Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 9

National Review: John Lennox, The Oxford Mathematics Professor Who Defends Christianity

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Oxford, England — John Lennox, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, leans forward in his chair, his blue eyes brightening, as he explains how his peculiar profession nearly shipwrecked the academic career of one of his intellectual heroes, Christian author and apologist C. S. Lewis.

Shortly before he disembarked for France to fight in the British Army during the First World War, Lewis failed his “fearsome” qualifying examination in algebra to continue his studies at Oxford. “He had to go to a crammer, which is an ancient word for a school where they crammed the information into you,” Lennox tells me. “But the world war intervened.” When Lewis returned to Oxford in January 1919, the university waived the mathematics requirement for him and other war veterans. “So, we were in a hair’s breadth of never having Lewis’s literary genius and output because of algebra — the subject I love,” he laughs. “There is something ironic in that.”

Perhaps something providential as well. By the time Lennox arrived at Cambridge University as an undergraduate in 1962, he already had devoured many of Lewis’s writings. He couldn’t resist sneaking out of his math lectures to hear Lewis lecture on John Donne before a packed auditorium.

More than any other thinker, it was Lewis — an atheist who converted to Christianity with the help of J. R. R. Tolkien — who gave Lennox the conceptual tools to confront the materialist objections to faith in God. “I thought it was very important to try to walk inside the shoes of someone who knew atheism from the inside, and Lewis provided that guide to me,” he says. “In all his questioning, there was the slow development of his impression that there was a God who could be taken seriously. All of that became very important to me.”

Now, at 75, Lennox has distinguished himself internationally for his intellectual defense of Christianity. He has debated — and, according to his admirers, bested — celebrated atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer. A fellow in the philosophy of science at Oxford, he writes books that explore the essential compatibility between the scientific quest, rightly understood, and religious belief. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo: All believed in a God who created and sustained the universe. “Instead of the founders of modern science being hindered by their belief in God,” Lennox reminds me, “their belief in God was the motor that drove their science.”

Citing Lewis’s approach in works such as The Abolition of Man, Lennox assails the notion that science is the only pathway to truth, or that it can explain the mystery of the human condition. In his sights are thinkers such as Peter Atkins, a professor of chemistry at Oxford who claims that “there is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence.”

Lennox discerns in this a self-defeating materialism. In books such as God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? he argues that the scientist’s confidence in reason ultimately depends on the existence of a rational and purposeful Creator. Otherwise, our thoughts are nothing more than electro-chemical events, the chattering of soul-less synapses. “If you take the atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic view, you’re going to invalidate the reasoning process,” he says, “because in the end you’re going to say that the brain is simply the end product of a blind, unguided process. If that’s the case, why should you trust it?”

The materialist view inevitably gives birth to a form of determinism that appears to mock our essential humanity. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and atheist, expresses the modern scientific outlook thus: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its tune.” Yet biological determinism, Lennox explains, robs human beings of any claim to dignity and freedom. Free will, we are told, is an illusion.

Ironically, certain strains of conservative theology, what Lennox calls “religious determinism,” lead to the same result. In his recent book, Determined to Believe: The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith and Human Responsibility, Lennox finds fault with Calvinist interpretations of Scripture that effectively negate human decision-making and moral responsibility.

“Free will,” he writes, “is that gift of God that gives us the capacity to come to God with empty hands.” By insisting that every decision and action in the world has been brought about by divine fiat, religious determinists make God the author of unspeakable evil. “It is hard to imagine that anyone could believe that such extreme deterministic ideas are even remotely Christian,” he writes. “They seem infinitely far away from describing the God of love revealed to us in Jesus Christ.”

In all of this Lennox follows in the footsteps of his theological mentor, C. S. Lewis. From his post at Oxford, he continues to communicate — in clear, compelling, and persuasive prose — the essential truths of the Christian faith to a wide and diverse audience. With a mathematician’s passion for logic, he embraces one of Lewis’s most famous maxims: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Before our conversation ends, I am reminded of another link between them: Like Lewis, Lennox was born in Northern Ireland and made England his permanent home, while retaining his Ulster charm.

“C. S. Lewis was a brilliant intellectual. But he was an Irishman, you know,” he says with a smile. “There’s a warmth there, a visceral nature . . . he had a deep interest in understanding where people were coming from, and to relate his Christian faith to helping them.”

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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 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 War over Liberal Democracy

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

Fatalism about liberal democracy is nothing new and has always found a disaffected audience. Left-wing politicians, writers, academics, activists: for decades they have denounced the Western liberal project as the primal cause of racism, inequality and exploitation. This time, though, the most strident prophets of gloom are residents of the cultural and religious right. Liberalism has collapsed, they tell us, because it was steeped in sin from its birth: it has failed “because it was true to itself.”

The conservative critics of liberalism offer an important and often penetrating analysis of our social ills. The epidemic of loneliness, the rampant materialism, the dissolution of ties to family and community—these are fearsome problems. Yet the true object of their complaint lies in the very origins of the liberal order: its foundational beliefs and ideals. The right-wing condemnation of liberal democracy—supported by intellectual sins of omission and outright distortions of fact—is as mistaken as that of the radical left.

Behind their protest, one detects a wistful nostalgia for the pre-modern world, an attachment to the medieval concepts of virtue, community and authority. In this, they fail to reckon seriously, if at all, with the sins of Christendom: the denigration of individual conscience, the criminalization of dissent, the corrosive entanglement of church and state, the hedonism of clerical leadership and the deeply rooted anti-Semitism. The Catholic medieval project, for all its achievements, ultimately failed to uphold one of the most transformative ideas of the Jewish and Christian traditions: the freedom and dignity of every human soul.

The conservative critics of liberalism thus ignore its actual historical beginnings. The attempt to construct a Christian society through coercion led to the betrayal of the most basic biblical and humanistic ideals. The quest for a unified community, once idolized, unleashed a long campaign of repression and terror. This, at root, is what produced the existential crisis of Christendom.

Yet this catastrophic failure—judged as a deep contradiction of the life and teachings of Jesus—generated a robustly Christian response. In this sense, the liberal project began as a protest: whispered in the Christian humanism of Erasmus, quickened by Luther’s Reformation, advanced by John Locke’s biblical vision of natural rights and culminating in James Madison’s religiously rooted republicanism. The abandonment of liberalism—as suggested by its critics—will lead where it always has led: to widespread ignorance, servitude, tyranny and totalitarianism. Understanding and defending liberalism’s historical achievement is the first step toward any serious effort at cultural renewal.

The Christianization of the Roman Empire brought with it profound reforms in European law, politics and society. The Catholic Church ended Rome’s gladiatorial games, established institutions to care for the poor and abolished human slavery. The universities founded by the church in Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Toulouse were an innovation: institutions devoted primarily to higher learning. At its best, the monastic tradition helped to dignify the concept of work, challenged the materialism of medieval society, extolled the disciplines of prayer and the study of the Scriptures, and strengthened the relationship between Christian belief and Christian virtue.

Nevertheless, the medieval church eventually replicated—and institutionalized—the repressive habits of pagan Rome. By the eleventh century, the Roman pontiff embodied the desire of the church to impose its inflexible will on the entire Western Christian world.

In 1075, in an effort to end the emperor’s intrusion into church affairs, Pope Gregory VII issued “Dictates of the Pope,” an utterly revolutionary document in church-state relations. Among other propositions, it asserted the infallibility of the church and authority of the pope over every living creature—including every political authority. “He himself may be judged by no one,” the pope declared, adding that “all princes shall kiss his feet.” He even granted himself the power to depose emperors. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII reaffirmed these claims in his Unam Sanctam (“One Holy”): “We declare, state, and define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”

Conservative critics of modernity properly fault those enlightenment thinkers who promoted “radical individualism” under the banner of liberty. One of the consequences, they explain, is a relentless quest for political power that renders democratic self-government impotent. The rise of the omni-competent state is indeed a formidable problem.

Yet it is not an entirely novel problem. In asserting claims of supremacy for the Roman pontiff, Gregory began by “looking within his own breast” for authority: an expression of individual autonomy that would make enlightenment philosophes blush. By attempting to consolidate in a single individual unprecedented—and unchallengeable—religious and political power, the church endorsed a theory of governance that would rival the political absolutism of Thomas Hobbes. By overreaching, the medieval church discredited itself before the emerging power centers of Europe.

There were other self-inflicted wounds. The Renaissance popes—who evidently inspired Mario Puzzo’s The Godfather —were notorious for their venality and greed in their own day. Clerical bribery, nepotism, sexual immorality, ruthless violence: these were open secrets among a disillusioned laity. Meanwhile, the sale of religious relics and indulgences invited the rank commercialization of the gospel. Patrick Deneen, a Catholic political scientist at Notre Dame, excoriates liberalism for promoting “hedonistic titillation” and a society obsessed with “consumption, appetite and detachment.” The critique neatly describes the ecclesiastical culture of late medieval Europe.

s between church and state, however, were not the only cause of the deepening crisis of Christendom. The gravest issue was its domestic policy: confronting the religiously unorthodox. Unlike ancient Rome, the Holy Roman Empire would not tolerate religious pluralism within its borders. No Christian thinker did more to legitimize the use of force against religious dissenters than Augustine of Hippo.

