Paine proceeds to justify this point on the basis of citations from the Hebrew Bible, especially those that criticise the institution of monarchy. This was all the more notable since Paine, as later became clear, was an atheist. You do not have to be religious to understand the force and logic of Abrahamic politics.
Which brings us to liberty of conscience. The idea that we should be free to hold the opinions we do was not born in Athens or Rome. It did not exist in the Bible. It did not figure anywhere in the ancient world. It appeared under very specific circumstances: a Europe which had suffered a debilitating series of wars of religion in the aftermath of the Reformation. It was the product of an intensely religious age in which religion had become a source of conflict.
There are three things that can happen in such circumstances. The first is that the victorious party imposes its view on its opponents, ruthlessly suppressing their rights if they persist in their views. That was the norm before the seventeenth century and it remains true in totalitarian states today. The second is to say: a plague on both your houses. Since religion is a source of conflict, let us ban it altogether, at least in public. If people must worship, let them do so in the privacy of their homes or places of worship but nowhere else. That was the view of Voltaire and the French revolutionaries: Écrasez l’infâme, ‘Crush the infamy.’ The second strategy denies liberty to all religions, the first to all but one.
The third view says this: today our side holds power. We can impose our views on our opponents. But tomorrow they may hold power, and they may do to us what we did to them. Under those circumstances we would not be free to practise our religion, and that is something we wish to avoid at all costs. Therefore we will grant religious liberty to all who are willing to undertake to keep the civic peace. We will guarantee our opponents the freedom to practise their faith, so long as they are loyal to the state. That is how liberty of conscience was born. It was born specifically at a time of strong religious passion, with the aim of preserving a space where liberty was protected as sacrosanct regardless of who held power.
So in England, and eventually in a different way in the United States, religious liberty came to be created by people for whom religion mattered a great deal, in a way that surprised and intrigued French observers. In the early eighteenth century, Montesquieu said that the English know ‘better than any other people upon Earth how to value, at the same time, these three great advantages – religion, commerce, and liberty’.17 In the nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville was likewise to say, ‘I enjoyed, too, in England what I have long been deprived of – a union between the religious and the political world, between public and private virtue, between Christianity and liberty.’18 That is what surprised the French: that religion can be a force for freedom.
It is often said that history provides us with no action replays. It is not given to controlled experiments. We only learn what can go wrong after it has already done so, and by then it is too late to put it right. In fact, though, the history of freedom in the modern world can be seen as a testing ground for different conceptions of politics.
It witnessed four revolutions: the English (1640), the American (1776), the French (1789) and the Russian (1917). They had very different trajectories. The English and American revolutions led to war, but they left in their wake stable societies with respect for human rights. The French and Russian led to reigns of terror. They began with dreams of utopia, but eventually they turned into nightmares of repression.
The difference between them was that the English and American revolutions were inspired by the Bible. They were led by Puritans who had a strong sense of covenant, a deep familiarity with the Hebrew Bible and its rabbinic commentaries, through the Christian Hebraists mentioned above. They were religious through and through. The French and Russian revolutions were based on philosophy – Rousseau and the philosophes in the case of France, Marx and Engels in the case of Russia.
Why did this make a difference? I would suggest three reasons. The first is that the Bible and philosophy have a different sense of time. The Hebrew Bible – the first work to see God in history, the first even to think in terms of history – understands that it takes time for human beings to change. The message of Exodus to Deuteronomy can be summed up simply: it took a few days for Moses to take the Israelites out of Egypt. It took forty years to take Egypt out of the Israelites. The road to freedom is long and hard, and you cannot force the pace. Even Moses, the man who led the Israelites out of slavery, was not the leader to take the next generation into the land.
Philosophy since Plato has found time a difficult idea. Time, said Plato, is a moving image of eternity. Philosophical truths are timeless. They belong to a heavenly realm in which nothing ever changes. Philosophy is about truth as system. The Bible is about truth as story. Systems are theoretical constructs, but stories are about people and the time it takes for them to change. Revolutions inspired by philosophy attempt the impossible: to create a new social order overnight.
The second, as already mentioned, is that biblical politics places a huge emphasis on civil society: on strong families, supportive communities, voluntary associations, philanthropic endeavours and the like. This was the great strength of Britain and America, as Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville saw and said. It was Burke’s ‘little platoons’ and de Tocqueville’s ‘associations’ that kept liberty alive by serving as a buffer between the individual and the state. That is why the French and Russian revolutionaries disliked them. Rousseau, Marx and Engels distrusted families and communities, because they got in the way of the direct relationship between the citizen and the state.
