Laissez-faire and the Theocratic Vision
You may have noticed, Protestants are talking about political theology again. It’s a welcome development. The latest installation, James Baird’s book, King of Kings, presents a very basic point, that government should promote true religion. Among other things, this vision of Christian political order (derived from the Westminster Standards) has been denounced as “unconservative,” a great heresy, apparently. More basically, this charge—meant to disqualify when other arguments fail—assumes a static quality to conservatism, a mistake when dealing with any ism.
The real question is, which conservatism? Endless essays and seminars about the “permanent things” and the conservative disposition cannot change the fact that conservatism as we now think of it is not timeless, and would have been unrecognizable to the ancients, even the American ancients. Much of what “conservatism” is today was created out of whole cloth over a century ago against the protestations of conservatives. Protestants in particular should consider this development carefully.
As Michael Lind and others have observed, conservatism has not been all that good to Protestants. It has, in fact, demonstrated little interest in conserving the traditions and historic thought of Protestant America. Postwar intellectual conservatism is a predominantly Catholic and Jewish project, and to some extent, as Lind points out, a British project. The traditionalism of the three-legged fusionist stool was not Protestant traditionalism but Catholic. The ecumenism was not Protestant denominationalism but the more inclusive “Judeo-Christian” kind, and “Christian” was no longer polite code for “Protestant” as it had been in the early republic.
And yet, the dynamics under review did not start there but earlier. For over 100 years, conservatism has de-Protestantized to the extent possible at nearly every turn, even as Protestants have provided a reliable consumer and electoral base. The second-class status of Protestants in conservatism did not appear overnight. Conservatism was intentionally “disconnected from the Protestant demographic mainstream of America,” and before the 1950s. Protestants were always anti-communist, as Allan Lichtman shows, but conservatism was never pro-Protestant. To rejoin the movement, Protestants had to be ecumenical. That Protestants joined late—the conditions of which were full embrace of conservative priorities—is entirely understandable. This is not to say that the reentry of Protestants into the conservative movement in the 1980s had no effect on the movement itself, simply that there are long historical reasons for why Protestants are not driving the conservative bus, and this by design. Protestants priorities also shifted as they filed into conservatism. There is a reason that Pat Robertson lost the Evangelical vote to George H. W. Bush. To be a good conservative in a “kinder and gentler nation,” you cannot endorse “theocratic” politics contrary to a theology of freedom.
New Conservatism
Clinton Rossiter called it “the Great Train robbery of American intellectual history.” In late nineteenth century postbellum America, change was everywhere. A second industrial revolution and mass immigration from previously unrepresented nations. Conservatism changed too; it became what most people today would recognize as conservatism, viz., classical liberalism or what Rossiter calls “laissez-faire conservatism.” Conservatism abruptly adopted a new posture and mode; it became more individualist, libertarian, and secular. That is, less attached to the historic American religion, Protestantism. No longer a part of conservatism was any positive moral, religious vision for society. Certainly, the belief that government should provide moral or religious direction for society became outdated. In other words, the American right lost its theocratic element. As we’ll see, the left did not.
As Rossiter recounts of the new conservatism of the Gilded Age,
“In proclaiming a political faith largely in Jeffersonian phraseology, the American Right ceased to be consciously conservative. The old Conservative tradition sank even deeper into lonely disrepute, while a new kind of anti-radicalism moved in to take its place and provide the Right with comfort and inspiration.”
Between 1865 and 1920, laissez-faire conservatism rose to prominence. This was the final abandonment of Federalism and the adoption of Jeffersonian democracy, as Rossiter describes it, though the new conservatives still made convenient use of Federalist founders like Adams. As today, conservatives were adept at making their eclectic, often contradictory, appropriation rhyme. This is how, for example, Alexander Hamilton can be eagerly invoked to affirm Lord Acton’s warnings about power but ignored in his advocacy of a powerful executive.
Rossiter notes that laissez-faire conservatism is a “paradoxical political theory” with “a monstrous gap between ideals and realities, and many of the ideals were at total war with one another.” “Progress, individualism, democracy—the Right could never have embraced these essentially alien beliefs with convincing enthusiasm except for one decisive fact: the intellectual climate of the age was thoroughly materialistic… This made it possible for the Right to argue that Liberal democracy and laissez-fair capitalism were really one and the same thing.”
