: “It would appear . . . that the action of the German Government has constituted both a violation of the Versailles and Locarno pacts, but as far as the United States is concerned it does not appear to constitute a violation of our treaty of August 25, 1921 with Germany.” Trade with Germany continued apace.

From 1935—37, amid deepening anxiety about the possibility of another European conflict, Roosevelt signed the Neutrality Acts, prohibiting U.S. assistance to either side in a European or Asian war, no matter what the cause. “I have approved this joint resolution because it was intended as an expression of the fixed desire of the Government and the people of the United States to avoid any action which might involve us in war,” FDR wrote. “The purpose is wholly excellent, and this joint resolution will to a considerable degree serve that end.” He would soon regret it.

FDR’s admirers like to draw attention to his 1937 “quarantine speech,” in which he warned about international aggression by nations such as Italy (in Ethiopia), Japan (in Manchuria) and Germany (in the Rhineland). Roosevelt suggested that the democracies join in a “quarantine” of belligerent states:

“It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of disease.”

Isolationists in both parties called it a war-mongering speech, but FDR never explained what he meant, even when pressed by reporters. He swiftly dropped the subject.

Then came the watershed acts of appeasement in 1938. In March, Germany annexed Austria, making it effectively a vassal state. There was no official reaction from Washington. Next came Czechoslovakia. Hitler signaled that he intended to bring the Sudetenland, with large numbers of ethnic Germans, back into the German fold. Tense negotiations between Germany, Britain, France, and Italy were held in September in Munich. At a dinner party, Roosevelt said that any suggestion that the United States would align itself with the democracies was “100 percent wrong.” He sent a personal note to Hitler: “The government of the United States has no political involvements in Europe and will assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiations.”

Hitler got the message: there would be no quarantine to check his ambitions. When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London waving a peace agreement with Hitler—a plan to dismember the Czech Republic—the American president sent Chamberlain a two-word telegram: “good man.” Six months later Germany took over the rest of Czechoslovakia.

In books such as Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life, biographer Robert Dallek writes glowingly of FDR’s “political genius” in confronting national and international crises. Really? Even Jean Edward Smith, in his laudatory FDR, admits that “Roosevelt swam with the isolationist tide” and “kept the army on a starvation budget.”

That’s putting it gently. Roosevelt kept himself, and the American people, willfully ignorant of bitter truths as the catastrophe enveloped Europe. Even after war broke out in September 1939, after Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Roosevelt continued to deny and dissemble. He repeatedly assured the American people that the United States would remain “un-entangled and free.” He persisted with these empty pledges—despite all evidence to the contrary—through the end of 1940, when the German military had conquered much of Europe, bombed London, launched an assault on European Jews, and threatened the survival of European Civilization.

The year 1940, of course, was a presidential election year, and Roosevelt marched in lockstep with the isolationist crowd throughout his campaign. On October 30, he told a Boston audience: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” On November 1, in Brooklyn, it was this: “I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.” On November 2, he promised voters in Buffalo: “Your president says this country is not going to war.” British historian Max Hastings offers this rough judgment of Roosevelt’s pre-war leadership: “In the absence of Pearl Harbor, it remains highly speculative when, if ever, the United States would have fought.”

If Trump is rightly criticized for his early handling of the coronavirus outbreak and the nation’s lack of preparedness, then the heartbreaking realities of the pandemic have dampened the impulse toward complacency. In addition to a raft of draconian limitations on individuals and businesses, the president has even suggested a quarantine of New York City.

Likewise, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, cured Roosevelt of his blindness to the gathering pandemic of totalitarianism. FDR successfully converted America’s industrial sector into a war machine. But he waited almost too late, and the nation was totally unprepared: America endured devastating losses against the Japanese in the Pacific and could not stage its D-Day invasion into France until June 1944.

Thus, throughout the 1930s, when the totalitarian disease was spreading globally, the democracies of the West—including the United States—appeared impotent. It was simply not true, as historian Kerns Goodwin claims, that “no one saw it coming.” The evidence of its malicious intent and power was everywhere present. Thus, W. H. Auden called the 1930s “a low, dishonest decade.” Franklin Roosevelt played his part in the collective denial and dishonesty of the age—until the contagion came knocking.

“Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity,” wrote Winston Churchill, “are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.” It is a truth that applies equally to natural and man-made evils.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City 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 Interest: The Future of Freedom in the Era of Dictatorial Rule

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

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OXFORD, England—A portrait of John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism, hangs in Christ Church Hall amid a gallery of honored graduates that includes John Wesley, William Pitt, Charles Boyle, and William Gladstone. But on the eve of England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688, Locke was a political fugitive living in exile, having been expelled from his Oxford University post for promoting “certain pernicious books and damnable principles.”

