How the Bible Corrupted the Soul of Western Civilization - Part 2

Did Christianity Discover Political Liberty?

This is Part 2 in a series. You can find the first installment here.

“[C]ontrary to what my secular professors taught me,” Vishal Mangalwadi writes in The Book That Made Your World, “it was the Bible, not Greek political ideals, that fired the modern quest for freedom.” Greek democracies, he says, “always degenerated into mob rule. . . . Europe’s Reformation and democratization began with the sixteenth-century rediscovery of the Bible and a biblical understanding of governance. It led to America’s founders explicitly rejecting Greek democracy for a constitutional republic.” (335-336)

Forget Greece, says Mangalwadi: the Bible laid the groundwork for freedom, and once Christians got around to reading it 1,500 years later, they developed a more or less fully worked out theory of political freedom later picked up by the Founding Fathers.

The evidence? Well, there isn’t much in the way of evidence. Mangalwadi’s main tack is to assert his version of the story of liberty, which I’ll return to shortly. But he does note that, “Quantitatively, the Bible was most frequently quoted by America’s Founding Fathers, followed by Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.” (352)

Here he’s citing the work of political scientist Donald S. Lutz. But Lutz goes on to say, “About three-fourths of all references to the Bible came from reprinted sermons.” It is hardly surprising to find sermons quoting heavily from the Bible. If, however, we consider only secular works, the references to the Bible are “about equal to the percentage for classical writers.” (Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of the American Constitution, 140) Mangalwadi does not mention this fact, nor does he seem to know that Lutz’s work catalogs plenty of ways the Greeks and Romans shaped the founders’ political thought, to say nothing of the way they shaped the thought of Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.

All of which is to say, his major piece of evidence is not evidence at all. We cannot understand what led to the rise of political liberty simply by counting citations. After all, the enemies of Independence cited the Bible as much as the Americans. Bernard Bailyn, in his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, demonstrates how loyalists such as Thomas Bradbury Chandler and Jonathan Boucher leaned heavily on the Bible to champion obedience to the crown. For example:

Boucher sought, first and foremost, to establish the divine origins of the doctrine of obedience to constituted authority—a necessity, he felt . . . in view of the gross misinterpretation rebellious Americans had for years been making of that suggestive verse of Galatians V,I: “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” What had been meant by “liberty” in that passage, he said, was simply and unambiguously freedom from sin, for “every sinner is, literally, a slave . . . the only true liberty is the liberty of being the servants of God.” Yet the Gospel does speak to the question of public obligations, and its command could hardly be more unmistakable: it orders, always, “obedience to the laws of every country, in every kind or form of government.” (Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 314-315)

Every thinker in the Christian West cited the Bible, but as Shakespeare noted, “The devil can cite scripture for his purposes.” Assessing influence is an altogether different task.

The Philosophy of Liberty

Political liberty is the state that exists when a government is established to protect individual rights, including both intellectual and economic freedom. It is the state that exists when the initiation of physical force is barred from social existence, so that each human being can support his own life and seek his own happiness. It is, in essence, the ideals (if not always the practice) of the original American system.

To see how liberty came to fruition in America, let’s return for a moment to Lutz’s list of citations. On the one hand, we have prominent Enlightenment thinkers. I have written at length about how the Enlightenment transformed political liberty into an ideal. But here I’m interested, not in Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke, but in the sermons. Not that they cited the Bible, but that so many of our revolutionary documents were sermons.

Historically, Christian thinkers had generally been an anti-revolutionary force. We got a taste of loyalist religious arguments in the quote about Boucher, but this was hardly a British innovation. Take the original Protestant, Martin Luther.

In the Epistle to the Romans 13:1–7, Paul writes that every person must be “subject to the governing authorities,” because those authorities are “instituted by God,” and resisting them is tantamount to resisting God’s ordinance. The lesson Luther took away, historian Quentin Skinner explains, is that while you should disobey the ungodly commands of a ruler, you should never actively resist such demands.