The new conservatives were disinterested in anthropology. “They ignored almost completely [man’s] nature and needs as social, religious, or political animal.” The economic individual was the political unit even as the new conservatives pleaded for him to be virtuous. “Liberty” was the buzzword, “liberty defined largely in economic terms.” All rights were individual, not communal. The liberty of property and contract, both intricate to economic self-determination and equality of opportunity—political not economic equality. Government’s purpose was to protect these rights, but it was also, by nature, a threat to them by its inefficiency and tendency to interfere. “The purpose of government was always stated in purely individualistic terms.” This was the minimalist, nightwatchmen theory of the state. Government was merely the umpire there to call foul if the rules of the game were violated. The state was decided not an active instrument of leadership, and was certainly not charged with social happiness. The goal was to reduce government’s relevancy and size to such a degree that, as Grover Norquist would say, it could be drowned in a bathtub.
It was on this basis that, Rossiter observes, “an intense cult of the Constitution” was born, rising to the level of “a second Holy Writ,” and its framers became apostles of new conservatism. Whereas the actual framers had been ambivalent about the Constitution as a pragmatic mode of governance, the new conservatives sacralized it. Now the parchment was “great and sacred,” and inviolate, immutable even. “In short, the Constitution was a closed book by which Americans must live henceforth and forever,” and this closed book was a “catalogue of limitations rather than a grant of powers.” In need of an interpretive key and inspirational hermeneutic, the Declaration of Independence was rediscovered as the philosopher’s stone.
The new faith required new clergy. Judicial supremacy was not invented by laissez-faire conservatism but was furthered to counter any semblance of departmentalism. Judicial review was the vehicle of strict, protectionist constitutionalism that would defend property and economy. Like Jefferson, the laissez-faire fear was active legislature, not judges—the oracles of God. The only thing worse was an active executive. Good presidents did the will of legislatures; good legislatures did little. Judges checked both. Judges of the Lochner era generally did not disappoint.
The merits of present cases aside, it is noteworthy that this period is when display of Ten Commandments in courthouses accelerated. Not that such display would have been any offense to the Establishment Clause prior to the late twentieth century. Rather the point is that new conservatives were interested in the Constitution acquiring parallel status with the Decalogue, both in a laissez-faire gloss. The move was not to suggest a moral, directing power to government, but rather the divinity of absolute restrictions against such activity.
Laissez-faire conservatives were still attuned to the importance of what is phrased today as intermediating institutions. Family, church, and school were indispensable to progress, and the existence of which precluded need for government oversight. Market interests, economic and moral, would keep things in step with providence, the arc of which bent toward progress which seemed inevitable to the genuinely optimistic, progressive mind of new conservatives especially those profiting from rapid industrialization.
All this became conservative constitutionalism and economics which, at bottom, were really the same thing. Minimalist government, individualism, free enterprise, unregulated markets—all a product of the postbellum years. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Bolshevism already served as the great contrastive threat. At one and the same time, Gilded Age conservatism “made a peace of convenience and profit with the two mighty forces of the age: democracy and industrialism.”
Rossiter adds that the new laissez-faire conservatism was remarkably and paradoxically confident in itself and that it had discovered moral absolutes. Every right thinking, respectable person believed in all of this: the individualism, the constitutionalism, the progressivism. What is equally strange is that as these absolutes were preached and their protective text gained sacred status, religion itself was decentered. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a secular conservatism was espoused for the first time. That is not to say that all apostles and adherents were themselves secular, albeit acolytes of Darwin and the “new thought” abounded. The new conservatism gained popular appeal, but it did not de-Christianize America overnight. Rather, it is to say that, for the first time on the right, an irreligious political order was espoused. Indeed, this was the most sacred thing to do. God willed it. New conservatism was, we might say, anti-theocratic.
Laissez-faire was economic dogma with more than economic implications. James Hutson points out that in the eighteenth century, the expanded tolerance policy of England was foisted on the colonies for economic and bureaucratic interests, viz., to attract emigrants. The population of England needed to be thinned a bit and colonial development required manpower and investment. Religious rigidity was bad for business. As Jefferson would later argue, too much public attention to religion at all is bad for progress.
In many ways, the new conservatism was anti-tradition—except for the traditions it constructed post hoc—and anti-Protestant. As Gillis Harp puts it in Protestantism and American Conservatism, “this new incarnation” of classical liberalism as conservatism was the first iteration of American conservatism that was not “explicitly or self-consciously Protestant as had been the old.” Meanwhile, the liberal Progressives remained more thoroughly Protestant in certain ways. There is a reason one triumphed over the other and that, only with great difficulty and further ostracization of Protestants did the new conservatism get a postwar rebirth. There is a reason that Protestants have never led institutional, intellectual conservatism, namely, their historic thought and assumptions were cast out in before the turn of the twentieth century and their populist base was discarded a half century after that.
