Our World and the Modern Liberal Worldview

A Symposium on Worldview

I argue here that “Christian worldview” thinkers need to reject modern liberalism, which in my estimation animates most of them, and secondly that they should expand “worldview” beyond mere suppositions. Worldview must encompass the subjective things, which constitute the principal goods of our life in this world. 

The Modern Liberal Worldview

As used by Christians, “worldview” is far too analytic in explaining why people hold this or that belief. The average person on the street did not acquire his beliefs by applying “presuppositions,” i.e., underlying suppositions. His beliefs are not consequences of rational inference. His strongest beliefs – the sort of beliefs that, when questioned, incite in him a passion to exact social costs from others – are formed in him by society. Society says what is praiseworthy and what is blameworthy, stemming from a foundational social dogma. In modern liberalism, you are “free” to be whatever you want and to express yourself, if you abide by the foundational dogma: each is entitled to his strong moral opinions, or to decide on the “meaning of his own existence,” but those opinions must remain personal, not a matter of public policy. Thick conceptions of the good must be separated from politics. Liberalism, at least in appearance and theory, restricts and suppresses the classical praise/blame function of society. 

Of course, this liberal restriction on the good is mere superstructure; it is but mist-enveloped appearance. At the foundation of liberalism, there is indeed a thick conception of the good, namely, that bare humanity (or humans as such)—stripped from their culture, ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.—is the animating concern of society and its institutions. The universal is elevated above the particular; the mere human is greater than the particulars that distinguish men. Civil society is a mere human space with unlimited identities, none claiming dominance over the others, only the right to be. Thus, in liberalism, our differences are reduced to public expression, to identities relative to others; no one can assert dominance in public policy, nor claim to be the core group of the political community. 

For this reason, liberalism is and has proven to be an effective strategy for minority ethnic groups in the West, for it effectively dispossesses majorities from their traditional strong claims to homeland. Their countries become a huddled mass of humanity, a “melting pot,” a “nation of immigrants,” united around a set of universal (liberal) propositions. It is not surprising that, after World War II, new buzzwords were popularized: “human dignity,” “human rights,” “nation of immigrants,” and “imago dei” (the Christianized version of human dignity). In modern liberalism, a “nation” is a space reserved for abstract humanity. 

This humanity principle is the foundational dogma of our age, animating virtually all thought in American society, including those who use “Christian worldview analysis.” Indeed, the humanity principle infects the full range of Christian theologies on offer today (with one very notable exception). The principle is Christianized, draped in Christian garb. We’re told, our hope is in a heaven of “all nations,” not our earthly nationality; and you are “more like” a Nigerian Christian than your secular American neighbor; and the civil realm is a “common kingdom” for common humanity, and so it should be multicultural, and the church is multicultural, so bring the nations to our doorsteps. Christian worldview—from dispensationalism to theonomic postmillennialism—has been syncretized with the fundamental modern liberal principle. You can reject “liberalism” and still be infected by it. A merely Christian society, which is the hope of some, is the theologized version of a merely human society. 

But despite the claims of “toleration,” some identities are off-limits in liberalism. You cannot be “antisemitic,” “racist” (to nonwhites), “misogynist,” and a few other things (expanding and contracting in relevance). But whether this or that group can speak positively or negatively about another group is asymmetric. Jewish academics and columnists¹, for decades, can write screeds against whites without any defunding or threats from donors. Of course, this cannot be reciprocated. “Antisemitism” on university campuses has generated calls for defunding, while rampant, decades-old anti-white ideology has proceeded with little disturbance. Likewise, nonwhite groups can say what they want with impunity (if it isn’t antisemitic). This is a version of what Eric Kaufmann has called “asymmetric multiculturalism”: the situation in which all minorities can have ethnic solidarity, even a negative or oppositional identity against the majority, while the majority can have no such solidarity, except when self-oppositional, i.e., self-hating. When saying something positive about a member of the majority, we must individualize him, ascribing his positive traits to the individual, not the group. But when some positive group-characteristic is unavoidable, the trait is declared to be merely human—a discovery of “humanity,” only accidentally connected to the group. Thus, positive features among majorities are either individualized or universalized. However, the majority are treated as a distinct group only when one says something negative about them. Christians, for their part, attribute the positive features of Western man to grace or divine providence, not something about them. In effect, the positive feature is universalized by a universal religion, namely, Christianity. 