The patristic works of Origin, Jerome, Ambrose and others had cited the Bible to anathematize heterodox belief. But it was Augustine (354–430) who interpreted Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast in Luke’s gospel—“compel them to come in, that my house may be full”—as a rationale for the use of force against heretics. For Augustine, coercion of this kind was “a just persecution” aimed at rescuing souls from damnation and preventing the heretical disease from spreading. “The church persecutes out of love,” he wrote, “the ungodly out of cruelty.”

Thus, the greatest authority in Western Christianity—whose writings were disseminated widely in medieval Europe—put his stamp on state-sanctioned violence against the unorthodox. So entrenched was the Augustinian doctrine that the seventeenth-century philosopher, Pierre Bayle, a convert to Protestantism, was moved to compose a 600-page (in modern type) rebuttal. “I don’t think it possible to imagine anything more impious, or more injurious to Jesus Christ, or more fatal in its Consequences,” he argued in A Philosophical Commentary , “than his having given Christians a general Precept to make Conversions by Constraint.”

Nevertheless, a theology of coercion would instruct European society for well over a thousand years. It helped to underwrite the Inquisition: church tribunals created to root out heresy—a capital offense—and reconcile heretics to the church. First authorized by a church council in 1229 in France, clerical leaders vowed to “diligently, faithfully, and frequently seek out heretics” in their parishes. Church courts to judge the accused soon were established throughout Europe.

We need not overstate the brutalities of the Inquisition. Those judged guilty of heresy who renounced their views could find mercy and be restored to the church. Large public executions—like the two hundred Cathars burned at the stake at Verona in 1278—were rare. The machinery of the Inquisition was never as efficient as its proponents claimed. Nevertheless, over the span of six centuries, tens of thousands of people met violent deaths, their property seized and their families left destitute, for one reason: they dared to think differently about God than the established order.

In his much-discussed book, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen fails to mention this feature of Christendom. Instead, he argues that the medieval cultivation of virtue was “a central defense against tyranny” and one of the distinguishing marks of European Christianity. “Protection of rights of individuals and the belief inviolable human dignity, if not always consistently recognized and practiced, were nonetheless philosophical achievements of premodern medieval Europe,” he writes. Rod Dreher, an editor at The American Conservative , brushes aside church abuses by extolling the “enchanted world” of medieval Europe, with its consciousness of spiritual realities. Medieval men and women “carried within their imagination a powerful vision of integration,” he writes in The Benedict Option . “In the medieval consensus, men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”

These are essentially pious fictions. The tragedy of Christendom—the everyday reality for ordinary men and women—was the establishment of a moral bond between Christianity and a culture of coercion, betrayal and terror. The church of the martyrs had transformed itself into the church of the inquisitors.

The use of torture, previously reserved for crimes against the state, became an integral part of church discipline. Unless the accused named others guilty of heresy—neighbors or family members—their confessions often were rejected. Gian Pietro Carafa, named pope in 1555, expressed a mental outlook closer to that of a Soviet KGB agent than a follower of Christ: “Even if my own father were a heretic,” he declared, “I would gather the wood to burn him.” Spiritual unity came at a great human cost.

This aggressive stance was in fact fueled by anxiety, a deep insecurity about the integrity of the entire medieval project. One expression of the insecurity was the impulse to censor: the creation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Another was the impulse to dogmatize: the construction of rigid boundaries defining acceptable belief. A third tendency was to exclude: the marginalization of dissenters from civic and political life. The latter impulse helps to explain European anti-Semitism, what historian Paul Johnson has called “a disease of the mind.”

The disease spread like a plague throughout the latter Middle Ages, when power struggles with the state, clashes with Islam and the growth of new heresies combined to put the church on the defensive. Patristic and medieval sources offered a basis for the toleration of Jews in Christian society. Like Muslims, Jews were to be tolerated in the hope that they could be persuaded to convert to Christianity. Throughout the Middle Ages, the papacy opposed their forced conversion, and they enjoyed a qualified autonomy in their practice of Judaism.

Yet, beginning in the thirteenth century, writes historian Mark Cohen, papal protection for the Jews was replaced by “hostility and a strong desire to exclude the infidel Jews from the company of Christians.” Other medieval texts justifying the use of force against Jews—accused of the “ritual murder” of Christian children—came into play. Dress codes entered authoritative canon law under Pope Gregory IX. Jews increasingly fell under a shadow of suspicion and endured outbursts of intense violence. During the Black Death in the 1340s, for example, Jews were massacred across Germany, Flanders and elsewhere. Copies of the Talmud were burned, and many Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity. The polices of subjugation, restriction, and exclusion finally led to expulsion: beginning in England (1290), followed by France (1306), Portugal (1496), Provence (1498), Saxony (1536), Bohemia (1541) and the Papal States (1569). In 1492, under the sway of the Spanish Inquisition, Spain ordered the expulsion of its entire Jewish population, roughly 200,000 people. Tens of thousands of refugees perished trying to find safe haven.

The apologists for Christendom either ignore these excesses wholesale or argue that they were negligible compared to the atrocities of the twentieth century—and quite modest compared to the legal practices of medieval Europe. As one canon lawyer put it recently for the National Review : “torture was ubiquitous in courts of the time, and the Inquisition’s use of it, while objectively horrific, was downright progressive when seen in context.” All of this evades the crux of the crisis: the transformation of the gospel, with its message of divine love and spiritual freedom, into an ideology based on exclusion and subjugation.

A small but growing number of thinkers discerned a spiritual malaise overshadowing the church. The Roman See managed to silence the voices of Jan Huss and John Wycliffe, but it had a much more difficult task in the person of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), a classical scholar and a Catholic theologian who defined for generations the reform movement known as Christian humanism. Erasmus used the tools of classical learning to draw believers into a deeper knowledge of Scripture, especially the message of the gospels, which he believed had been effectively abandoned in much of European society.

Nowhere was this deficit of piety more glaring than in politics. In The Education of a Christian Prince , Erasmus argued that a prince is set above his subjects politically, but not morally. The prince, in fact, is “a man ruling men, a free man ruling free men and not wild beasts.” It is “a mockery,” Erasmus wrote, when rulers “regard as slaves those whom Christ redeemed with the same blood as redeemed you, whom he set free into the same freedom as you…” Elsewhere he asked: “What makes a prince a great man, except the consent of his subjects?” In all this, Erasmus anticipates the Lockean model of consensual government.

Likewise, the church and its ecclesiastical leadership came under a withering assessment. In works such as In Praise of Folly , Erasmus lambasted the moral turpitude of clerical leadership: the warrior popes, heresy trials, priestly concubines and lust for wealth and worldly power. “If Satan needed a vicar he could find none fitter than you,” Peter tells Pope Julius at the gates of heaven. “I brought heathen Rome to acknowledge Christ; you have made it heathen again.” Although Erasmus never developed a theory of religious freedom, he condemned the persecuting temper of Rome. “Compulsion is incompatible with sincerity,” he wrote, “and nothing is pleasing to Christ unless it is voluntary.”

Erasmus called his reformist vision “the philosophy of Christ,” meaning a thoroughgoing return to the life and teachings of Jesus. The gateway to personal and social renewal, he argued, was the Bible, which must become as familiar to laymen as it was to priests and bishops. In 1516, Erasmus produced a revolutionary translation of the New Testament, based on a study of original Greek manuscripts. His text cast doubt on the accuracy of the Latin (Vulgate) translation, first made by Jerome in 382 and endorsed as authoritative by the church.

The work set off a storm of controversy. One critic warned that if the Vulgate was in error, “the authority of theologians would be shaken, and indeed the Catholic Church would collapse from the foundations.” According to biographer Johan Huizinga, Erasmus appeared to many admirers as “the bearer of a new liberty of the mind.”

Disaffected by the materialism of the church, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther (1483–1546) became emboldened by the example of Erasmus, whom he regarded as “our ornament and our hope.” Erasmus’ Greek New Testament arrived in Wittenberg just as Luther was lecturing on the book of Romans. It became the working text for his own translation of the Bible into German, the publishing event that shattered the hegemony of the Catholic Church.

More than 150 years before John Locke attacked the Hobbesian concept of an all-powerful Leviathan, Luther led an assault on the “tyranny of Rome” and its “perverse leviathan” of religious mandates that reduced the faithful to slavery. Luther’s watchword was freedom, proclaimed in his incendiary tract, “The Freedom of a Christian.” “One thing, and only one thing, is necessary for Christian life, righteousness, and freedom,” he wrote. “That one thing is the most holy Word of God, the gospel of Christ.”

By forcibly controlling the interpretation of Scripture, Luther claimed, the Roman Curia was proving itself “more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ever was.” By elevating its priestly class and demanding obedience to its teaching on works, penance and pilgrimage, the church had degenerated into “so terrible a tyranny that no heathen empire or earthly power can be compared with it.”