The third reason has to do with the different ways biblical and revolutionary politics understood the concept of rights. Two of the greatest writers on liberty in the mid-twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty and J. L. Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, distinguished English and French approaches to liberty.19 The English approach was gradual, evolutionary, mindful of history and respectful of tradition. The French approach was perfectionist, philosophical, even messianic in a secular way. For the French revolutionaries there is an ideal template of society that can be realised by the application of politics to all spheres of life. The English, by contrast, knew ‘How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure’.20
This leads to two different concepts of human rights. The English version saw rights as defining the space in which governments may not intervene. In the social contract, we hand over some of our liberties to government for the sake of law and order and defence against foreign powers. But there are certain liberties – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as Thomas Jefferson put it – that are inalienable, meaning we do not and cannot sign them away. They define an area of freedom by setting limits to the power of the state.
The French approach was to see rights as an ideal description of humanity which it is the task of politics to enforce. Politics is about the transformation of society by the force of law. The French Revolution was undertaken in the name of rights, conceived as part of a scheme of social harmony that would reconcile personal good with the general good. Politics is about the use of power to bring about an ideal state of affairs. As Talmon writes, ‘When a regime is by definition regarded as realizing rights and freedoms, the citizen becomes deprived of any right to complain that he is being deprived of his rights and liberties.’21 Whereas English liberty set limits to the state, French liberty was to be imposed by the state. If need be, said Rousseau, we must force people to be free.
Hayek, writing in 1959, prophetically saw that the French tradition was everywhere displacing the English one. That has become suddenly, and unexpectedly, an issue in both Britain and the United States, where there has been an alarming erosion of religious liberties in recent years. The Attorney General of Massachusetts forced the Catholic Charities of Boston to close their adoption services because of their principled objection to same-se
x adoptions. A similar situation occurred in Britain. In Britain also, an airport worker was forbidden to wear a crucifix in public, a teacher was dismissed for talking to a sick pupil about prayer, and an officer of the Royal Society was forced to resign for suggesting that teachers, if asked, should be prepared to discuss the idea of creation.
These are dangerous intrusions into the freedom of religion, codified in article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which states, ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes … freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.’ That religious rights are being curtailed in Britain and the United States, the two nations that led the world in religious liberty, is deeply disturbing.
This is French freedom, not English; philosophical freedom, not biblical. It is a step towards totalitarian democracy. When politics becomes the pursuit of abstract perfection by means of legislation, freedom is in danger. There has, historically, been only one counterforce strong enough to prevent the slide from democracy into tyranny, as happened in Athens in antiquity and in France during the Reign of Terror: that is the recognition of the limits of human authority under divine sovereignty.
That remains, even today, the difference between Abrahamic politics and ideological politics, between a minimalist and a maximalist state, between the idea that civil society is sacrosanct because it is not based on relationships of power, and the idea that it should be circumscribed as far as possible so that political power should prevail.
My argument has been that contrary to the received narrative, freedom has been better served in the modern world by a religious vision than by a secular one. The Abrahamic vision, with its insistence on the non-negotiable dignity of the human person and the importance of protected space – the families and communities that make up civil society – where relationships are not based on power, saved England and America from the worst excesses of revolutionary politics that cost tens of thousands of lives in France and tens of millions in Russia.
Revolutionary politics bears all the hallmarks of left-brain thinking, with its preference for abstractions over the concrete men and women, with their specific histories and loyalties, who make up society. Abrahamic politics, by contrast, is politics with a human face, the politics that knows the limits of power, as well as the transformative effect of free persons freely joining together to make social institutions worthy of being a home for the divine presence. Abrahamic politics never forgets that there are things more important than politics, and that is what makes it the best defence of liberty.
8
Morality
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
Will and Ariel Durant1
Every ethos has its origin in a revelation, whether or not it is still aware of and obedient to it.
Martin Buber2
Dostoevsky is said to have commented, ‘If God does not exist, all is permitted.’ Was he right? Do you have to be religious to be good?
The short answer is, ‘No.’ You do not have to believe in God to save a drowning child, give food to the hungry or dedicate your life to fighting poverty in Africa. Some of those who risked their lives to save others in the Holocaust were religious, some were not. The most remarkable thing about such people is that they thought there was nothing remarkable in what they did.