Progressives remained politically Protestant if theologically heterodox whereas conservative Protestants may have retained more fundamental orthodoxy at an individual or church level but jettisoned their Protestantism politically. No surprise then that while conservatism may have built up the economy, Progressivism remade the nation and the world.
Theocratic Dissenters
The shift to laissez-faire conservatism did not progress uncontested. There were plenty who had never accepted Jefferson or Jackson, and who were “revolted by the decline in public morality, decay of manners, and vulgarity of the newly rich, frightened by a landscape gashed with factories and cities chocked with immigrants… They care no more for the fruits of democracy than for those of industrialism.” Progress was never certain; individualism smacked of excess. “Although they were deeply concerned with the rights and personality of the individual, they would not be drawn into an attitude of contempt for government and neglect of the community.” Critics like Henry and Brooks Adams, traditionalists (or humanists) like Irving Babbitt, and patricians like Henry Cabot Lodge were members of the resistance—variously skeptics of democracy, industrialism, and individualism all.
These types are the ones briefly chronicled by Rossiter. But they weren’t the primary source of dissent. That came from Protestants. Not all Protestants, to be sure. The son of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher (Presbyterian turned Congregationalist), Francis Wayland (Baptist), and Phillips Brooks (Episcopalian) preached, in their own way, elements of laissez-faire doctrine predicated on a basic law of natural social hierarchy and the belief that individualism was a providential means to social progress.
Those Gillis Harp calls “theocratic dissenters” did not constitute a unified platform but an identifiable spectrum of resistance not just to the individualism and capitalism of laissez-faire conservatism, but to its political irreligion. Harp identifies three representative figures—Protestants all. “Among their most significant distinguishing features of the dissidents was religious faith and not merely in terms of personal piety.” Their Calvinism gave them a vision of Christian commonwealths not just individuals.
Theodore Dwight Woolsey and Noah Porter, the successive presidents of Yale College and both were Congregationalist ministers. Harp’s other theocratic dissident is Robert Ellis Thompson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, editor, and minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church. The Episcopalian Elisha Mulford and others, like Old School Presbyterians in the South (e.g., Robert Dabney), and Charles Hodge (Princeton), are also mentioned by Harp. Though Mulford was more theologically liberal than the others, he nevertheless maintained the hallmarks of “traditionalists… formed by Calvinist political thinking and by a theocratic stream within the Reformed tradition.”
In this sense, their assumptions and ambitions were objectively conservative in that they maintained the “theocratic” (Harp’s language) element of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestants (surveyed by Harp in earlier chapters). Don’t believe that they were conservative? How about the fact that they lost. Surely this establishes unquestionable conservative bona fides.
Their’s was a “statist” vision insofar as it assigned Christian character and purpose to both the nation and the state, rejected faith in progress, secularism, and modernizing corporatism. Indeed, one of Harp’s primarily complaints is that Evangelical Protestants in particular became derivative of the conservative dogmas of the mid-to-late twentieth century, baptizing laissez-faire rather than asserting their own native tradition. They lost their “critical edge.”
Seven years before Abraham Kuyper gave his famous Stone Lectures on Calvinism at Princeton, it was Thompson who had the honor, and his lectures are representative of the stream of theocratic dissent that sought to conserve an older understanding of moral political order.
Divine Order
In The Divine Order of Human Society, the title given to Thompson’s lectures, opens with a passage that resonates so completely with our own day that it should be quoted at length. (Think of someone like Jonathan Parnell at Cities Church when reading this quote.) Thompson speaks of the seminary students training for pastoral ministry in reference to the then emerging Social Gospel (as Joseph Bottum saw, the ancestor of today’s upheavals):
“A quarter of a century ago they might have confined themselves to the exposition of the Word of God, and to the questions of pure or applied theology which came directly in the line of a pastor’s relation to his people. They now find that they are obliged to take some interest in a new range of subjects. Social agitations have arisen, which seem to go down to the roots of things. They are invited on Christian principles to repudiate the whole structure of society and to aid in its overthrow. They find that passages of the Bible they never thought of in that connection are alleged as condemning what they had been taught to approve. They are told that Christianity is a revolutionary doctrine which lays the whole system of our social order under its ban.”