Luther’s doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers”—a message of spiritual freedom and equality—was violently at odds with the entire superstructure of Christendom. Under the medieval system, only the monastic orders, with their vows of celibacy and poverty, could produce the “spiritual athletes” of the church. While modern admirers like Rod Dreher hope to recapture the monastic spirit, Luther experienced the monasteries as hotbeds of avarice and pride. He abolished them. “Here Christian brotherhood has expired and shepherds have become wolves,” he complained. “All of us who have been baptized are priests without distinction.”

The papal bull of 1520 excommunicating Martin Luther from the Catholic Church accused him of promoting forty-one heresies and “pestiferous errors.” One of the alleged errors was his view that “the burning of heretics is against the will of the Holy Spirit.” Luther’s challenge to the church involved not only a disagreement about the gospel and the authority of the Bible; it set off an enduring debate in the West about the rights of individual conscience in matters of faith.

Finding inspiration in the example of the first-century Christians, Luther elevated the individual believer, armed with the Bible, above any earthly authority. This was the heart of his defiance at the Diet of Worms: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand.” Neither prince nor pope could invade the sanctuary of his conscience. This, he proclaimed, was the “inestimable power and liberty” belonging to every Christian.

Over the next two centuries, every important advocate of political equality, pluralism and religious freedom in the West would enlist Luther’s insights. Yet no one did so to greater effect than English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). Combining Luther’s defense of individual conscience with the Erasmian “philosophy of Christ,” Locke imagined an entirely new political community: a society that guaranteed equal justice to all of its citizens, regardless of religious belief.

Locke’s career is central to the story of how the West defeated two of the most intractable problems of medieval European society: political absolutism and militant religion. In seventeenth-century Europe, the problems were inextricably linked; both drew nourishment from eccentric interpretations of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. No progress toward a more liberal and tolerant society was possible, Locke reasoned, without a revolution in the theological outlook of political and religious authorities.

This is the fundamental objective of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government . Thomas Hobbes made a secular argument for political absolutism in The Leviathan , but by the 1680s, when Locke composed his Two Treatises , absolutism was wrapped in biblical citations supporting patriarchy. Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, despite its vastly different theological outlook, shared with Leviathan one fundamental idea: the perpetual and complete submission of every subject to an arbitrary sovereign.

For Locke, this was a one-way ticket to tyranny. If political authority is absolute and unquestionable, then the human race is a slave race. Authors such as Deneen, Dreher, Christopher Ferrara, Yoram Hazony and other conservative critics of liberalism make no meaningful distinction between Locke and Hobbes. They do not appear to have taken their historical task seriously: “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation,” Locke began his work, “that ‘tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for it.” Hobbesian-style servitude was exactly what Locke risked his life combatting. Indeed, his First Treatise —often ignored by political theorists—offers an exacting examination of the Hebrew Bible to reveal no rationale whatsoever for absolute rule.

What, then, is the basis for any political authority? This is Locke’s great objective in his Second Treatise , in which he enlists the language and moral authority of man’s natural rights. As he asserts the freedom and equality of every human being, Locke’s biblical anthropology is on display:

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possession; 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; they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure.

A legitimate political society, Locke reasons, must respect God’s relationship with his people. In his wisdom and with his divine power, God calls each person to work out his will in the world. Created, called and sent by him: they belong to him and to no one else. Unlike Hobbes, Locke postulates a “state of nature” containing a fundamental moral law—that human life must be protected so that it can fulfill its divine calling and serve its true sovereign. Political absolutism, by definition, robs God of his divine prerogative. The only government capable of upholding God’s moral law, Locke concludes, must be based on the consent of the governed.

Herein lies the great contribution of Locke’s Two Treatises : like no other author, he offered a rational, moral and theological basis for consensual government. As historian Peter Laslett summarizes it, Locke established a set of principles for political equality “more effective and persuasive than any before written in the English language.”

Yet this is only part of Locke’s achievement. In A Letter Concerning Toleration , Locke combines the political doctrine of consent with a radical reinterpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus. No tolerant, pluralistic society is possible, he argued, unless it is sustained by a broader culture nurtured by a gospel of divine mercy.

Locke’s Letter completely rejects the prevailing view of religious identity as being rooted in family, geography or political regimes. He argues that faith cannot be inherited; it must be appropriated through individual judgment and consent. The same holds true for membership in a community of believers: the church must be understood as a “free and voluntary society.” Voluntarism in matters of faith, he wrote, is confirmed by “the perfect example of the Prince of Peace,” who never compelled anyone to follow him or embrace his teachings.

Locke’s conservative detractors detect in all this an atomistic individualism. Writes R.R. Reno, editor of the Catholic journal First Things : “Locke’s ideal society is…a free association of individuals, unbound by duties that transcend their choices.” In Liberty: The God that Failed , Christopher Ferrara, president of the American Catholic Lawyers Association, claims that Locke’s vision of liberty is limitless: “For Locke, as for Hobbes, freedom means the absence of restraint on human action.” Among these critics, Locke emerges as an almost demonic opponent of Christianity and God’s moral law. “Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty,” according to Deneen, “by which he means our liberation from the constraints of the natural world.”

A more misleading and fraudulent portrayal of Locke’s philosophy would be hard to imagine. Indeed, Locke seems closer than his critics to traditional Christian doctrine when he explains the nature and importance of authentic faith: “The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.” Coercion produces hypocrites, not converts.

Any serious reading of Locke’s work reveals a mind animated by belief in a universal moral law, in the immortality of the soul, and in the hope of eternal life. “The law of Nature stands as an eternal rule to all men,” he wrote, “legislators as well as others.” Declarations that “every man has an immortal soul, capable of eternal happiness or misery” appear repeatedly in his many writings on religious toleration. Precisely because the stakes are so high, Locke argued, the central obligation of government is to protect the freedom of every individual to discover the truth about God and his moral demands, according to his conscience. Government has no higher purpose than this. More to the point: any government that fails to uphold this natural right of religious freedom forfeits its legitimacy.

What kind of a political community, then, does Locke envision? Locke lived through the turbulence of the Restoration (1660–1689), a renewed struggle between king and parliament amid an effort to reimpose religious conformity (via the Anglican Church) throughout England. The latter project was an abject failure. Wherever it was attempted, whether in Protestant or Catholic countries, the unifying vision of Christendom produced the same results: it treated ordinary, God-fearing citizens as criminals, turned neighbor against neighbor and sent thousands to prison or execution. Religious pluralism was a sociological reality in post-Reformation Europe. Locke’s genius—counter-intuitive to establishment elites—was to imagine a political society that could draw strength from diversity.

The just state, he argued, will guarantee the equal rights of all its citizens, regardless of religious identity: “The sum of all we drive at is, that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” The civic ethos for which Locke pleads in A Letter Concerning Toleration is that people treat their fellow citizens as they themselves wish to be treated. “Nay, if we may openly speak the truth…neither Pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth, because of his religion.”

Elsewhere in the Letter, Locke makes clear that he includes law-abiding Catholics among those to be treated with equity—a radical proposition in a Protestant nation seething with anti-Catholic prejudice.

Catholic thinkers such as Adrian Vermeule, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, simply do not take Locke at his word. “Both politically and theoretically,” he writes in First Things , “hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth.” The accusation is groundless. In the Lockean commonwealth, even the most despised religious minorities would be granted full rights as citizens. Impartial justice for all religious believers: is this not the political application of the golden rule, the very heart of Christian morality?

It would take another century before the Lockean vision of a just and pluralist society would find political expression: in America’s Constitutional Convention of 1787. Virtually all of America’s Founders viewed religious freedom as the bedrock of republican self-government. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, in a 1947 ruling, put it this way:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

This conviction is on spectacular display not only in the religion clauses of the First Amendment, but in James Madison’s precursor to the convention debates over religion, his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments . Written as a response to plans for a general assessment tax to support churches in Virginia, its defense of liberty of conscience nevertheless transcended local politics. Indeed, in no other Founding document are the woeful lessons of Christendom, as well as the insights of Erasmus, Luther and Locke, put to such powerful effect.

To many of Madison’s European counterparts, the religious wars of the post-Reformation period seemed to validate the claims of the soft theocrats: diversity of religious belief invited sectarian violence and social disorder. Yet Madison looked at the historical record—and at the American experiment thus far—and came to the opposite conclusion. “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial,” he wrote. “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” He rejected any form of religious establishment because:

[I]t will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion has produced among its several sects. Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world in consequence of vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish Religious discord by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion. Time has at length revealed the true remedy. Every relaxation of narrow and rigorous policy, wherever it has been tried, has been found to assuage the disease.

Here was Madison’s “true remedy” for sectarian strife: freedom of conscience in matters of faith. Civic peace and political prosperity could be achieved, he argued—but only if the political authority ensured “equal and complete liberty” for all religious groups.

Following Luther and Locke, Madison describes conscience as the sacred realm of belief involving “the duty which we owe our Creator… It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him.” Our religious commitments, he explained, must be carried out through reason and conviction, not force or violence. “The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.”

The conservative critics of liberalism insist that its emphasis on freedom was intended to release individuals from their moral obligations to God and community. The Framers’ commitment to religious liberty, writes Ferrara in Liberty: The God that Failed , was “a massive bait-and-switch operation,” one that “requires not just the subordination of Christianity by the State but also the triumph of Liberty over Christianity as a competing creed.” The original and fundamental aim of liberalism, according to Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed , was “achieving supreme and complete freedom” by disabusing individuals of any concern for the common good. The Founders’ hidden agenda, he writes, was to “inculcate civic indifference and privatism among the citizenry.” This would allow the State to consolidate its power and marginalize religion from public life.