The moral sense is prior to the religious sense. Long before they have begun to think about God or the human condition, young children understand concepts like fairness and injustice and can be quite forceful on the point. Adam Smith thought that (almost) all of us have the capacity for empathy. We are pained by other people’s pain, moved by other people’s plight. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.’3
We now know how this works. Our brain contains mirror neurons. These are brain cells that react not only when we perform actions but when we see others doing so.4 These make us imaginatively identify with others. When we watch a high-wire artist we share his suspense. When we see someone being humiliated we share their embarrassment and shame. Emotions within a group are contagious. When one laughs, we all laugh. Mothers and children mimic one another in precisely synchronised body language. Astonishingly, even one-day-old children cry in response to another infant’s cries of distress.5 We are hard-wired for empathy. We are the ‘moral animal’.6
Nor are we the only moral animal. The primate studies of Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal have shown us how widely distributed empathy can be. De Waal tells the story of a female bonobo named Kuni who found a wounded bird in her enclosure at Twycross Zoo in England. She picked up the bird and when the zookeeper signalled to her to let it go she climbed up a tree, unfolded the bird’s wings and spread them wide, a gesture that made no sense for a bonobo but every sense when trying to help a bird. When the bird failed to fly, Kuni climbed down and guarded it until the end of the day when it finally flew to safety.7
In 1964 researchers discovered that rhesus monkeys would refuse to pull a chain to release food for themselves if they could see that doing so would deliver an electric shock to another member of the group. One monkey, after seeing another receive a shock, stopped pulling the chain for twelve days, risking starvation to avoid hurting a companion.8
I am going to argue in this chapter that religion is important to morality, vitally so. But the relationship between them is neither simple nor superficial. Religious people can easily slide into the belief that only we are good; the others, the unbelievers, are either immoral or amoral. That is arrogance, not humility, and it is, in any case, simply untrue. We are social animals, we have social intelligence, and we have the instincts and skills that allow us to survive as groups, often putting the welfare of others ahead of our own. We have a moral sense, and this has nothing to do with religion or faith.
That is the short answer. But there is a longer one. Voltaire was highly sceptical about conventional religious beliefs, but said, ‘I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife, to believe in God, for I think I shall then be robbed and cuckolded less often.’9
Rousseau thought that a nation needed a religion if it was to accept laws and policies directed at the long-term future. Without it, people would insist on immediate gain, to their eventual cost.10
George Washington in his farewell address said, ‘Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion … Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.’11
What these views have in common is the belief that religion holds societies together as moral communities. The fear of God makes people think twice before defrauding or deceiving others. Conscience, the voice of God within the human heart, would, without religious faith, be more and more easily ignored. People would take advantage of one another whenever they thought they could avoid detection, and there would be a slow but inevitable breakdown of trust.
Tolstoy has a wonderful passage in which he offers an analogy:
The instructions of a secular morality that is not based on religious doctrines are exactly what a person ignorant of music might do if he were made a conductor and started to wave his hands in front of musicians well-rehearsed in what they are performing. By virtue of its own momentum, and from what previous conductors had taught the musicians, the music might continue for a while, but obviously the gesticulations made with a stick by a person who knows nothing about music would be useless and eventually confuse the musicians and throw the orchestra off course.12
Tolstoy’s point is subtle and substantive. When people begin to lose their re
ligious convictions, often the first thing they stop doing is observing religious rituals. The last thing they lose is their moral beliefs. A whole generation of mid-Victorian English intellectuals, most famously George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, lost their Christian faith but held fast to their Christian ethics.13 But that, implies Tolstoy, cannot last for ever. New generations appear for whom the old moral constraints no longer make sense, and they go. Moralities may be a long time dying but, absent the faith on which they are based, they die.
In 1959 the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe wrote a fascinating article in which, in effect, she said that what Tolstoy predicted had happened.14 Morality had become incoherent because we had lost the foundation on which it was built. Words like ‘obligation’ and ‘ought’ belonged to a culture in which people believed that there was such a thing as a divine law: the belief shared by Jews, the Greek Stoics and Christians. Lose this and the words themselves lose their meaning. It was, she said, as if the word ‘criminal’ remained when the criminal law had been abolished and forgotten.
In 1981, in one of the classics of modern philosophy, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre went further, and argued that our entire moral vocabulary had collapsed. All we are left with is fragments, half-remembered words like duty, virtue and honour, which no one understands any more. We speak without knowing what we are saying. We argue about morality without having any shared standards or beliefs. We are, he seemed to be saying, in a post-moral age.15
When I read these texts, my initial impression was that they were exaggerating. We all know certain moods in which the world as we knew it seems to be coming to an end, but somehow the heavens never fall. Yet as time passed, I began to realise how prophetic Anscombe and MacIntyre were. In public discourse, moral considerations became harder and harder to defend.
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