Social dogma animates not only belief but action by establishing what is blameworthy and then praising those who do the blaming. Public moral worth is determined by one’s actions against dissenters from the humanity principle. Social opprobrium keeps people in line². Thus, even in a society with extensive free speech protections, there are great social and financial costs to violating the social dogma. It is not costly to fly a rainbow flag, but it is costly to fly a confederate flag. It is not costly for universities to be anti-white; it is costly to be homophobic, antisemitic, or transphobic. Social dogma is clearly revealed when otherwise smart people see no need to refute violations of social dogma. It is enough to psychoanalyze, morally denounce, or ridicule you. You are “feds” or “nazis,” or you’re on the take from Putin or Qatar. You have an “authoritarian personality” or have “ethnic vainglory.” Christians theologize the opprobrium, stating that you’ve denied Gospel, you’re an apostate, your church should discipline you, and “you wouldn’t like the cultural diversity of heaven.”

Far from eschewing the world, Christians have simply Christianized the prevailing system of praise and blame, finding their Christian moral worth and good work in enforcing the humanity principle. That is, you are godly to the extent that you enforce the Christianized version of modern liberalism’s social dogma. Since prevailing social dogma offers confidence to its enforcers, many Christians act in confidence only when they enforce social dogma. They are weak in themselves, and so they borrow confidence from modern liberalism. They delude themselves into thinking they are enforcing basic Christian orthopraxy. I suspect that, for many, their confidence in Christianity depends on syncretizing it with a confidence found outside it and that their enforcement likely produces addictive euphoria.

 Now, in classical liberalism, at least as described by John Locke, atheism and gross impiety should be punished because God (even if it was the “god” of the philosophers) was still the underlying principle of society. In modern liberalism, however, we have not the eradication but the subversion of divinity. It is not atheism but a subversion of Christian theism. These two truths, that there is a world to come and that humans share much in common are subverted to deny majorities a strong and exclusive claim to a particular place. You must be rootless in heart; your heart must dwell in heaven; and you must relegate your particular loves to your politically irrelevant identity. The only thing that fundamentally matters in liberal society is your humanity. You can care a great deal about your particularity. You can proclaim it from the rooftops, fly all the flags. But, in the end, your distinctness must be nothing but an expression of identity among other identities. 

A corollary to the human principle is the nomadic principle. Since your particular ancestral connection to a place is relegated to the personal or to an identity among identities, you cannot assert an intergeneration claim to the place of your people. You cannot follow Edmund Burke, who spoke of the “eternal society”—the linkages of the dead, living, and unborn to a people and place. The living, in liberalism, do not inherit a place from their ancestors. Rather, the dead labored for humanity. That is, they labored for an abstraction, just as our soldiers fight and die not for us but for humanity—to “make the world safe for democracy.” Likewise, the living do not labor for the future generations that spring from them, their kin, or their friends. They labor for future humans, who will come from everywhere and form a nowhere. In modern liberalism, the powerful element—the nowheres—recreate in society their own state of existence: nomadic, deracinated, cosmopolitan. Don’t be fooled, however. They’ll congratulate and praise you for loving your granddaddy’s old farm. They’ll smile and say, “That’s good.” It’s your identity; you can deeply love your identity. But the moment you say, “this land is the land of my people,” you’re toast. At heart, you must be nomadic and have a weak claim to the land of your people. 

Christians eventually came to Christianize this nomadic principle through expressions such as this world is not my home, or America in the end will burn, or we’re just pilgrims passing through, or the church is your only people and place. Theology serves to conform us to the humanity and nomadic principles. We have, therefore, a theological justification for a strong Christian identity that makes only weak public claims for itself. You are but an identity among a sea of identities. And when we “stand boldly for Christ,” we are merely expressing our identity among others. For this reason…no one cares. Express away, Christian man, just keep your identity out of politics, or go ahead and be political, but fuse your Christian “political witness” with the social dogma. The clearest expression of this is in Kellerism, where Christian politics is simply the work of making the Christian identity as winsome as possible. Politics is not for political ends but for shaping a public identity (or our “moral witness”) in the service of evangelizing coastal elites. 