These conspiratorial tropes, oddly reminiscent of Marxist narratives, have no basis in the historical record. Locke was not content with “narrow measures of bare justice” in the pluralistic society he advanced. “Charity, bounty, and liberality must be added to it,” he wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration . “This the Gospel enjoins, this reason directs, and this that natural fellowship we are born into requires of us.” Madison explicitly insists upon freedom of conscience not merely as a right, but as a religious obligation: “what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator… This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.” This is why the Founders, avid readers of Locke, considered religious freedom a natural right: a pre-political right, superior to the ordinary claims of government or civil society. “[F]reedom of conscience and freedom of choice are not the same; where conscience dictates, choice decides,” writes political scientist Michael Sandel. “Where freedom of conscience is at stake, the relevant right is to exercise a duty, not make a choice. This was the issue for Madison…”

This view of religious conscience was reflected not only in all of the original state constitutions, but also in the pulpit oratory of the period. “The members of a civil state do retain their natural liberty or right of judging for themselves in matters of religion,” proclaimed Yale minister Elisha Williams. “Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion.” The unconcealed objective of the Founders—consistent with the cultural assumptions of most Americans—was not to render religion impotent, but to protect its independence from government meddling. Their common aim was to increase religion’s moral influence in civic and political life.

Madison’s Memorial helped to defeat the religious assessment bill, clearing the way for Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, a defense of the rights of conscience that shaped the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Herein lies the singular insight of their civic vision: liberty of conscience as the first freedom in the constitutional order, an inalienable right intended to anchor the other civil liberties in the Bill of Rights. To achieve this, there could be no national religion, no attempt to create a unified religious community—in short, no revival of Christendom.

This, in the end, appears to be the principal cause of the conservative antagonism toward liberal democracy. “The American model is, in sum, terminally flawed,” writes Christopher Ferrara, “by failing to allow the Church to guide the temporal powers according to the majestic demands of the divine and natural laws.” Patrick Deneen complains that modern liberalism “generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.” He seems strangely unaware that this was precisely the situation in medieval Europe on the eve of the Reformation. This was the condition of European society that reformers such as Erasmus, Luther and Locke sought to change. As they experienced it firsthand, the bond between faith and virtue had been shattered.

Yet the defenders of the medieval order disavow these unpleasant realities. Laments Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option : “The West has lost the golden thread that binds us to God, Creation, and each other.” The golden thread, if it ever existed, was lost long before the arrival of liberal democracy. The point must not be missed: outrage over what Christendom had become—over its betrayal of Christian ideals—sent successive generations on a quest for a more just society.

The Founders took note. In a letter to F.L. Schaeffer, dated 1821, Madison explained that the American model of religious liberty

illustrates the excellence of a system which, by a due distinction, to which the genius and courage of Luther led the way, between what is due to Caesar and what is due God, best promotes the discharge of both obligations.

Hence the profound significance of the American experiment: by establishing the principles of freedom and justice for people of all faiths—in law and in culture—the United States has avoided the sectarian hatreds that drenched the European continent in blood.

These lessons were lost on the French revolutionaries, by contrast, who looked to the secular theorists of the radical enlightenment for guidance. “Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Social Contract . “Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime.” The Founders unanimously rejected that view. In their republic, faith and freedom were made allies from the start, and the result has been the most stable and religiously diverse society in the history of Western Civilization. Despite its many shortcomings, the United States has established an ethos of inclusion, equality and social justice that is the envy of the world.

The architects of this new liberal order knew what they were doing; they knew their history and understood their debt to an earlier generation of reformers. In this, they looked to Locke, not to Voltaire.

Ironically, in their religious critique of secular materialism, Deneen and company have imbibed a thoroughly secular narrative of the American Founding. They fail to grasp the fundamental divide between the French and American Revolutions—between the radical enlightenment of the former and the moderate enlightenment of the latter, tempered as it was by evangelical Christianity and Lockean liberalism. Locke’s vision of freedom drew its energy from the Bible’s emphasis on authentic faith, a legacy of the Christian humanism of Erasmus. For these reformers, the scandal of Christendom was its obsession with rituals and orthodoxy over genuine belief, expressing itself in charity and love. “Jesus Christ, bringing by revelation from heaven the true religion to mankind,” Locke wrote, “reunited these two again, religion and morality, as the inseparable parts of the worship of God, which ought never to have been separated.”

It is here where liberalism’s critics descend into a swamp of intellectual confusion. “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,” writes Yoram Hazony in First Things . “A main goal of Locke’s philosophy,” Deneen writes, “is to expand the prospects of our liberty—defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites—through the auspices of state.” Nonsense. As we have seen, none of these thinkers who broke from the medieval worldview imagined freedom as an end in itself. From both their published writings and private correspondence, this theme emerges like the morning star: the supreme objective in securing political and religious liberty was not the acquisition of property or the pursuit of pleasure. It was to make possible the pursuit of truth and the cultivation of virtue, framed by the moral precepts of the Bible.

Nevertheless, the rich and complex relationship between Christianity, freedom and virtue in the liberal project—culminating in the American Founding—is largely ignored by the critics. They are correct, of course, in decrying the recent distortions of the concept of liberty that have unleashed a raft of social and cultural ills. Their critique of the unrestrained self that seeks political power to pursue selfish ends is sobering.

Yet their theorizing seems grossly disconnected from the concrete advances in the defense of human freedom and dignity made possible by political liberalism—what one reviewer for The Weekly Standard calls “a crime against memory.” There is, indeed, an absence of gratitude: a flippant indifference to the courageous and hard-fought battles of earlier generations to advance the cause of freedom. Lacking a deep sense of the historical challenges to sustaining a just society, the naysayers are prepared to curse the entire liberal democratic endeavor.

In this, they seem to have joined the ranks of the aggrieved utopians who typically populate the cultural left. “If the American right wants to copy all the flaws of the New Left, I guess the republic will survive,” writes Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston College, for Commonweal Magazine . “But it sure would be nice to have a conservatism that takes reality seriously.” The conservative fatalism of Deneen, Dreher and company provides yet another example of why sustained attention to our civilization’s achievements, as well as its shortcomings, is the first requirement of responsible citizenship.

America’s Jewish community bears witness to that history. Nowhere outside of Israel have the Jewish people found a more welcoming political community. The reason, according to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, can be found in the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Sacks explains that these truths “are anything but self-evident. They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hierarchical society the world has ever known. They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible.”

The modern crisis of liberalism is real enough, but its critics seem too embittered to offer a realistic path forward. Their disillusionment is not unlike that of a century ago, in the aftermath of the First World War. Book titles published in the 1920s and 1930s tell the tale: The End of the World ; The Decay of Capitalist Civilization ; The Twilight of the White Races ; The Ordeal of This Generation ; Modern Civilization on Trial ; The Problem of Decadence ; and Spengler’s The Decline of the West , to name just a few. For many authors and intellectuals, the problem was liberal democracy itself. Socialists, communists and fascists seized upon this disillusionment, and we know the rest of the story: the only forces that stood between civilization and barbarism were the defenders of the liberal democratic order.

This salient historical fact helps to define our own situation: an age of failed states, radical Islamic jihad and authoritarian aggression. The fiercest critics of the liberal project—from either the political left or right—typically have little personal experience with societies that lack democratic norms. They seem unable to imagine what the international order would look like absent the powerful influence of the Western conception of natural rights and human equality. They enjoy the prosperity and stability of the West, even as they excoriate the ideals that produced it. James Madison, in “Advice to My Country,” published posthumously in 1834, warned against a posture of self-flagellation:

The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy of it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.

America’s transparent enemies—the purveyors of relativism, materialism, tribalism and statism—present dangers enough to the republic. No other serpents are required. Conservatives who traffic in cynicism about the entire liberal project may fancy themselves doing the Lord’s work. But their condemnation of the democratic ideals of freedom and equality as inherently perverse seems quite at home in the devil’s playground. Unchecked, they would rob us of the sources of our democratic strength. They must be resisted.

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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 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

Weekly Standard: Tolkien, Lewis, and the Lessons of World War I

This article was originally posted at The Weekly Standard.

In the spring of 431 b.c., Athens and Sparta went to war. Their dispute soon enveloped the entire Greek world. Thucydides, an eyewitness to the fighting, wrote that it would be “more momentous than any previous conflict.” He was right. Dragging on for 27 years, the Peloponnesian War anticipated the suffering and deprivation associated with modern conflicts: the atrocities, refugees, disease, starvation, and slaughter. The war destroyed what remained of Greek democracy and left the Greek city-states vulnerable to demagogues and foreign invasion.

A hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918, another war begun by two European states—a local squabble that escalated into global conflict—came to an end. Struggling to describe its scope and destructive power, the combatants called it the Great War. Like its Greek counterpart, the war ravaged soldiers and civilians. Over the course of four years, roughly 20 million people were killed, another 21 million wounded. National economies were ruined; empires collapsed. The war to “make the world safe for democracy” left European democracy in tatters.

