Abstract
I worry that some recent Christian criticisms of liberalism are the kind of fantasy that Murdoch warned about, caricaturing what they purport to oppose. They are also ominously vague about what would replace it. Both writers echo earlier Christian flirtations with Marxism: philosophical errors lead idealists to gullibly embrace authoritarian kleptocrats who do not give a damn about the people the idealists are trying to help.
I will focus on the work of Patrick Deneen, with some reference to the more abbreviated but similar critiques of liberalism by Adrian Vermeule. Both claim that liberalism’s relentless logic tends to destroy communities and traditions. The alleged mechanism is underspecified. Deneen offers more detail, emphasizing the harm that neoliberal economics has done to working class incomes, and the harm that the sexual revolution has done to working class family structure. In both cases, he is unfamiliar with the pertinent social science and so misdescribes the mechanisms at work. These ills certainly exist, but abandoning liberalism is a quack remedy.
I’m one of the liberals they oppose. I have defended aspects of liberal practice that they find especially odious: abortion, gay rights, drug use, and pornography. I have also argued, however, precisely as an inference from liberalism, that religious people like them who reject all these things ought to be able to live out their ideals unmolested by the majority, for example when they decline to facilitate same-sex weddings. I don’t recognize myself in their claims that liberals aim to bully religious conservatives to the margins of society. Some on the left concededly do. They aren’t liberals. The insouciant enthusiasm, in factions on the left and the right, for dismantling American political institutions calls to mind Roger Scruton’s observation that genuine conservatism “tells us that we have collectively inherited good things that we must strive to keep,” and that it understands “that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”
I have worked very hard to understand the views that oppose mine. Reading them, I find little evidence that they have given liberals like me the same courtesy.
Recommended Citation
Andrew Koppelman,
"It is Tash Whom He Serves": Deneen and Vermeule on Liberalism,
98
Notre Dame L. Rev.
1525
(2023).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol98/iss4/4