Since all powers are ordained, this would still be tantamount, even in the case of a tyrant, to resisting the will of God. This harsh contrast between the equal duties of disobedience and non-resistance to tyranny is clearly brought out in the central section on the tract on Temporal Authority. If the prince commands you to do evil, you must refuse, saying that “it is not fitting that Lucifer should sit at the side of God.” If the prince should then “seize your property on account of this and punish such disobedience,” you must passively submit and “thank God that you are worthy to suffer for the sake of the divine word.” (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 15-19)

So how did so many American preachers end up supporting the American Revolution? The short answer is that the Enlightenment had transformed Christian thinking. The Enlightenment had elevated the values of reason, earthly happiness, and political freedom into ideals, and many Christian thinkers redefined Christianity to accommodate those ideals.

David Sorkin, a Jewish professor at Yale, outlines this shift in thinking in his book The Religious Enlightenment. In his account, Enlightenment Christians shared the general Enlightenment horror at “Reformation and Counter-Reformation militance,” and sought “an express alternative to two centuries of dogmatism and fantasticism, intolerance and religious warfare.” In particular, they sought to restrict the scope of scripture. The Bible was “not the supreme source of all knowledge,” not “a textbook of science and politics,” but simply a guide “to salvation and man’s relationship to God.” (David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 6, 14)

Above all, Enlightenment Christians sought to elevate the role of reason, formulating a doctrine they called “reasonable belief.” According to Sorkin:

The terms reasonable and reasonableness were already current when Locke popularized them in his 1695 treatise, The Reasonableness of Christianity. . . . To religious enlighteners, unreasonable meant an exclusive embrace of either reason or faith. Faith untempered by knowledge, or combined with excessively partisan forms, produced intolerant, dogmatic, or enthusiastic religion. They had in mind “inner light” Puritanism, Pietism, or convulsionary Jansenism; the polemical, scholastic theology of the major Christian denominations (Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics) in the seventeenth century; or, in the case of Judaism, an exclusivist and casuistic (pilpul) method of studying the Talmud. At the same time, religious enlighteners thought that unaided reason engendered immoral skepticism and unbelief. They were certain that morality without belief was neither desirable nor possible. (David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 11-12)

(There was another popular strain of religious thought during the revolutionary period, the evangelicalism of the First Great Awakening. The evangelicals were not pro-reason, but they did believe in the sovereignty of individual judgment in religious matters, and so were able to find common cause with Enlightenment thinkers. See Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, 178-179.)

What is so notable about revolutionary America is that both secular and religious thinkers adopted Enlightenment ideals.

Political liberty cannot arise in a vacuum, but depends on certain philosophic fundamentals. Above all, it depends on a respect for reason, for it is reason that liberty liberates. It is only because human beings can think and need to think to arrive at the true and the good that liberty is a value—which is precisely why every step in the direction of liberty was taken by a champion of reason.

Luther, for example, called reason “that clever whore,” and held that faith “wrings the neck of reason. . . . It holds to God’s Word: lets it be right and true, no matter how foolish and impossible it sounds.” (The Essential Luther, 20; W. T. Jones, Hobbes to Hume, 64) Unsurprisingly, when he turned to politics, his concern was not liberty, but submission and obedience to authority. (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 12-19)

By contrast, Locke held that “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.” Even revelation, he held, must be subjected to reason: reason must decide what counts as genuine revelation, it must be the tool that fixes the meaning of revelation, and if any supposed revelation conflicts with reason then it cannot be true, “[f]or faith can never convince us of anything, that contradicts our knowledge.” (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV.XIX.14; IV.XVIII.5-6.) It’s no accident that he became one of history’s greatest champions of liberty.

This is why, in the end, Christianity cannot claim credit for the rise of liberty. Christianity, as a doctrine, subordinates reason to faith and worldly happiness to obedience to God. To be sure, Christians have differed in how consistently they embraced Christianity’s other-worldly doctrine, but that’s just the point: it was only to the extent that particular Christians elevated reason and sought out the rational requirements of earthly flourishing that they became champions of liberty. It was not the teachings of revelation that opened the way for Locke and the Founders—it was the extent to which they used their minds to examine the facts of this world. Consistent Christianity is consistently anti-freedom.

It would be absurd to pretend a single essay (let alone a book review) could fully prove that. What I will say is that Mangalwadi’s approach to making the alternative argument is hopeless. He starts with a goal—to show that Protestants discovered liberty by studying their Bible—and then musters whatever facts (or “facts”) support his theory, while systematically ignoring any and all evidence that would counter it.