And more than that: The core commitments of Western civilization—to reason, truth, virtue, and freedom—were thrown into doubt. T. S. Eliot saw the postwar world as a wasteland of human weariness. “I think we are in rats’ alley,” he wrote, “where the dead men lost their bones.” Many rejected faith in God and embraced materialistic alternatives: communism, fascism, totalitarianism, scientism, and eugenics.

Yet two extraordinary authors—soldiers who survived the horror of the trenches—rebelled against the spirit of the age. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who met at Oxford in 1926 and formed a lifelong friendship, both used the experience of war to shape their Christian imaginations. In works such as The Lord of the Rings, The Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien and Lewis rejected the substitute religions of their day and assailed utopian schemes to perfect humanity. Like no other authors of their age, they used the language of myth to restore the concept of the epic hero who battles against the forces of darkness and the will to power.

One of the most striking effects of the war was an acute anxiety, especially in educated circles, that something was profoundly wrong with the rootstock of Western society: a “sickness in the racial body.” Book titles of the 1920s and ’30s tell the story: Social Decay and Regeneration (1921); The Decay of Capitalist Civilization (1923); The Twilight of the White Races (1926); The Need for Eugenic Reform (1926); Will Civilization Crash? (1927); Darwinism and What It Implies (1928); The Sterilization of the Unfit (1929); and The Problem of Decadence (1931).

The promotion of eugenics—from the Greek for “good birth”—began in Great Britain in the years leading up to World War I. But it gained international support in the period between the two world wars, just as Tolkien and Lewis were establishing their academic careers. The aim of the movement was to use the tools of science and public policy to improve the human gene pool: through immigration restriction, marriage laws, birth control, and sterilization. The movement’s first task was to educate and persuade a potentially skeptical public. Sir Francis Galton, the British sociologist and cousin of Charles Darwin who coined the term, explained that eugenics

must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for eugenics co-operate with the workings of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.

The success of the movement was breathtaking. In The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars, historian Richard Overy writes that eugenics advocates soon represented mainstream science, becoming affiliated with leading academic and scientific organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. “The concept appealed,” he writes, “because it gave to the popular malaise a clear scientific foundation.” At an international eugenics conference in Paris in 1926, Ronald Fisher, later a leading Cambridge geneticist, suggested that the new science would “solve the problem of decay of civilizations.” Two years later, at University College London, Charles Bond argued that biological factors were “the chief source of the decline of past civilizations and of earlier races.” At the 1932 Congress of Eugenics in New York, an international cast of geneticists, biologists, and doctors were assured that eugenics would become “the most important influence in human advancement.”

The barbarism of the First World War seemed to have put civilization on trial. In the desperate attempt to rescue humanity from itself, the science of eugenics appeared to provide an answer. What it supplied, instead, was a pseudoscientific rationale for racist ideologies. Benito Mussolini, who swept to power in Italy in 1922, was the first European leader to exploit the language of eugenics to establish a fascist regime. Science and government would work together to improve the Italian race. One of Mussolini’s earliest admirers, of course, was Adolf Hitler. Nazism, according to Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess, was “applied biology.” The Aryan race was the eugenic ideal, and maintaining its purity became the focus of Hitler’s national policy.

What’s astonishing in retrospect is how little resistance the eugenics movement met as it captured the imaginations of the best and brightest in the West—scientists, clerics, academics, jurists. But among the motley crew of holdouts were two instructors in English literature at Oxford, Tolkien and Lewis, who enlisted their literary talents to confront eugenics. In That Hideous Strength (1945), the concluding book of his Space Trilogy, Lewis takes direct aim at the assumptions underlying the eugenics agenda. He tells the story of an English couple threatened by a demonic force, represented by the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E), attempting to take over the university town of Edgestow. The aim of the N.I.C.E. is to reeducate and remake humanity using the instruments of modern science, in a bid for world domination.

Lewis’s fictional antagonists wage an all-or-nothing contest for the future of the human race. Consider this exchange between Lord Feverstone, a leader of the Progressive Element at the university and collaborator with the N.I.C.E., and Mark Studdock, a university professor drawn into its orbit:

Feverstone: “Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest—which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”

Studdock: “What sort of thing have you in mind?”

Feverstone: “Quite simple and obvious things, at first—sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. . . . But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain . . . ”

Studdock: “But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”

Feverstone: “It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man.”

Lewis links eugenics with the totalitarian impulse. The devaluation of individuals—justified by scientific materialism—can only proceed through the coercive machinery of the state. Lewis was criticized for being “anti-science.” He denied the charge. “Under modern conditions,” he wrote in response to a critic, “any effective invitation to Hell will certainly appear in the guise of scientific planning.”

Although Tolkien shared Lewis’s disdain for the eugenic vision, he has been accused of promoting racism in his fictional works. In The Lord of the Rings, the free people of Middle-earth, mostly white, do battle with beast-like orcs sometimes described as “black-skinned.” Some of the races in his story, critics say, are presented as good and others as irredeemably evil.

But the most evocative and moving character in his story is the hobbit—from a race often ignored, underestimated, and denigrated by others—who emerges as the hero in the fierce struggle against Mordor. “My dear Frodo!” exclaims Gandalf the wizard. “Hobbits really are amazing creatures. . . . You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.” One of the moral triumphs of the work is the willingness of the disparate races of Middle-earth to put aside their differences and sacrifice for one another in the war against Sauron.

Tolkien began writing his epic story in 1937—just as fascist ideologies were dominating international politics—and continued working on it throughout the Second World War. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia two years before. And by 1938, Germany’s Jews had been stripped of their civil liberties. The Munich Agreement, signed that year, surrendered a portion of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for a promise of peace. Although Tolkien denied that his work was allegorical, he acknowledged in a 1938 letter to his publisher that his new story “was becoming more terrifying than the Hobbit. . . . The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it.” One of the narrative threads of The Lord of the Rings can be read as a conscious assault on the entire racist-totalitarian campaign.

The key to understanding the moral universe of Lewis and Tolkien can be found in a brief exchange in The Lord of the Rings, in Aragorn’s answer to Éomer, who asks how they ought to respond to the storm of evil thrust upon them. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them.” The same vision animates Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. All of its various creatures (bears, badgers, horses, moles, mice), along with a group of English children, are summoned to rescue Narnia from despotism and restore its rightful line of kings. “I’d rather be killed fighting for Narnia,” says Jill, “than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same.”

The perspective of these two Oxford friends is remarkable when we consider another of the pernicious effects of the First World War: the widespread erosion of the concept of individual freedom and moral responsibility. Literary critic Roger Sale has called the war “the single event most responsible for shaping the modern idea that heroism is dead.”

Consider what the soldiers at the Western Front were made to endure. The mortars, machine guns, tanks, poison gas, flamethrowers, barbed wire, and trench warfare: never before had technology and science so catastrophically conspired to obliterate man and nature. On average, more than 6,000 men were killed every day of the war. Their mutilated remains were consigned to graves scattered across Europe. The helpless individual soldier chewed up in the hellish machinery of modern warfare became a recurring motif of the postwar literature. In his All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Erich Maria Remarque described a generation of war veterans “broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.”

But the purveyors of fatalism found in Tolkien and Lewis implacable opponents. In the worlds they created, everyone has a role to play in the epic contest between Light and Darkness. No matter how desperate the circumstances, their characters are challenged to resist evil and choose the good. “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world,” wrote Tolkien. “Small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

As soldiers of the Great War, Tolkien and Lewis endured the most dehumanizing conditions ever experienced in a European conflict. Their generation then watched with dread as totalitarian ideologies threatened to dissolve the weakened moral norms of their civilization. Others, such as Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, raised the alarm but seemed pessimistic about the outcome. A New York Times review of That Hideous Strength discerned in Lewis a different spirit: “When Mr. Huxley wrote his bitter books his mood was one of cynical despair. Mr. Lewis, on the contrary, sounds a militant call to battle.”

Tolkien and Lewis possessed two great resources that helped them to overcome the cynicism of their age. The first was their deep attachment to the literary tradition of the epic hero, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. What matters supremely in these works is remaining faithful to the noble quest, regardless of the costs or the likelihood of victory. “The tragedy of the great temporal defeat remains for a while poignant, but ceases to be finally important,” Tolkien explained in his 1936 British Academy lecture on Beowulf. In the end, “the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries.”

The second great resource was their Christian faith: a view of the world that is both tragic and hopeful. War is a sign of the ruin and wreckage of human nature, they believed, but it can point the way to a life transformed by grace. For divine love can reverse human catastrophe. In the works of both authors we find the deepest source of hope for the human story: the return of the king. In Middle-earth that king is Aragorn, who brings “strength and healing” in his hands, “unto the ending of the world.” In Narnia, it is Aslan the Great Lion, who sacrifices his own life to restore “the long-lost days of freedom.” In both we encounter the promise of a rescuer who will make everything sad come untrue.

As the world marks the centennial of the end of the Great War and remembers the many lives swallowed up in its long shadow, here is a vision of human life worth recalling, too.