This new gospel (“the Socialist solution”) further tells them that as “Christian” revolutionaries they are to “aid in the establishment of a completely new order of things” that will induce total equality. On the other side of the equation, Thompson says, is the moral breakdown of society: dissolution of the family, legalized divorces, explosion of municipal populations, and so on.
All this, the demands of the revolutionaries and moral degradation, are pressing on pastors as they would not have a quarter century prior. It is in this environment, says Thompson, that pastors and all Christians must return to true “social foundations,” realize that “There is no peace for us but in becoming a more Christian nation.” Part of the reason that Christians had been otherwise defenseless against the radicals was because they had not understood the “sociological” (or political) import of the Bible. Strictly New Testament Christians are vulnerable to manipulative, emotive proof texting. (Do we not see it today?) Christians have to think politically again but they don’t know how.
“To very many Christians much of the Bible means nothing, or next to nothing, because they have no perception of its sociological purpose.” What use is the Old Testament once you get the incarnation and resurrection? Thompson argues that its sociological use is in presenting the archetype of “all national life… for all time” just as the New Testament is the “textbook” of “church life.” The history of Israel “is meant to illustrate the laws of that life” through a sociological record. The Old Testament is a political instruction manual.
Thompson is no theonomist. The socio-political use of the Old Testament is not about wooden replication. Thompson employs the national history of Israel in traditionally Protestant form as a record for principled emulation. It tells us what good political orders and bad political, good kings and bad kings, good citizens and bad citizens are like. Israel shows what sins destroy nations and what virtues uphold them.
Of course, Thompson also inveighs against rampant individualism (“in this Darwinian age”), blaming John Wesley, Adam Smith, and Jean Jacques Rousseau chiefly. Against all these spirits of the age, Thompson directs us to “the ground occupied by the Protestant Reformers.” Calvinism, a “manly” and “heroic faith,” is “a social as well as a theological faith.” It is “theocratic” if not “hierocratic” (rule of priests). “Eliminate from the Calvinistic theology the theocratic element… and you have destroyed the perspective and the coherence of its teachings.” Thompson was not a Covenanter but he says their virtue was keeping a theocratic element alive (“witness to the breadth of the divine kingdom”). Calvinism dissipates without the theocratic political element but so too does the unity of the Old and New Testament, the consecration of socio-political life to God is the thread between them. And without this element, life on earth lacks “historical permanence” and gives way to progress.
Thompson works through the subjects of family, church, and nation, each one being perfected by Protestantism but now under duress at the hands of apostate Protestants. The fundamental nature of each society—family, church, nation—is that they are worshipping societies, they are all religious, none is secular, each reflects the kingdom of God. Thompson’s comments on national life, however, are most presently pertinent.
A social contractarian theory of political society defies human nature. Man is a political animal. The body politic is this “mediately the creation of God.” “It is by our nature, not by any deliberate choice or act of volition, that the state exists.” Hence, Aristotle says the state predates man and other associations and “does not look back to a time when as yet the state was not.” Political society, nations are natural not engineered, and “history is the biography of nations.” Only “political theorists” have visited places and times where political order was absent. The natural development of nations and states can be traced and understood, as Thompson does at length through the history of Israel, but this progression is not optional. All this is—that nations are not human creations—is intricate to the theocratic element.
Accordingly, there are no “human rights” outside of political order. Natural rights are those that are conducive to the “completeness” of man’s life which is found in political society, “our ethical culture.” The right to property, for example, is not a right individual man in a state of nature discovers and imposes on society as a condition of membership, but rather one discovered in the development of a cultural ethic as conducive to man doing good and living well with other men. Private property is conducive to both production and benevolence.
Theocracy
Again, the typical nation is Israel, “the Old Testament is the key to the meaning of national life.” That meaning is fundamentally theocratic, not in the sense of rule by priests, but in that “religious and political affairs are so intimately blended that they are inextricable.” This was true of every ancient state, some were theocracies in the literal sense, like Egypt. Theocracy for Thompson is simply the recognition of God as author and ruler of society; it is a Christian political order, the diametrical opposite of a merely secular order. A Christian order is not a recapitulation of Old Testament Israel in its particulars, but it is an instantiation of the archetype insofar as it approximates divine justice on earth, maintains the sacredness of the nation, and harmonizes priest and king, in “conscious obligation to God.”