We can see that in three crucial points he makes about the development of political liberty:

1. The Hebrew Bible is the source of pro-liberty ideas

2. Athenian democracy was not a source of pro-liberty ideas

3. Protestant radicals invented modern liberty

Is the Hebrew Bible the Fountainhead of Political Liberty?

According to Mangalwadi, the story of freedom begins with the Bible.

The process of losing and recovering freedom recorded from Genesis through Chronicles, gave birth to political ideas that were received during the sixteenth-century European Reformation. They are the most important pillars of modern democracy. In Genesis, Abraham was told that he would become a great nation because he would teach God’s ways to his descendants. The giving of the Ten Commandments is recorded in the Bible’s second book—Exodus. Moses put that Law into the Ark of the Covenant and placed it at the very heart of the nation to make the point that durable freedom is possible only under the rule of God, the rule of law, and the rule of elders (representatives). (337)

Is Moses the original freedom fighter? It’s worth noting that in the NRSV translation, the word “freedom” appears in the Old Testament only once. Leviticus 19:20 states: “If a man has sexual relations with a woman who is a slave, designated for another man but not ransomed or given her freedom, an inquiry shall be held. They shall not be put to death, since she has not been freed.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of political freedom.

Indeed, while Mangalwadi claims that “Oppression and slavery” were “evil because they were contrary to all that God had intended for human beings made in his own image” (337), he ignores that the Old Testament is completely at home with slavery. It’s true that Moses led the Israelites out of slavery, but as political scientist Michael Walzer notes in In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible:

this experience did not lead Israelite legislators to abolish slavery. According to the covenantal and Deuteronomic codes, Hebrew slaves cannot be held longer than six years, a rule that effectively turns slavery into a form of limited indenture (Exodus 21:2–6; Deuteronomy 15:12–18). Nothing is said of foreign slaves, however, for whom the sabbatical year presumably brings no release. Leviticus is explicit in permitting the permanent enslavement of foreigners: “they shall be your bondmen forever” (25:46). (Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, 25)

Of course, the Greeks were also at home with slavery, and the leading American founders, while regarding the institution as morally odious, did not end it. On the other hand, they did not have the advantage of direct revelation from God; one would have hoped for more from the Almighty.

But it is not only on the issue of slavery that the Hebrew Bible is at odds with liberty. When we look at the content of Mosaic law, we do not find anything like a concern for individual rights and freedom. As I noted in an earlier essay, “The Jewish God, far from bestowing freedom on his followers, insists on the death penalty for homosexuality, adultery, violating the Sabbath, blasphemy, idolatry, and even cursing your parents.”

In Deuteronomy 13, for example, we are told:

If anyone secretly entices you—even if it is your brother, your father’s son or your mother’s son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend—saying, ‘Let us go serve other gods,’ whom neither you nor your ancestors have known, any of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far away from you, from one end of the earth to the other, you must not yield to or heed any such persons. Show them no pity or compassion, and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them and afterward the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

In a similar vein, Leviticus 24 tells the story of a man who publicly curses God’s name during a quarrel, and is held “until the decision of the Lord should be made clear.” The Lord then makes his decision quite clear: “Take the blasphemer outside the camp . . . let the whole congregation stone him. . . . One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death.”

The reason it took more than a millennium for Christians to formulate the concept of individual rights was not because they failed to read the Bible closely. Scrutinize the Bible as carefully as you’d like: you will never find the passage that announces an individual’s right to seek his own happiness free from force.

What about the Ten Commandments? Most of them are about religious obedience, not individual rights (God even manages to work in a tacit endorsement of slavery in Exodus 20:10). Only three of the Commandments—do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness—are compatible with individual rights, but these weren’t Jewish innovations. You can find them prohibited in the Code of Hammurabi and the laws of Solon. It does not take omniscience to know that a society cannot function if people are free to slaughter, pilfer, and deceive each other.

The Israelites objected to oppression by another people, but one tribe bristling at being enslaved by another tribe is not the same thing as endorsing individual freedom. The Israelites had no concept of individual rights. Neither, of course, did the Greeks. But they did make a crucial contribution to political liberty, which Mangalwadi completely distorts and evades.