Despite his rehabilitation, Locke’s principles—government by consent, political equality, religious liberty, and the right to resist tyranny—are as controversial as ever. Indeed, nearly every international crisis today involves an argument between Locke and Thomas Hobbes: a debate over the right to live in freedom vs. submission to dictatorial rule.

Consider the political landscape in places such as Hong Kong, China, North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Venezuela. In each case, Lockean ideas about human equality and self-government are being devoured by the Hobbesian Leviathan. In each case, the rule of law cannot be counted on to protect the rights of minorities and political dissenters. The result—as Locke predicted—is social unrest and revolution. When both sides are armed, the stage is set for civil war. “For when the people are made miserable, and find themselves exposed to the ill usage of arbitrary power,” Locke warned, they will be “ready upon any occasion to ease themselves of a burden that sits heavily upon them.”

Locke’s world was not so different from our own. Over his lifetime (1632–1704) he witnessed populations convulsed by the English Civil War, regicide, religious extremism, show trials, executions, and the suspension of civil liberties. He saw firsthand a campaign of religious persecution that sparked a refugee crisis in the heart of Europe. Ultimately, Locke’s liberal principles triumphed in the West. Yet the story of his achievement, ripe with lessons for our own age, is being neglected.

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 a universal submission to an all-powerful political authority. Locke saw something else: the human capacity for rational self-government. This is the subtext of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), considered part of the canon of Western philosophy. The leading philosopher of his age, Locke nevertheless preferred the reasoning of ordinary people to the “learned gibberish” of intellectuals and religious scholars. “The candle that is set up in us,” he wrote, “shines bright enough for all our purposes.”

Chief among those purposes, Locke argued, was the creation of a political society built upon our natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Unlike Hobbes, Locke envisioned a “state of nature” rooted in a fundamental moral law: the protection of human freedom so that every individual could pursue her divine calling and serve her true sovereign. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business,” he wrote in Second Treatise of Government (1690). “They are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure.” The agents of Leviathan not only violate God’s moral law but “put themselves into a state of war with the people.” The American Founders would take note.

In seventeenth-century Europe, however, political absolutism was sanctioned by religious authorities, armed with hyper-patriarchal interpretations of the Bible. Any progress toward a more liberal, egalitarian society required a theological revolution in the European mind. Locke sought to instigate it.

It is true that Locke shared the enlightenment critique of militant Christianity and its capacity to unleash profound wickedness: “All those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe . . . have been at first kindled with coals from the altar.” Yet unlike the enlightenment thinkers who followed him, he didn’t believe the concepts of freedom and equality could be defended on purely secular grounds; they must be anchored in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. “Lockean equality is not fit to be taught as a secular doctrine,” writes political theorist Jeremy Waldron. “It is a conception of equality that makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God.”

Political philosopher Leo Strauss persuaded generations of scholars that Locke was “a hedonist,” that he did not take man’s religious aspirations and obligations seriously. The opposite was the case: Locke was as much a religious reformer as he was a political revolutionary. In the Christian humanist tradition of Erasmus, a man he greatly admired, Locke argued that a return to the teachings of Jesus—in politics and culture—held the key to a more just and humane society. Hence, one of his rules for a philosophical society he founded in 1688 while in exile in the Netherlands: “Proposing to ourselves and others the example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, as the great pattern for our imitation.”

This was the moral core of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), arguably the most important defense of religious freedom ever written and the conceptual basis for the modern secular state. Neither Jesus nor his disciples ever coerced anyone into the kingdom of heaven, Locke argued. Mutual charity, expressed in the golden rule, was their answer to religious diversity. “But that the church of Christ should persecute others, and force others by fire and sword to embrace her faith and doctrine, I could never yet find in any of the books of the New Testament.”

Locke drew conclusions from his case for religious liberty considered utterly radical at the time. First, the church must be “a free and voluntary society,” based on the conscience and consent of each individual. Second, the state must protect equally the rights of every person to pursue his religious obligations. “The sum of all we drive at,” he wrote, “is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” Here are the defining doctrines of liberal democracy: government by consent of the governed, equal justice under the law, and the separation of church and state.

These are the political principles that have helped the West to defeat two of its most intractable problems—political tyranny and religious authoritarianism. It is precisely these ideas that are under assault in much of the rest of the world. Nevertheless, while many on the political left ignore Locke’s influence, a growing number of conservatives have rejected it as a “dead end” toward radical individualism and social breakdown. Yoram Hazony, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, argues that “there is nothing in the liberal system that requires you, or even encourages you, to also adopt a commitment to God, the Bible, family, or nation.”

Nonsense. These voices would cut us off from a vital source of moral and political insight, gained from bitter experience. Like no one before him, John Locke combined liberal political theory with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Ultimately, he helped lay the foundation for a society with greater freedom, justice, and diversity than anything Christendom had produced in over a thousand years. It is an inheritance that cannot be guarded too carefully.

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Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City 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