It is the religion of a people that determines their liberties and relations and distinguishes them from others. And it is the absence of the theocratic principle that inaugurates statism. Atheist regimes are true, literal theocracies. Atheist regimes do not usually declare themselves atheist or agnostic, rather they are identifiably by their foundations, by the absence of the theocratic principle. In these regimes, the fiat of man creates societies, nations; the individual is the deity who rules through his rights, and the state is his vicegerent. Man directs the state in individualist democracy, and the state serves his passions. If man is the originator of political reality, then rights can be infinitely granted. Laissez-faire reduces the state to a rights factory, an agnostic state, not a state at all. “[A] nation’s conception of God furnishes the goal toward which it moves.” Remove the theocratic element and a nation becomes stagnant, incapable of growth, collapsing in on itself. Thompson saw China as the quintessential agnostic state and, hence, artificial, soulless, and lifeless, its only movement coming from reaction to external occurrences.
Already, Thompson recognized that these dynamics yield immense intolerance of intolerance where tolerance itself becomes an overarching ethic. When Christianity is predominant, the unbeliever pleads for tolerance, but he has no grounding for it and, therefore, no basis for extending it to anyone else, especially not the intolerant. Toleration in a Christian society can reinforce the center as normative whereas pluralism by definition makes toleration impossible, a moot point. Given that the purpose of the state is rights generation, anyone who suggests limitations on rights production is an enemy of the state, especially if limitations are rooted in a divine will. The same goes for those who assert particularity over neutrality. Was this not demonstrated on every count by socialist states?
None of this equation, the beginning, middle, or end, conforms to nature and nature’s God. Here the state does not assert divine moral order against man but a human moral order against God. There is no authority outside the self and society is reduced to a collective self. Laissez-faire is, in a technical sense, collectivism. The individualists put America on the same path as their socialist counterparts would through their insistence that the state facilitate rather than restrain the selfish passions of mankind. By discarding a theocratic vision, the new conservatives ensured that their clash with more restrictive alternatives would be a contest of rights, not justice, a duel of human passions not divine order. What the laissez-faire conservatives would struggle to combat is a rival that retained the theocratic element, especially if material and political conditions under conservatism produced aggrieved parties.
Truer Protestants
The Progressives never discarded the theocratic vision. Woodrow Wilson was reportedly a great admirer of Mulford’s The Nation (1870)—Thompson called it the greatest book of political thought. This is, in part, why the Progressive/New Deal era, from Wilson to FDR was so powerful (and illiberal), and this is why there has never been a conservative parallel in modern American history of great historic change and moral, political, and economic reorientation of the nation. A cursory review of Wilson’s and FDR’s speeches evinces theocracy, replete with appeals to divine order and providential purpose. World War II really was “Protestant jihad.”
The point is not the results, or the particular flavor, of the Progressive theocratic vision. The point is that they retained it (at least rhetorically) in their politics while conservatives embraced laissez-faire secularism and individualism. It supplied moral energy, the “voltage differential.” John F. Kennedy, for that matter, was not the last to invoke John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity (1630), but he was the only one to name Winthrop and deliver a city on a hill speech that actually would have made sense to Winthrop.
Progressives, liberals, whatever you want to call them—all these labels are obviously malleable—adulterated soteriology but have conserved an indispensable element of American Protestantism that conservatives haven’t. Walter Rauschenbusch still preached a “Christianizing social order.” Calvin would not have recognized Rauschenbusch’s account of the faith, but he would have recognized this sentiment, namely, that Christianity is political. In this sense, the Progressives were truer Protestants. It is significant that, as questions of national identity become more pressing, J.D. Vance seems to understand something of this. Though not to the extent of the theocratic dissenters of the 1890s, the newest right retains some affinity for at least the historic importance of national religious character through its recovery of the Buchananite paleoconservatives who had been ostracized by conservatism for decades.
Without the theocratic element, conservatives won’t be able to put together an era of dominance and lasting change that Progressives did in the twentieth century, the results of which are still with us. And it may be that it takes a Roman Catholic to lead Protestants back to their own tradition. Insofar as Protestants are resistant to this leading, it is because their conservatism is new not old, innovative not traditional, a fact that should induce reflection. Reassessment and realignment on the American right is the a big opportunity for Protestants. That there are some Protestants who are already “aggressively Protestant” is a good sign. The critics are right; the new theocratic dissidents are not conservative because they are two things incongruent with conservatism, Protestant and illiberal. They are, to borrow a favorite media phrase, ultra conservative. More importantly, they are truer Protestants.
Image Credit: Idleness and Industry (1747), William Hogarth. Wikimedia Commons.