Was Athenian Democracy a Failed Experiment in Mob Rule?

If reason and freedom go together, then it’s illustrative that the first society to elevate reason to top value was also the first to take major strides toward liberating the individual through its establishment of the first democracy. But according to Mangalwadi, “Greek democracies never worked for more than a few decades. They always degenerated into mob rule. Plato experienced Greek democracy as the social chaos that murdered his mentor Socrates” (336)

It is certainly true that the death of Socrates is an eloquent illustration of the difference between unchecked democracy and a government based on individual rights (though this is a point Mangalwadi has no right to make, since the regime he lionizes sentenced people to death for their speech, not as an unusual exception, but as a matter of principle).

But it’s totally false that Greek democracy broke down in a matter of decades. Athenian democracy was relatively stable for roughly a century: it flourished from the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE to the death of Pericles in 430, and was still mostly functional until 411. (Greek scholar Paul Cartledge argues in Democracy: A Life that, interruptions aside, Athenian democracy actually functioned until 322.) And during that time, what the Athenians achieved was something unprecedented and profound: in a world that had only known subjects, it introduced citizens—self-rulers who had unprecedented control over their political fate.

Contrast that with the Hebrew Bible, which describes patriarchies, theocracies, and messianic kingships, but never democracies, let alone rights-protecting republics. (Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, 46-52) (Mangalwadi argues that if you squint really hard, the recurrent mention of biblical “elders” reveals that the Bible really advocated for representative democracy. But the Bible says virtually nothing about who these elders were, how they were chosen, and what role they played in governance. It certainly doesn’t say that they were elected by the people, or even had much say in important political decisions. See chapter 11 of Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible.)

No, the Greeks had nothing like the modern concept of individual rights. But it is a gross mischaracterization to treat Athenian democracy per se as mob rule. In law professor Brian Tamanaha’s On the Rule of Law, he writes of Athenian democracy:

The danger in a popular system of this kind is that democracies can be as tyrannical as absolute monarchies. Protecting against a populist tyranny, the law was accorded a status that set it apart, rendering it not easy to modify by the popular courts and legislative assemblies. The role of these courts and assemblies was to respect the law and act as guardians of the law, not to declare the law as they pleased. Seen as the reflection of a transcendent order that stands behind the lived community, law enjoyed a sanctified status. “Greek philosophers and statesmen, like others before and after them, were beguiled by the dream of putting on record some system of basic law which would be so perfectly adapted to the true interests and the actual social conditions of the society for which it was framed as to be venerated as eternal and unalterable.” The phrase “the laws of Solon,” a reference to the legendary monarch who in the sixth century BC established a body of laws and the popular courts, was used to stamp particular laws as ancient and untouchable. New laws could be passed, and old laws changed, but such enactments were subject to review. Proponents had to demonstrate the inadequacy of existing laws as a condition of passage, and all decrees of assemblies were examined for consistency with preexisting law. If legislation was found to be in contradiction with preexisting valid laws, the proponents of the legislation could be fined. The result of these various mechanisms and standards was to maintain a democratic system “while subordinating the principle of popular sovereignty to the principle of sovereignty of laws.” (Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law, 8)

Law, procedure, norms, and accountability all limited in practice the exercise of political power. This meant that, despite having no concept of individual rights, Athenians did have an unprecedented degree of de facto liberty, being free to do anything that was not expressly prohibited by law. (Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law, 10)

By historical standards, Athens took enormous strides toward political liberty—and did far more for its eventual triumph than Moses ever did.

Did Protestant Radicals Invent Freedom?

