Liberal Is Not a Curse Word
If I called you a liberal, would you be complimented? Or are those fighting words?
Popular usage often empties ‘liberal’ of its historical meaning, reducing it, in Hatfield versus McCoy fashion, to a nickname for one caucus within our contestatory politics. Depending upon your perspective, it may designate a friend or a foe.
If I were to ask what determines if one is liberal, many could not answer except in vague terms, or perhaps by naming particular politicians they cheer or vilify. Some could respond by pointing to specific policies that they associate with today’s liberalism. But what I am really seeking to understand is what attributes identify some things as liberal as opposed to other categories.
In my experience, most Westerners of good will would subscribe to what I usually mean when describing a person or idea as liberal. In my normal usage, ‘liberal’ denotes a vision for our society, to borrow from John Milton, in which none are elevated above others and in which all “may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly without adoration.”
We receive our English word from the days of the Roman republic: a liber was a free person, “insofar as he enjoyed sufficient power and protection in the sphere of the basic liberties to be able to walk tall amongst others and look any in the eye without reason for fear or deference” (Pettit, 8).
From this classical vision of a free society, political philosopher Phillip Pettit derives a simple test by which to assess current policies. He calls it the ‘eye test.’ Our laws are sufficiently liberal — in this classical sense — when each citizen is afforded the dignity under law to stand unashamed and without fear before his neighbor.
This liberal vision for our common life should be especially important to Christian thinkers, for it’s consistent with “the New Jerusalem,” the poetic vision for our life with God when time is fulfilled. That vision is important because, as John Howard Yoder reminds us, the vocation of Christians is to weave lives that announce through their fruits that this new world is “on its way”(Yoder, 373). Quite simply, the politics of Jesus liberate.
Notice that, for me, liberal corresponds to this classical vision for our common life. That’s important because it clarifies that the liberal vision is not, as some profess, a discovery of Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Jefferson or John Stuart Mill. Modern liberalism, rather, is a species of thought — a family of prescriptions for an egalitarian society grounded in the language of natural law.
I gladly self-describe as a classic liberal to the extent that means my compass is set for the New Jerusalem. But, as a Christian, I am less persuaded of the worldview of modern liberalism, which I take to be self-contradictory.
In my next post, I’ll explain why.
Yoder, John Howard. 1994. “Sacrament as Social Process: Christ the Transformer of Culture.” In The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, 323–58. Herald Press (PA).
Pettit, Phillip. 2013. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. The Seeley Lectures. Cambridge University Press.
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