The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Forrest McDonald

The semi-hysterical reaction of liberal establishmentarians to the recent political success of the Religious Right no doubt stems from fear that more successes are to come. But it also arises from a deeply held understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of Christianity and its history. In their view, Christianity is and always has been inimical to freedom; to them, the centuries prior to the Renaissance were truly Dark Ages, wherein the people were crushed beneath the burdens of superstition, a priestly caste, and absolute monarchs. The Renaissance was a breakthrough that culminated in the Enlightenment, which led to the American Founding and the subsequent triumph of democracy elsewhere.

Not a word of this Revised Standard Version will bear close scrutiny, as M. Stanton Evans shows in a remarkable work that combines erudition with clear thinking. Consider, for instance, the compact theory of the origins of legitimate government, the idea that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed - the underlying premise of the Declaration of Independence. The RSV places the rigin of that doctrine in the brain and pen of John Locke. It was in fact, as Mr. Evans points out, a medieval commonplace, coined by Christian Scholastics with the hearty approval of the Church. Similarly, the belief that the power of rulers is limited by natural law, the conviction that individual property rights (including the right to buy and sell freely) are sacrosanct, the proposition that property cannot be taken without the consent of the owner or of his representative, the very idea of representation - all these and the other concepts that made possible the emergence of individual freedom are to be found in the Bible and in medieval Christianity.

From the careful historical survey on which these observations are based, Mr. Evans draws two main conclusions. One is that not only can faith and freedom go together, but "they have to do so." That is, "religious belief and its associated values are conceptually indispensable to a regime of freedom," and as a matter of historical fact American institutions of free government "were developed on the basis of religious precept." As a subpoint, Mr. Evans remarks that there is no conflict between traditionalism and freedom, for the American tradition is one of freedom: that is what conservatives should seek to conserve. His second conclusion is far more general. Standing Marx and Engels on their heads, Mr. Evans declares: "Always and everywhere, the governing system that is adopted will reflect the underlying religious presuppositions of the culture, and as these vary so will the prospects for statecraft, science, economics, and a great deal else."

The Renaissance, far from being a step toward freedom, was followed everywhere it took hold by the rise of absolute monarchy. That was no coincidence, for the ancient models that were being rediscovered "knew nothing of our ideas of limited government and personal liberty, and given their peculiar conception of the world could not have done so." Pagan societies were beset by a host of capricious deities; the need to propitiate them vested absolute power in the priesthood, whether that body was controlled by a king or the demos.

As for the Enlightenment, the deification of reason that marked the French version led to the tragedy of the French Revolution, and its Rousseauvean legacy has haunted the twentieth century. Present-day adherents, whom Mr. Evans characterizes as neopagans, confirm the maxim that if one does not believe in God, one will believe in anything. Some espouse pernicious causes that are also obviously silly: those who maintain that any "lifestyle" is as good as any other, or those who insist that animals, trees, and rocks should have rights equal or superior to those of humans. And there is Julian Huxley, who admitted that the odds against human life's coming into existence through a sequence of mutations "are given by a number ... greater than that of all the electrons and protons in the visible universe" but, instead of concluding that there must therefore be a God, preached the "immense power of natural selection." Others, however, such as Lenin and Hitler, devised isms that took on all the qualities of a religion and led to unspeakable horrors.

Mr. Evans's argument - which seeks, in its way, to define American conservatism - is convincing in all respects but one. Namely, it cannot fully accommodate the peculiar species of conservatism that is the subject of Eugene Genovese's brilliant new book: Southern agrarianism. The Southern agrarians, as Mr. Genovese describes them sympathetically but objectively - and he covers the whole range from John Taylor of Caroline to John C. Calhoun to the Vanderbilt Agrarians to Richard Weaver to M. E. Bradford - fail to fit Mr. Evans's mold in certain vital particulars.

Perhaps most importantly, free-market capitalism is central to Mr. Evans's scheme of things, and the Southerners wanted no part of it. To be sure, they believed strongly in private property, but they insisted that a great concentration of it, the very thing that makes capitalism so productive, was destructive of the sense of family, community, and place. Antebellum Southerners, led by John Taylor, waxed almost frantic in their denunciation of finance capital, insisting that "mere paper" property in the form of money and bank notes was outright theft from honest laborers in the earth. Other Southerners, then and later, insisted with equal shrillness that the rise of great factories was dehumanizing. Mr. Genovese remarks as an aside that they never "examined carefully the extent to which business corporations have actually contributed to the stability of communities and to sustained employment for families and households," though he also comments that capitalism has been a powerful "solvent of traditional social relations." Both propositions are true, but Southerners would agree only to the negative part. Indeed, during the 1930s several of the Vanderbilt Agrarians departed from their traditional championing of states' rights and advocated a massive federal program to redistribute property, thus restoring decentralized ownership.