According to Mangalwadi, Christians basically ignored the Bible’s allegedly pro-freedom message for a millennium and a half, until the Reformation. It was then that the Huguenots—French Protestants (mostly Calvinists)—formulated the modern theory of liberty:

The Huguenots’ traumatic experience on Saint Bartholomew’s Day gave birth to three books that triggered a veritable revolution from the medieval form of government to the modern form of constitutional government. François Hotman, Theodore Beza, and possibly Philippe du Plessis-Mornay wrote the three treatises. The transition unleashed by these writings ensured that the rule of law and the rights of the people took precedence over the tyranny of monarchs and popes. The primacy of the law and the authority of the people were expressed in concrete institutions such as parliaments and courts that were no longer subject to the whims of kings. These three books, collectively referred to as the ‘Trilogy of Freedom,’ demonstrate the role the Bible played in giving birth to modern liberties. (345-346)

What’s so unfortunate about Mangalwadi’s treatment is that these thinkers actually deserve far more attention than they typically get in the story of liberty, and it is good to see them elevated in importance. But an honest examination of these thinkers and their influence reveals that Christianity was a barrier to the development of freedom—not the driving cause.

First, some context. By the sixteenth century, authoritarian Popes and Christian kings had ruled Western Europe for about a thousand years. In 1517, Martin Luther sparked the Reformation, which would break the Catholic Church’s monopoly. There was little reason to think this would lead to anything like political freedom. Both Luther and Calvin, for instance, supported the coercive suppression of heresy. Indeed, Calvin famously backed the execution of Michael Servetus for denying the Trinity, which Calvin’s leading disciple Theodore Beza—none other than the same Theodore Beza Mangalwadi cites as a founder of freedom—defended in his 1554 tract The Punishment of Heretics by the Civil Magistrate. (Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 72-82, 93-132.)

And, of course, the Reformation did not in fact lead to political freedom—certainly not in the short term. Instead, it helped spark Europe’s wars of religion, the deadliest in Europe’s history to that point, and the Counter-Reformation, which intensified the Inquisition’s war on free thought. The Enlightenment, as we’ve seen, was in many ways a reaction to the devastation unleashed by the Reformation.

This brings us to the Huguenots, and the major problem they were grappling with. On the one hand, they rightfully feared extermination by the French state. On the other hand, Protestants had inherited a doctrine from Luther and Calvin that demanded obedience to rulers, however tyrannical. We’ve seen how Luther rooted his opposition to political resistance in Romans 13; Calvin took a similar line.

“We are not only subject to the authority of princes who perform their office towards us uprightfully and faithfully as they ought, but also to the authority of all who, by whatever means, have got control of affairs, even though they perform not a whit of the princes’ office.” Calvin admits that this hard doctrine “does not so easily settle in men’s minds,” but this only prompts him to repeat it with greater emphasis. Even “a very wicked man utterly unworthy of all honour” must be “held in the same reverence and esteem by his subjects” as “they would hold the best of kings if he were given to them.” The reason is that “they who rule unjustly and incompetently” have been raised up by God “to punish the wickedness of the people.” This means that even tyrants are deliberately ordained by God to fulfil his designs, and are not less “endowed with that holy majesty with which he has invested lawful power.” This in turn means that even if “we are cruelly tormented by a savage prince,” or “vexed for piety’s sake by one who is impious and sacrilegious,” the same hard lesson still applies: we are “not allowed to resist,” but must turn the other cheek, recognising that “no command has been given” to us except “to obey and suffer.” (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 194)

This was clearly suicidal, and as the wars of religion wore on, Protestant thought began evolving and thinkers struggled to develop a doctrine of resistance. In essence, what they were looking for was an argument that said a tyrannical king was not a legitimate ruler and could therefore be lawfully resisted. Importantly, that argument needed to have appeal to a wider constituency than French Protestants, who by themselves would not be able to take on the French state. According to Skinner:

The solution adopted by Beza, Mornay and the other leading Huguenots in the face of this dilemma was an obvious but nonetheless a paradoxical one: they turned to the scholastic Roman law traditions of radical constitutionalism. They rejected the characteristically Protestant tendency to suppose that God places all men in a condition of political subjection as a remedy for their sins. Instead they began to argue that the original and fundamental condition of the people must be one of natural liberty. This in turn enables them to abandon the orthodox Pauline contention that all the powers that be must be seen as directly ordained by God. Instead they inferred that any legitimate political society must originate in an act of free consent on the part of the whole populace. (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 320)

Mornay, for example, makes something like a social contract argument for political authority. But whereas social contract theorists like Locke would propose a single contract at the foundation of society, Mornay proposes two. The first is a contract between God on the one side and the king and the people on the other side, through which the community becomes a church obligated to offer proper worship to God. The second is a contract between the king and the people, through which a state is created—a state where the king is bound to rule justly and the people are obligated to obey the king so long as he rules justly. As Mornay puts it:

The first covenant concerns an obligation to piety; the second concerns an obligation to justice. In the first, the king promises to serve God faithfully; in the second, to rule the people justly. The first obligates him to pursue God’s glory with everything he has; the second obligates him to advance the people’s welfare. The first carries an explicit condition: “If thou keep my Commandments.” The second carries its own: “If thou distribute Justice equally to every man.” (Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 133).