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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 the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

Wall Street Journal: What World War I taught the Clergy

This article was originally posted at Wall Street Journal.

The catastrophe of World War I, which ended 100 years ago Sunday, reshaped more than geopolitics. It also transformed a generation of Western Christians from holy crusaders into antiwar activists. This shift in thinking, coinciding with the rise of European fascism, contributed to the outbreak of World War II.

Religious leaders on both sides of the conflict demonized one another and conferred divine legitimacy on their war aims. In October 1914, German theologians endorsed a letter by prominent intellectuals that declared Kaiser Wilhelm II’s war policy a defensive necessity. In turn the Allies, backed by their national churches, characterized the German leader as “the Beast of Berlin.” London’s Bishop Arthur Winnington-Ingram said churches had a duty “to mobilize the nation for a holy war.” Germany, he argued, had abandoned Christianity for paganism. “The god the German leaders worship is an idol of the earth,” intoned G.A. Studdert Kennedy, one of Britain’s best-known chaplains: “a crude and cruel monster who lives on human blood.”

Although officially secular, the French government welcomed the crusading rhetoric of the Catholic clergy and helped lead the nation into a union sacrée. American Baptist leader Samuel Batten captured the apocalyptic mood when he called the war “a continuation of Christ’s sacrificial service for the redemption of the world.”

Four years of mechanized slaughter left the righteous crusade looking like an unholy debacle. With European democracy in tatters, a profound sense of disillusionment descended. The clergy were particularly affected.

By the early 1920s, churches on both sides of the Atlantic passed hundreds of resolutions renouncing war. Membership in peace societies exploded. In 1924 the Chicago Federation of Churches, representing 15 denominations, declared itself “unalterably opposed to war.” A nationwide poll found 60% of clergymen opposed any future war and nearly half vowed not to serve as wartime military chaplains.

The pacifist outlook culminated in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. Signatories, including the U.S., Germany, Japan and France, agreed to abandon war as a tool of national policy. Church leaders mobilized for passage. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in 1929. The Christian Century, liberal Protestantism’s leading journal, opined: “Today international war was banished from civilization.”

Yet within a decade, a series of political crises rendered the document moot. Japan invaded Manchuria, Mussolini marched into Ethiopia, and Hitler occupied the Rhineland and annexed Austria. Meanwhile in 1933, the University of Oxford’s debating society had decided overwhelmingly “that this House will under no circumstances fight for King and country.” Neither Britain nor France was in any mood to confront international aggression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt—with enthusiastic Christian support—signed the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936, banning military aid to any nation in wartime.

When Hitler orchestrated the Munich Agreement in 1938—a desperate act of democratic appeasement that dismembered Czechoslovakia for a promise of peace—church leaders rejoiced. “The peace of Munich was possible,” Jesuit priest John LaFarge Jr. wrote in the Catholic journal America, “because of the habits and methods of peacemaking learned through two decades of international intercourse in the halls of the League of Nations.” Within a year Germany invaded Poland.

Throughout the 1930s Christian leaders played down the differences between Western democracies and the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the Christian Century, denounced a potential Anglo-American alliance as “a war for imperialism.” Harry Emerson Fosdick, the popular social-gospel minister at New York’s Riverside Church, warned that American involvement in the war against Nazism would be “a colossal and futile disaster.”

Some Christian thinkers repented their pacifism as the Nazi blitzkrieg enveloped Europe. Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, on launching the magazine Christianity and Crisis, excoriated liberal churchmen for evading the problem of radical evil: “This utopianism contributed to the tardiness of the democracies in defending themselves against the perils of a new barbarism.” Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, who fought in France during the Great War, told a friend on the eve of World War II that “death would be much better than to live through another war.” Nevertheless, he saw no moral alternative in a world ravaged by the will to power.

“We know from the experience of the last twenty years,” Lewis wrote in 1944, “that a terrified and angry pacifism is one of the roads that lead to war.” It is a truth that bears repeating as the world reflects on the tragedy of World War I.

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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 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 Maker of Middle-earth, in Gorgeous Detail

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Oxford, England—After five months of ferocious and futile slaughter in “the Great War,” an Oxford undergraduate — knowing his deployment to the Western Front was inevitable — used his Christmas break in 1914 to cultivate his imagination. Twenty-two-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien began writing “The Story of Kullervo,” a heroic yet dark tale based on the Finnish saga The Kalevala. In May 1915, a year before he arrived in France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force, he painted a watercolor, “The Shores of Faery,” which places Kor, the city of the Elves, at its center. Accompanying the painting, in his sketchbook, is a poem with the same name, describing Valinor, the “Undying Lands” that would form part of the landscape of his legendarium. Tolkien’s taste for fantasy, he explained, was “quickened to full life by war.”

Such clues to the development of Tolkien’s creative imagination are beautifully assembled in “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth,” an exhibition by the Bodleian Library of Oxford University that represents the most thorough treatment of his life and work in decades. The collection includes draft manuscripts of his best-known works, such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as fan letters, family photographs, and dozens of drawings, maps, and watercolors that Tolkien created to illustrate his stories.

Indeed, the numerous sketches and paintings in the Bodleian’s Weston Library, which is hosting the exhibition, will enlighten even longtime Tolkien fans about the intensely visual and artistic aspect of his creativity. For many years, Tolkien’s four children — John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla — were the recipients of his “Father Christmas” letters, which usually included images drawn with ink or watercolor. His invented stories for his children ultimately led to The Hobbit (1937), and he brought to the manuscript a series of artistic renderings to flesh out his vision. “I never could draw,” he wrote to his publisher with characteristic modesty, “and the half-baked intimations of it seem wholly to have left me.” Nevertheless, Tolkien produced dozens of drawings and watercolors, like the enchantingly pastoral “Hobbiton,” to help capture the forests and mountains and fields of Middle-earth.

The Bodleian’s Tolkien archivist, Catherine McIlwaine, has given the exhibition a tremendous vitality by placing Tolkien in the full context of his life: his role as son, scholar, tutor, author, husband, father, and friend. On display is a tattered portion of Tolkien’s 1926 prose translation of Beowulf, the Old English epic poem that he studied and taught for most of his professional life. He considered it the “greatest of the surviving works of ancient English poetic art,” and his college lectures on the poem drew large and enthusiastic audiences. “Dear Prof. Tolkien,” begins a 1941 letter from Betty Bond, one of Tolkien’s students. “Some of us among the home students would like to tell you how much we have enjoyed your ‘Beowulf’ lectures this term, and to thank you not only for enlightening but also entertaining us for two hours a week. We hope that we shall now be able to face the terrors of schools [examinations] as fearlessly as Beowulf met Grendel!”

Other letters in the collection capture moments of intense poignancy. “Dear Daddy, I am so glad I am coming back to see you it is such a long time since we came away from you,” the four-year-old Tolkien (with the help of his nurse) wrote to his father, then working in South Africa. “I hope the ship will bring us all safe back to you.” A telegram arrived the same day, bringing the news that Arthur Tolkien was seriously ill. He died the following day, February 15, 1896. A letter from Geoffrey Smith, one of Tolkien’s inner circle of school friends, hints at the experience of loss that would inform so much of his literary work. Smith, who arrived at the Western Front shortly before Tolkien, wrote him from France: “May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.” Smith was killed leading his men on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916.

One of Tolkien’s most famous tales is the love story of the mortal man, Beren, and the immortal Elf-maiden, Lúthien Tinúviel. He first told a version of the story in The Book of Lost Tales, which formed the basis for The Silmarillion. His hand-written manuscript begins thus:

Among the tales of sorrow and ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some that are fair in memory, in which amid weeping there is a sound of music . . . and under the shadow of death light that endureth.

As the exhibition explains, the legendary story of Beren and Lúthien was inspired by a true love story: the relationship between Tolkien and his wife, Edith, a marriage that endured for more than 60 years. A manuscript, written in Edith’s hand, forms the first chapter of The Book of Lost Tales, composed when Tolkien the soldier was recovering from trench fever. On Tolkien’s instructions, the names “Lúthien” and “Beren” are inscribed beneath their names on their shared headstone in Wovercote cemetery in north Oxford.

Implicit throughout the exhibition is Tolkien’s singular moral vision: a view of human life as both heroic and tragic. Here, it seems, is the motive force behind his astonishing creativity — an essentially Christian belief in the fall of man. In this, he was helped immeasurably by his circle of Oxford literary friends, the Inklings. All the members of the Inklings were professing Christians, and at the center of their weekly meetings was C.S. Lewis, another veteran of the Great War who became Tolkien’s closest friend for many years.

Lewis, also a lover of mythology and author of books such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, was the first to challenge Tolkien to turn his private “hobbitry” into a published work. Tolkien confessed that he never would have completed The Lord of the Rings — a work twelve years in the making — without Lewis’s constant encouragement. “I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst,” Lewis wrote to Tolkien in 1949 after reading the story in manuscript. “So much of your whole life, so much of 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.”

