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-REVIEW: of God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke?s Political Thought by Jeremy Waldron (Victor Nuovo, 2003.05.04, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

In God, Locke and Equality, Jeremy Waldron argues that Locke's mature writings present an idea of basic human equality, grounded in Christian theism, and that this idea is "a working premise of his whole political theory" whose influence can be detected in "his arguments about property, family, slavery, government, politics, and toleration". Waldron also argues that contemporary liberalism lacks just such a well founded and versatile idea as well as the resources to supply it. Its self imposed secular stance is the reason for this deficiency. Since Locke's idea of human equality is rooted in theism, it is only reasonable that contemporary liberalism should relax its restrictive stance and consider religious reasons such as Locke's for its commitment to equality.

Two of the main theses of his book, that Locke's mature works aim at a unified outlook that may be fairly characterized as liberal, and that this outlook is founded on Locke's Christian beliefs are not new. John Dunn, who was the first to present Locke's political theory in its religious context [The Political Thought of John Locke] has said as much in numerous places and Waldron acknowledges this. What is new is Waldron's assertion of the contemporary relevance of Locke's Christian outlook for political thought, in particular as it pertains to human equality. This and his liberal optimism contrast sharply with Dunn's pessimistic attitude towards the efficacy of liberal and democratic theory, especially Locke's, just because it is rooted in theism. In the place just cited, Dunn refers to a brief handwritten note circa 1693, in which Locke contemplates the consequences for mankind if there were no God and no divine law. The result would be moral anarchy. Every individual "could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions". It should be observed that in this note Locke still attributes fundamental freedom and equality to mankind even without God, but the prospect for civil society, and even more for liberal democratic society, would disappear and in its place would appear a social condition that Dunn characterizes as "dolefully Nietzschean". According to Dunn's view, Locke not only was able to imagine the consequences of "the death of God", he also in a sense anticipated it by his own failure to show that human rationality is sufficient to discover the theistic foundations of the political morality that he takes for granted in the second Treatise. This was the task that was promised but never fulfilled in Locke's Essay. Locke's argument for the necessity of revelation in The Reasonableness of Christianity is taken by Dunn as a tacit admission of this failure. In the light of all this, Dunn characterizes Locke as a tragic figure, whose greatness is manifest more in his intellectual courage to persevere in his enquiries than in his philosophical achievement. The lesson to be learned from reading Locke is a moral one, and it is well worth learning. On the other hand, any attempt to appropriate Locke for contemporary political theory is misguided.

No one can fail to be amused by the way liberals (with a small and/or large "l") are continually being disappointed when they turn to the sources of liberal democracy and find there not secular humanists like themselves but men who take as their starting point the universality of Christian faith. Poor John Locke is a particularly choice example as he's cited over and over in defense of the principle of toleration, but when we turn to the constitution he wrote--The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina : March 1, 1669--we find the following:

Ninety-five.
No man shall be permitted to be a freeman of Carolina, or to have any estate or habitation within it, that doth not acknowledge a God, and that God is publicly and solemnly to be worshipped.

Likewise, turning to the supposed champion of secularism in America, we find this instead:

In conformity with the principles of our Constitution, which places all sects of religion on an equal footing, with the jealousies ofthe different sects in guarding that equality from encroachment and surprise, and with the sentiments of the Legislature in favor of freedom of religion, manifested on former occasions, we have proposed no professor of divinity; and the rather as the proofs of the being of a God, the creator, preserver, and supreme ruler of the universe, the author of all the relations of morality, and of the laws and obligations these infer, will be within the province of the professor of ethics; to which adding the developments of these moral obligations, of those in which all sects agree, with a knowledge of the languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, a basis will be formed common to all sects. Proceeding thus far without offense to the Constitution, we have thought it proper at this point to leave every sect to provide, as they think fittest, the means of further instruction in their own peculiar tenets.
-Thomas Jefferson, Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia

It must come as rather a rude awakening to discover that Jefferson would have erected his famous "wall" only after moving most of Christianity into the realm of "ethics" and providing for professors at a state university to teach it.

What's strange though is that enjoying the fruits of liberalism and having gained a better understanding of whence they flow, folks like Mr. Dunn get so upset that they're ready to declare the founders of liberalism failures and to deny that they have any further relevance. You'd think that they might consider the alternative, that the founders were a success and that their relevance lies in what should now be seen as a warning to us, that if we discard the God, the law, and the morality upon which liberalism is premised that we will render liberal democracy incoherent and risk losing it.

Indeed, it comes as no surprise to find that one of the great liberal democrats of our age understood this well and, regardless of his own religious beliefs, was able to accept its truth:

I have often asked myself why human beings have any rights at all. I always come to the conclusion that human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world. These values are as powerful as they are because, under certain circumstances, people accept them without compulsion and are willing to die for them, and they make sense only in the perspective of the infinite and the eternal. . . . While the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.
-Vaclav Havel, The New York Review of Books

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2003 03:49 PM