In both cases, then, the king’s authority is conditional. The religious contract implies that Christians have a right (indeed a duty) to resist a king who violates God’s law. The secular contract implies that people are bound to obedience only so long as they are under the protection of a just, lawful government. The king’s power was delegated to him from the people, and he continues to hold that power only with the people’s consent.

The problem is the two justifications are ultimately at odds. The religious justification entails a semi-theocratic regime, while the secular justification leans in the direction of genuine freedom.

According to Mornay’s secular justification, human beings are born into a state of natural liberty. “[H]uman beings naturally love freedom and hate being controlled. We are born more to lead than to follow, and we would never have willingly accepted being governed by others, surrendering what nature gave us.” Why, then, do human beings form political societies, which involves surrendering some of their natural liberty? Because “we expected some significant benefit in return.” Specifically, we expect our rulers to “uphold justice and defend by force of arms both the public order and individual citizens against harm and wrongdoing.” (Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 133). The king, therefore, far from being an all-powerful sovereign, is only an agent of the people, and if he threatens their life and liberty, they have a right to depose him. (This did not mean, as it did for Locke, that the people had a right to revolt against a tyrannical king. They can only exercise their right to depose him indirectly, through inferior magistrates.)

In very broad outlines, then, Mornay’s secular argument anticipates the viewpoint of Locke and the Founding Fathers. But it’s important not to exaggerate how pro-liberty Mornay is. Intellectual historian George Sabine is insistent that Mornay’s work

was in no sense a claim of popular rights inhering in every individual, nor did the Huguenot party from which it emanated stand for popular rights. It stood rather for the rights (or ancient privileges) of towns and provinces and classes against the leveling effect of royal power. The spirit of the Vindiciae was not democratic but aristocratic. Its rights were the rights of corporate bodies and not of individuals and its theory of representation contemplated the representation of corporations and not men. . . .

The author had no conception of a state which could abstain from making itself responsible for religious truth and purity of worship. In particular, its defense of the right to resist was not in the least an argument for popular government and the rights of man. (George Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 383)

Perhaps that’s overstated.¹ But it remains true that despite the important contribution of Huguenot thinkers to the idea of liberty, their ideas as formulated in the sixteenth century could not have produced the United States of America.

Equally important, their advances in a pro-liberty direction came from shedding distinctively religious arguments. As Skinner puts it:

With the publication of the major Huguenot treatises of the 1570s, Protestant political theory passes across a crucial conceptual divide. Hitherto even the most radical Calvinists had vindicated the lawfulness of resistance in terms of the paramount duty of the powers that be to uphold the true (that is, the Protestant) faith. But with Beza, Mornay and their followers, the idea that the preservation of religious uniformity constitutes the sole possible grounds for legitimate resistance is finally abandoned. The result is a fully political theory of revolution, founded on a recognisably modern, secularised thesis about the natural rights and original sovereignty of the people. (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 338)

It was not radical Huguenots who discovered political liberty, but Enlightenment thinkers. Yes, Enlightenment thinkers were building on earlier traditions, but these traditions themselves were either pagan or involved Christian thinkers pulling away from Christian orthodoxy and from Christianity’s other-worldly orientation.

If Christians wish to argue otherwise, they will have to look to a better guide than Mangalwadi.

1. Skinner argues that Mornay sees the purpose of government as “the preservation of individual rights,” which he bases mainly on Mornay’s (rather good) discussion of property rights. (Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol II, 326-329) I come down somewhere in between Skinner and Sabine. I believe that Mornay is groping towards a proper understanding of rights, but he hasn’t fully disentangled the concept from the feudal conception.