Darryl Hart is easy to read, but, in another sense, he is very hard to read. His second chapter “Whose Freedom, Which Liberty?” is a treasure trove of historical information, but his discussion also includes, it must be said, an astonishing oversight. I don’t know what — other than an amillennialism that appears to have the pull of Jupiter’s gravity — could account for it.
Darryl begins by noting, and ably discussing, the common idea among American Protestants, from the Founding on, that Protestantism and civil liberty go together like ham and eggs. Darryl doesn’t assume it the way they do, and points out in a number of places that they are assuming it. “The flip side of this assumption was the similar belief that Protestantism was the best soil from which civil liberty could grow” (p. 51, emphasis mine). “For him [Beecher], as for Witherspoon, the connection between Protestantism and political liberty was so close as to be obvious” (p. 56). “Beecher was not the only American Protestant to let the connection between political and religious liberty go assumed rather than proven” (p. 57, emphasis mine).
He discusses John Witherspoon, and Lyman Beecher, and Josiah Strong, showing how each of them assumed that evangelical Protestantism was the natural cradle of liberty. Darryl is quite right about this, and I was somewhat confused reading through this section — because I assume it too, and I do so because it seems historically obvious. But Darryl wants it to be demonstrated, about which more shortly.
But Darryl then tries to show that these American Presbyterians were departing radically (albeit unwittingly) from the Westminster Confession’s definitions of liberty, which Darryl wants to represent as advocating a very “spiritual” concept of liberty. He quotes the twentieth chapter of the WCF, and then says, “In other words, the primary consideration in understanding Christian liberty was the ultimate salvation of persons from sin and death” (pp. 62-63).
I simply cannot understand why Darryl would draw conclusions about the “apolitical” nature of Westminsterianism, but not refer to the fact that the men who drafted that document were neck deep in the political affairs of the time, and drew the different conclusions they did on the basis of their respective theologies. Moreover, I cannot fathom how Darryl could draw these conclusions from the chapter on Christian liberty in isolation, and not make any reference to the chapter on the civil magistrate, which says loads of things that don’t sound very “apolitical” to me. To wit:
But Darryl wants to say that “faith and public policy have little to do with each other” (p. 70) and he wants to say it as though it were the heritage of Westminster. I simply can’t get my mind around this.
But there is another problem for him, going in the other direction. Darryl knows that Thornwell was one of the principal advocates of the spiritual nature of the church. “Thornwell defended well this spiritual conception of Christian liberty” (p. 63). But Darryl still flinches. He prefaces his discussion of Thornwell by saying, “Without trying to justify a clearly racist and pernicious way of ordering society and economic production . . .” But if the Christian faith is apolitical, then whatever could be wrong with racist and pernicious ways of ordering society? Who cares about that? All we want to know is if we are going to heaven with our sins forgiven. And whatever could be wrong with saying ditto when it comes to economic production? Remember, Darryl holds that Christian “freedom [has] nothing to do with politics” (p. 63). Christian liberty is apolitical (p. 64). Well, is it or not?
And so here are some concluding thoughts, taking up Darryl’s challenge, the one he levels at Christian republicanism’s greatest weakness — “that is, failing to spell out the exact nature of the ties between religion and political liberty” (p. 60). There are three answers to this — exegetical, historical, and “think about it for a minute.”
Exegetically, God commands all nations to believe in Jesus, to observe all that He has commanded. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry. The New Jerusalem is the Christian Church, and kings will bring their honor and glory into it. This could be developed more, but there it is.
And historically, from at least the time of Constantine on (not to mention far-sighted Christians before Constantine), the Christian Church has assumed it as self-evident that the civil magistrate had an obligation to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Many of the Founders of the American experiment believed that this could be done informally, but they agreed with all Christendom that it was absolutely essential to do. They stepped away from the robust Westminster embrace of an established church, but they stepped away from Westminster in the opposite direction than Darryl indicates. Westminster insisted on a formal, covenanted relationship between state and Church. The Americans thought we could have an informal, “goes without saying” arrangement between state and Church, but they were still advocates of Christendom. Darryl has objected to this most recent move (that’s reasonable), but it’s still a little weird. Westminster brewed themselves a hearty oatmeal stout of establishmentarianism, the Americans went for an amber ale (no federal church, state churches if you want them, and generic Protestantism pervasive everywhere), and now Darryl is urging us all to return to the stout. But his example is confusing — he is drinking the bottled water of secularism.
“Think about it for a minute.” Look at it this way. If the gospel genuinely liberates a people from their sins, freeing them from their bondage to vice and self-indulgence, and these people begin to live responsible and God-honoring lives, it will at some point be next to impossible to enslave those people. All the tricks that despots use won’t work on them. Christian liberty, of the spiritual kind that Westminster spoke of, is a yeast that must work through the entire loaf of bread.