The Failure of Liberal Christianity

Edward Feser examines the roots of political liberalism as a governing philosophy, and observes the disastrous consequences of Kantian Christianity on our moral, political, and spiritual life.

We have regularly advanced the descriptive argument that the liberal order is collapsing, and a new postliberal order is unfolding before our eyes. Yet we have just as often shown why liberalism — as a governing philosophy developed over centuries into “classical” or right-wing libertarian and “progressive” or left-wing libertine varieties — fails on substantive grounds. In this essay, philosopher Edward Feser tells us why there is more to the failure of liberalism than meets the eye as he examines, after Nietzsche, why the “catastrophic spider” of Kantian Christianity has failed too.

Hobbes took the state of nature to be a condition of perfect license to do whatever one desires. In Locke’s state of nature, individuals possess a right of self-ownership that entails wide-ranging liberty to do what they like with the fruits of their labor. It is easy to see in Hobbesian man the harbinger of the left-wing libertine, and in Lockean man the model of the libertarian right-winger. Indeed, it is in Hobbes and Locke that we find the oldest and deepest foundations of the liberal individualism that defines modern politics.

But though these thinkers were key to the rise of the liberal order, they by no means provide the whole story. For the Hobbesian and Lockean rationales for freedom seem obviously grubby. They provide what Leo Strauss famously characterized as “low but solid” ground on which liberalism could build. But they do not inspire — not the way that Christendom (which liberalism displaced) once inspired. And while an inspiring vision was not needed in order to build the liberal order, any civilization needs an inspiring vision in order to preserve itself once built — at the very least, to instill loyalty in its citizens, and rally them to its defense.

Liberalism found this inspiration in the rhetoric of human dignity, a fine garment within which its unsightly Hobbesian bones and Lockean flesh could be hidden. And it was made from threads spun by Kant, whom Nietzsche aptly labeled a “catastrophic spider,” albeit for the wrong reason. For Nietzsche, Kant preserved the heart of Christian morality by secularizing it. But in reality, what Kant did was to subvert that morality, by replacing its worship of God with an idolatry of man.