Tolkien’s remarkable achievement was to use the genre of myth to reaffirm — against a culture of doubt and disillusionment — the “permanent things” about our lives, to engage his immense imaginative and artistic gifts to recover ancient truths about the human condition. Though often accused of escapism, no author in the 20th century expressed with greater power (as he once described it) “the beauty and mortality of the world.” The Bodleian exhibition richly tells the story of his quest: quickened while a soldier in the Great War; nurtured by his faith, family, and friendships; and deepened through sorrow and consolation. As Tolkien once described his great mythology: “It is written in my life blood.”

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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 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

CNN: Pope Changes Death Penalty Doctrine

Last night I joined CNN’s SE Cupp to discuss Pope Francis’s new doctrine on the death penalty.

“I think this is a bombshell of historic proportions…This Pope comes along and says ‘no, they’ve all gotten it wrong and I’ve got it right.’” @secupp has @JosephLoconte explain why Pope Francis’ reversal on capital punishment is so significant. https://t.co/Rcx6xw8F6J

— HLN (@HLNTV) August 3, 2018

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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 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

Weekly Standard: Chinese intimidation comes to Benedict Rogers’s mailbox

This article was originally posted at The Weekly Standard.

LONDON—If we needed more evidence of China’s deep insecurity about its communist rule, it could be found in a sleepy bedroom community outside London. On the day of my arrival recently at the home of Benedict Rogers, a leading British human rights advocate, I learned that my friend—along with his neighbors and his 77-year-old mother—had just received the latest of a series of anonymous letters attacking him for his criticism of China’s policy toward Hong Kong. The letters were postmarked from Hong Kong.

“In more than two decades of human rights advocacy work, including working on countries such as North Korea, Burma and issues such as radical Islamism in Pakistan and Indonesia,” Rogers told me, “this is the first time I have ever received letters of this kind or been subjected to this type of attempt at intimidation.”

When Great Britain transferred sovereignty of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Beijing agreed by treaty to respect the political and economic freedoms of the semi-autonomous city—the “one country-two systems” principle. Instead, China has orchestrated a campaign to erode Hong Kong’s civil liberties, prompting Rogers to launch Hong Kong Watch in 2017. He also has been a vocal critic of Beijing over its human-rights record. Last year, he was denied access to Hong Kong by immigration officials, ostensibly as a “threat to national security,” a claim echoed in the defamatory letters sent to his home. Two letters sent to his neighbors in Surrey instructed them to “keep an eye” on Rogers and included a photograph of him with the caption, “Watch him.” The letter to Rogers’s mother complained that he had “decided to take on a ‘crusade’ like attitude towards my country China and city Hong Kong,” and urged her to “talk some sense into him.”

Although Rogers says he doesn’t know the source of the anonymous correspondence, experienced observers from China and Hong Kong say that it is a common tactic of the Chinese regime. In October 2017, for example, a series of anonymous letters similar to those sent to Rogers and his neighbors were delivered to staff members at the Hong Kong Free Press, accusing them of spreading “hatred and dividing Hong Kong, China society.”

Rogers—like his mother, whom I have met—is not a wilting wallflower. As deputy chairman of the Conservative party’s Human Rights Commission, he has traveled extensively in China and southeast Asia and written widely about human rights abuses in the region. He told me that he established Hong Kong Watch because he believes that China is violating the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a legally binding treaty at the United Nations that safeguards the “rights and freedoms” of Hong Kong citizens. Those rights—which are not protected in communist mainland China—include freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, private property, travel, choice of occupation, academic research, and religious belief.

“In recent years, China has completely disregarded its obligations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and trampled with increasing vigor on Hong Kong’s freedoms,” Rogers says. “Hong Kong is an international city, respected as the only city in China to have these freedoms based on the rule of law. It is therefore in all our interests to ensure that Hong Kong’s way of life is protected.”

Over the last several years, Beijing has become less tolerant of any signs of dissent across its territories, and President Xi Jinping has set the tone. “The party exercises overall leadership over all areas of endeavor in every part of the country,” Xi told delegates at a recent Communist party Congress meeting. No aspect of civil society, it seems, is beyond party control: All “socialist literature,” he explained, must extol “our party, our country, our people, and our heroes.”

Thus, five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing in 2015 turned up in the custody of mainland Chinese authorities. Control of all print media, including books, is now in the hands of the Communist party’s Central Propaganda Department. Also in 2015, the government targeted about 300 human rights lawyers, legal staff, and activists across 25 provinces, harassing, arresting, and detaining many of them for months. Earlier this year, China demanded that more than 30 international airlines, including some American carriers, delete from their websites any information suggesting that Taiwan, Macau, or Hong Kong are not part of China.

“It is increasingly clear that China is reaching well beyond its borders to silence critics, at the same time as becoming ever more repressive of dissent and debate within China,” Rogers explains. “Xi Jinping has presided over the worst deterioration in human rights in China since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.” That’s no exaggeration.

Nevertheless, among Western political and economic leaders, the idea persists that the price of trade with China is silence on human rights. Some U.S. lawmakers have grown increasingly critical of China’s policies toward Hong Kong, including Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who introduced legislation authorizing “punitive measures” against government officials in Hong Kong or mainland China who are responsible for “suppressing basic freedoms in Hong Kong.” But the bill has yet to receive a hearing in either the House or Senate. In December, the Trump administration included on a sanctions list a Chinese police official it held accountable for the death of a rights activist, Cao Shunli, in 2014. However, the Washington-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders expressed “regret that the US Administration only named a low-level Chinese official.” The Washington Post reported in late June that Sam Brownback, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for religious freedom at the State Department, was urging the White House to punish Chinese officials cracking down on faith groups.

In the meantime, Beijing will continue to try to bully anyone—anywhere—who challenges its morally debased communist narrative. “If we do not act, to defend our values of democracy and human rights and to speak up for those who are repressed,” Rogers warns, “we will find China becoming ever more intrusive and invasive.”

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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 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

Weekly Standard: Religion and the Renaissance

This article was originally posted at The Weekly Standard.

FLORENCE, Italy—If the inspiration for the highest ideals of the Western liberal tradition could be traced to a single city, it would be Florence: birthplace of the Renaissance and hotbed of radical individualism. The humanism of the Renaissance is either praised for shattering medieval superstitions or lamented for elevating the autonomous self against traditional religious authorities. Yet one of the most striking features of the period is the recovery of biblical concepts of human dignity and how they helped to unleash artistic, social, and intellectual genius.

The scientists who emerged during this period—some benefitting from Medici family patronage—saw no contradiction between pursuing knowledge about the physical world and pursuing the knowledge of God. Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo: each agreed that “the book of nature” was “written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.” Against their critics, they saw their intellectual breakthroughs as contributing to a sacred mission. Newton once explained that his Principia (1687) had an apologetic purpose: “When I wrote my treatise about our System I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity, and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.”

Renaissance artists like Michelangelo were driven by their love of beauty, an experience they connected intimately to God’s creative power. A contemporary biographer, Ascanio Condivi, wrote that Michelangelo “loved not only human beauty but universally every beautiful thing.” Though anxious not to make the human body an idol that blinded him to the need for repentance, Michelangelo would not abandon his longing for beauty to the stifling artistic conventions of his day. As he put it in one of his poems:

To what am I spurred by the power of a beautiful face?

Since there is nothing else in the world that brings me delight, to this:

to ascend while still alive among the blessed spirits by a

grace so great that every other seems inferior.

When Pope John Paul II in 1995 held mass in the Sistine Chapel to celebrate the restoration of Renaissance frescoes, he recalled Michelangelo’s achievement. “The frescoes that we contemplate here introduce us to the world of Revelation,” he said. “The truths of our faith speak to us here from all sides.” These artists, the pope explained, upheld a theology of the human body that celebrated the beauty of human beings created by God as male and female, suggesting the hope of a world transfigured by the risen Christ.

It is true that Renaissance humanists, in looking to ancient and classical sources for insight, often became enamored with pagan mythology. Some, like Pico della Mirandola, extolled the godlike potentialities of human beings as “the free and proud shaper” of their own destiny. Yet others, with a more chastened view of human nature, turned back to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures: the Christian humanists such as Erasmus, who applied the new tools of classical scholarship to draw others into a deeper and more authentic knowledge of the Bible.

These biblical humanists emphasized individual moral responsibility and a program for reform based on the “philosophy of Christ.” By this they meant the obligation of every believer to understand and apply the teachings of Jesus in all realms of human experience: politics, economics, family life, and so on. “What else is this philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls being born again,” wrote Erasmus, “but renewal of a human nature well formed?”

For the Christian humanists, intimate knowledge of Scripture was the gateway to spiritual and social transformation. Risking church censure, Erasmus sought to have the Bible “translated into all languages” and “published as openly as possible.” In an age when holy writ was available only in Latin—and only to clerical elites—a more democratic approach to faith represented an appeal to the ethos of the ancient church. No wonder Martin Luther, as he launched his Protestant Reformation, called Erasmus “our ornament and our hope.”

Yet modern confusion about the Renaissance abounds. Liberals usually ignore the biblical assumptions that framed much of the scholastic and artistic genius of the period. Conservatives often attribute our modern woes to the supposedly unhinged individualism of the Renaissance spirit. But the Renaissance should be understood as a partial response to the moral turpitude of the medieval church: the crushing legalisms, inquisitions, heresy trials, and clerical hypocrisy.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the artist whose “Last Supper” ranks among the most famous of Christian paintings, also led the most exhaustive campaign of anatomical investigation ever attempted. Scholars believe that if his findings had been published in his lifetime, they probably would have altered the course of modern science. His discoveries, however, were based on secret dissections of dozens of human cadavers, a forbidden practice that invited execution.