Ironically, for all their talk of antithetical worldviews, Christian “worldview” thinkers are some of the fiercest advocates for the modern liberal presuppositions, and they piously enforce them among their fellow Christians. Indeed, the “worldview” mentality, in my estimation, opens the Christian mind to this very thing. Affirming antithetical worldviews, without a fundamental critique of the humanity and nomadic principles, makes every “worldview” an identity among identities. And all the various Christian organizations and thought leaders, from left to right, encourage us to “speak up” and “engage” but none seem to realize that we’re just adding to the cacophony of shouting.

Our World

With all this emphasis on “humanity,” we’ve lost a basic element of it: to have a strong connection to people and place. The abstraction of humanity has suppressed a basic human good. As I alluded to earlier, one problem with “worldview” is that it’s far too suppositional. Since it can only contend with suppositions about purely objective reality, it has little interest in and downplays subjective elements. In this section, I want to reframe “worldview” a bit to make it more humane. 

To state my point directly: the highest goods of earthly life are good because they’ve taken on features that are subjective. I’m not talking about “standpoint epistemology” or any such thing. I’m saying that the highest things in earthly life, what we care for the most, are experienced and known subjectively, based on a relation to a people, place or thing. The clearest example is the difference between a house and a home. Everyone can affirm, “This is a house.” Everyone can affirm, “This is Sally’s home.” But only Sally (and anyone else in that household) can experience this house as home. The experience and knowledge of this house as home is exclusive to Sally and her household. It elevates the house for them beyond market value and beyond material into something higher. It is essential to their well-being. The principal features of life—that which we cherish on earth more than anything else—require the addition of an exclusive, subjective element to elevate it from pure objectivity. Such elevation is required for the complete human good, and it is the principal part of earthly life. 

What does this have to do with “worldview”? I suggest that we, at the very least, allow “worldview” to be applied beyond the more suppositional, analytic mode. Human beings are world-creators. Our activity in the world takes objective reality and generates a subject-object relation such that, at a most basic level, these things and places become familiar to us. Familiarity is foundational for an array of attitudes or sentiments present in these relations. There is comfort, anxiety, responsibility, warmth, solemnity, sacredness, memory, sacrifice, and many others. Places and things can be adorned with such familiarities and even become enduring conduits of love from loved ones long gone, who left traces of their labor behind. And the living receive these as gifts to be conserved and improved on for future generations. 

Our world is not simply the world, objectively speaking. Our world is one adorned with these subject-object relations. It is a life-world—the world enlivened by our activity across generations. Each of us has a world, different from others, though each world overlaps and each is irreducible to an individual. It is intersubjective, meaning that our relation to places and things is bound up with others. A family together has an inter-subjective relationship to the house. The love of home is bound up with symbiosis, the living-together. Our being-with and our living-together is the ground of our shared, social world, the basis for our common particular loves. Roger Scruton once called this the “soul of the world.”

Our life-world extends far beyond the house. It goes to the town, county, state, and nation. These are not mere economic zones but places of our concern, love, responsibility, struggle, and sacrifice. They are the places of our loved ones long dead, who gave them to us; and they are the future homes of our progeny, for whom we labor. 

If it is true that the intergenerational connection to people and place is a necessary and principal human good, then that good needs to be secured. It is not enough to reduce it to an identity in modern liberalism. It must be an object of policy. But that requires us to reject the humanity and nomadic principles described above. Mere humanity cannot be the foundation of a political community. Rather, the foundation must be the shared world of its inhabitants, those loves that are exclusive to them. Proper thinking of “worldview” must encompass this reality, elevating it beyond mere universal suppositions. Our world is ours and worth conserving, to the honor and the good of those whom we love. 

---

Share This