Living with Liberalism
I'll preface this post by saying what I think is probably obvious to most folks - that I'm on the conservative end of most things - theologically, politically and socially. So, I'm not trying to pick a fight but it follows that I am not on board with liberalism in any of those areas. Yet, I know that I live in a world that is far more liberal than I am and came across some good words on living with liberalism from Comment Magazine. In an article called "Living with Liberalism: Six Strategies for Faithfulness" Canadien authors David T. Koyzis nad Brian Dijkema define liberalism this way:
What is liberalism? And, what is it not? As we understand it, liberalism is much more than esteem for personal liberty, which in itself is legitimate. We value the liberties guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the United States' Bill of Rights, and in similar documents. Indeed, these are the bedrock to constitutional government.
However, liberalism as an ideology is based on the assumption that all communities are fundamentally voluntary associations whose tasks are determined, not by the nature of the communities themselves, but by the wills of the individuals making them up. This means that in theory, at least, there are no intrinsic differences between family, marriage, school, business enterprise, labour union, church and state, all of which are reducible to the whims of their members. If the local bird watchers' society is voluntary, with members coming and going at will, why shouldn't marriage or the state be the same? Liberals have undertaken to extend this voluntary principle as widely as possible throughout society.
I hope that is the kind of definition that is accurate without seeming too pejorative or antagonistic. In fact, the authors go on to offer what I believe is a fair summary of the benefits and deficiencies of liberalism.
So, what is a liberal society? Or can there even be such a thing? The effects of liberalism are tenacious and enduring. Beginning with the notion of social contract in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, liberalism has made a huge impact on the development of the modern and postmodern worlds. Among its positive features is the heightened consciousness of the place of the individual as distinct from the group—something absent from nearly all pre-modern cultures. This has led to an emphasis on the protection of human rights around the globe, as found in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It has also led followers to work for the liberation of people caught up in oppressive régimes that fail to respect these rights. The civil rights movement of nearly fifty years ago in the United States
was a positive legacy of this. Thinkers such as Brian Tierney, Oliver O'Donovan, and a growing body of literature on mediaeval and early modern political thought show that virtually all the liberal watchwords of today, such as freedom, rights and equality, draw from a deep well of Christian social thought informed by the Scriptures. In spite of its followers' efforts to distance themselves from this tradition, or more likely because of the tradition's enduring strength, liberalism has managed, by God's common grace, to produce good fruit.Yet it is not difficult to recognize liberalism's deficiencies. At its worst, liberalism manifests little concern for what might be called the commons—namely, the shared heritage of the citizenry not subject to individual or nonstate corporate ownership. Everything from public parks and buildings to air and water do not easily fit into especially the early liberal framework, with its glorification of what the late C. B. MacPherson famously labelled possessive individualism. Contemporary libertarians, applying the logic of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," assume that a spontaneous order will emerge out of the workings of the market so as to produce a net benefit for the society as a whole. When this doesn't occur as readily as expected, liberalism is forced to change its spots, as it were.
In accordance with its effort to reduce a variety of communities to mere voluntary associations, liberalism has difficulty accounting for the distinctive character of institutions such as marriage, family, and state. If the state is a voluntary association formed by contracting individuals, then there is nothing especially unique about it. More to the point, it has no intrinsic jural task that might distinguish it from other communities. The net result is that citizens expect either too little or too much from it, because they lack a norm for assessing its activities.Finally, most liberals attempt to consign ultimate religious convictions to the private realm, ostensibly reserving the public realm for those matters universally accessible to human reason. However, if liberalism is rooted in a contestable series of assumptions based on a particularizing worldview, then liberals have done nothing more than to banish the convictions of others while privileging their own within the public realm. That this is tantamount to a new established religion has largely escaped the adherents of liberalism, whose monopolistic pretensions can only amount to a subtle miscarriage of justice in any number of areas, but especially in education.
There is so much good stuff in the whole article and I
encourage you to go read the whole thing. But in responding to a
society that becomes more and more liberal, the authors suggest that we
must first recover the notion that Christians are living in exile, and
yet, while in exile we are to pray for and act toward the welfare of
the cities in which we live. To that end, they offer six suggestions
for living in exile:
Once again, here' s the link to the whole article.
HT - Steve Bishop - An Accidental Blog
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