“It is the business of little minds to shrink,” he wrote, “but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.” Radical individualism? It was a similar defense of the rights of conscience—a commitment to pursue truth wherever it leads—that helped to bring the Christian church into existence.

In an age of skepticism, mediocrity, and moral indifference, we could use a few more radicals of the Renaissance type.

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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 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: When human rights are abused from all sides

This article was originally posted at The Hill.

In 1948, on the eve of the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, campaigning for its adoption, warned her audience not to be deceived about the gravest threats to democracy and human rights in the post-war world. “We must not be deluded by the efforts of the forces of reaction to prostitute the great words of our free tradition,” she said, speaking at the Sorbonne, “and thereby to confuse the struggle.”

Roosevelt had in mind the Orwellian mischief of the Soviet Union, but attempts to compromise the concepts of freedom and human rights are alive and well today. Consider the Trump administration’s controversial immigration policy at the Mexican border: its flaws are manifest, but comparisons to the Nazi treatment of European Jews or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II debase our moral vocabulary. Likewise, the White House decision to quit the politicized UN Human Rights Council — an organization essentially hijacked by autocratic regimes — is being denounced as a campaign “to undermine the human rights of all people everywhere, and their struggles for justice.”

Both the president and his critics could benefit from recalling Roosevelt’s leadership during a time of intensive disagreement over the meaning of human rights. Aware of her own country’s failure to uphold basic civil liberties for all its citizens, she nevertheless drew sharp distinctions between immovable totalitarian regimes and flawed democracies on the pathway to reform.

By 1948, the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi German had shattered. Moscow had broken its promises to hold free elections in Eastern Europe, staged a blockade of West Berlin, and accused the United States of acting like a “fascizing” power by offering Marshal Plan assistance to Europe. Thus, the Cold War was in full swing when Eleanor Roosevelt, armed with the prestige of her husband’s legacy, assumed the chair of the newly established UN Human Rights Commission.

Roosevelt’s great task, in the aftermath of the atrocities committed during the Second World War, was to compose an international bill of rights that could win universal approval. She initially tried to charm the Russian delegates on the Commission with afternoon teas and dinner parties. But she quickly found herself embroiled in confrontations with the Russians over the rights of the individual vs. the interests of the State.

“We know the patterns of totalitarianism — the single political party, the control of schools, press, radio, the arts, the sciences, and the church to support autocratic authority,” she said. “These are the age-old patterns against which men have struggled for three thousand years. These are signs of reaction, retreat, and retrogression.” It was a brave and withering indictment: The communist government led by Joseph Stalin — whom her husband affectionately had called “Uncle Joe” — was just another installment in the historical catalogue of political despotisms.

Facing Soviet complaints of racism in American society, Roosevelt confessed that the United States struggled with “problems of discrimination,” but emphasized the potential for democratic reform. She pointed to the institutions of a free press, fair trials, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and freedom of religion and the rights of conscience as essential to a just society — rights that were categorically denied behind the Iron Curtain.

With the help of fellow commissioners such as Charles Malik, the Lebanese ambassador and an Arab Christian, Roosevelt secured overwhelming support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was adopted on December 10, 1948, during a UN General Assembly meeting in Paris, in a vote of 48-0, with eight abstentions. No less an achievement was Roosevelt’s repeated insistence that “the peace and security of mankind are dependent on mutual respect for the rights and freedoms of all.” By linking the promotion of democracy and human rights to international peace and security she helped to lay a new foundation for the conduct of American foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century.

It is a lesson that needs serious attention in the age of Trump. Actions taken in the name of “national security” are no substitute for policies that are both prudent and humane. Stifling fundamental human rights — at home or abroad — can only weaken U.S. national security interests. Pretending that dictators and strongmen such as Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin are acting in the best interests of their people communicates American indifference to violations of human dignity.

At the same time, UN organizations such as the Human Rights Council must not be manipulated to shield thuggish regimes from censure. Thirteen years ago, I served on a Congressional Task Force on the United Nations that recommended the original Human Rights Commission be abolished and replaced by a Human Rights Council, “ideally consisting of democracies committed to upholding and promoting the highest standards in human rights.” No honest observer could claim that the existing human rights body is achieving that goal—or is anything close to what Eleanor Roosevelt had in mind.

“The propaganda we have witnessed in the recent past, like that we perceive in these days,” she said, “seeks to impugn, to undermine, and to destroy the liberty and independence of peoples.” Propaganda about human rights abounds. Only statesmen with moral clarity can cut through the fog.

 

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

The Hill: On D-Day’s anniversary, Eisenhower reminds us of just war in action

This article was originally posted at The Hill.

On the eve of the Allied invasion at Normandy, June 6, 1944, the architect of the greatest amphibious assault in history drafted a handwritten note, to be delivered to the press if the campaign ended in disaster. “Our landings…have failed…and I have withdrawn the troops,” he wrote. “The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

The chief reason for the stunning success of D-Day was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. Writes biographer Stephen Ambrose: “Only his worries were infinite, only he carried the awesome burden of command.” And yet the story of Eisenhower’s capacity to shoulder the terrible burden of command has largely been left untold. Of all the forces that shaped Eisenhower’s approach to war — to his responsibility as a leader in wartime — the teachings of the Bible were decisive.

He was an unlikely war hero: the third son of David and Ida Eisenhower, common laborers from Abilene, Kan. Members of the Mennonites, they were pacifist in their politics and conservative in their Christianity. They communicated to their sons the old-fashioned virtues of honesty, ambition, integrity, and fear of God. Above all else, they gave Eisenhower a reverence for the Scriptures. “Our civilization is built upon its words,” he said. “It describes the condition of man and the promise of man with such power that, through many eras and generations, it has made the mighty humble and has strengthened the weak.”

Historians tend to disregard Eisenhower’s religious beliefs as political posturing. He once remarked that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” But the remainder of the quote, uttered during the Cold War against Soviet communism, makes clear what he had in mind: “With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.” Eisenhower grasped intuitively the biblical taproot of American democracy.

He also believed that, even in wartime, democracy must not be defended by abandoning its central moral claim: the dignity and worth of every human soul. It is taken for granted today that the Allied forces attempted to wage a just war in Europe against the Nazis, not a brutal campaign of blind vengeance, of mass rape and mass executions. Whatever its excesses, the American-led military was not indifferent to the lives of soldiers and civilians. Moral cynicism was the defining feature of the Soviet military on the road to Berlin, not the Allied forces under Eisenhower.

To have advanced faster and further than the Russians into Eastern Europe, “it would have been necessary for the Western Allies to fight a very different and more ruthless war, at much higher cost in casualties,” writes historian Max Hastings. “Stalin and his marshals cared nothing for the preservation of civilian life or property… For all its commanders’ military sophistication, this was a barbarian army, which had achieved things such as only barbarians could.” It makes a difference if a nation’s military is led by individuals steeped in atheistic communism or rooted in the moral precepts of the Bible.

Biographers, however, often overlook a critical feature of Eisenhower’s approach as a military commander: the Christian assumptions that subordinated his ego to a noble cause. Unlike other successful generals, Eisenhower could never forget the individual human costs of war. Prior to D-Day, Ike spent many hours visiting troops in the field, because he wanted as many soldiers as possible to look into the face of the man ordering them into harm’s way. He was anxious to avoid “the unbearable burden of a conscience justly accusing me of the stupid, blind sacrifice of thousands of the flower of our youth.”

Probably no American general was more sober about the tragic nature of war. As Eisenhower put it in his farewell address as president, he had “witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war.” Nevertheless, he upheld the concept of the just war: the moral obligation to defend the innocent against the forces of evil. For Eisenhower, this became a personal obligation that could not be evaded, a truth he must have absorbed during the daily family Bible readings of his youth. “The only unforgivable sin in war,” he declared, “is not doing your duty.”

When Germany surrendered in May of 1945, Eisenhower was in command of more than three million American troops. An international hero, he was invited to give a speech in London, a victory celebration in Guildhall, where he would be honored with the Duke of Wellington’s sword. “I come from the very heart of America,” he said. “To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before the law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit … a Londoner will fight. So will the citizen of Abilene.”

Here was a military leader who understood the political principles he felt called to defend. As he framed it in his war memoir: “We believe individual liberty, rooted in human dignity, is man’s greatest treasure.” Here was a commander of millions who submitted his own conscience to the moral demands of the Word of God. “To read the Bible,” he said, “is to take a trip to a fair land where the spirit is strengthened and faith renewed.”

Dwight Eisenhower made that trip many times during his military career, especially on D-Day. Throughout his life, Ike viewed the Bible as the Freedom Book: the basis for self-government, the bulwark against tyranny, and “the unique repository of eternal spiritual truths.” His great campaign, launched 74 years ago, helped to liberate a continent and to reassert these truths in the fog of war.

 

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.