The Lockean Liberalism of Douglas Wilson's "Boniface Option"

How do we get a Christian nation?  In his Frequently Asked Questions About Christian Nationalism, Douglas Wilson says there are three common answers to that question: the Benedict Option, the Bonaparte Option, and the Boniface Option.

Oddly, Wilson does not mention Rod Dreher, although the Benedict Option was originally proposed by Dreher in his book with that title.  I have argued that Dreher's argument is incoherent, because while he claims to reject liberalism, his proposed alternative to liberalism is founded on the liberal principle of individual liberty by which social order arises through voluntary choice.  I am making the same argument about Wilson's Christian nationalism: although Wilson appears to be arguing for an illiberal theocracy, his careful readers can detect a secret teaching in favor of a liberal social order with religious liberty and toleration.

Dreher tells the story of St. Benedict (480-543 A.D.) and the monastic tradition that he began.  Disgusted by the corruption that he saw in Rome under barbarian rule, Benedict turned to a life of prayer and contemplation, living for three years as a hermit in a cave.  After leaving his cave, he joined a monastic community, and founded twelve monasteries of his own.  To guide the monks and nuns living in such monasteries, Benedict wrote a book The Rule of Saint Benedict with rules for how each day in a monastery can be devoted to prayer, work, eating, fasting, and other orders of ascetic discipline, in which monks learn to live a holy life in this world to prepare for the eternal life to come in Heaven.  This guided the monastic tradition of the Middle Ages.

To show that this is a living tradition today, Dreher describes his time visiting the Monastery of St. Benedict in central Italy near Norcia--the modern name of Benedict of Nursia's birthplace.  This monastery was founded in the tenth century.  It was closed in 1810 under the tyrannical rule of Napoleon, who was trying to destroy the Catholic Church in the territories under French imperial rule.  The monastery was reopened in 2000 by some young American men who wanted to live the contemplative life of Benedictine monks.

Oddly, Dreher does not reflect on how this manifests the religious liberty secured by liberalism.  This monastery was closed under the illiberal rule of Napoleon, but then reopened under the liberal order of modern Italy.  Moreover, as Dreher indicates, all of the monks have voluntarily chosen to submit to the discipline of this monastery, because they want to live a Christian monastic life.  Therefore, the monastery is a voluntary association, which is possible in a liberal social order that secures the liberty for forming such voluntary associations.  So, if the Benedict Option is optional, if it's a product of individual choice without coercion, then it is founded on the liberal principle of social order arising by individual consent. 

Now, of course, few people will choose to live in a monastery.  But Dreher points to many other ways that people can choose the Benedict Option.

Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option.  Secede culturally from the mainstream.  Turn off the television. Put the smartphone away.  Read books.  Play games. Make music.  Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or a group within your church.  Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists.  Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department (98).

Even without living in a monastery, Dreher argues, parents can turn their home into a "domestic monastery."  A Christian family can have regular times of family prayer.  The family can have strict rules limiting television and online media.  The family can live in neighborhoods with other Christian families.  And the family's life can be organized around their church's worship services and around their private Christian school. 

Notice that Dreher identifies the Benedict Option as "antipolitical politics."  It's "antipolitical" in the sense that it does not require that Christians become politically influential in striving for political power.  For Wilson, that means that while it's a good starting point for Christian nationalism, it doesn't go far enough towards achieving the triumph of Christian nationalism as a political project.  Wilson explains:

The Benedict Option emphasizes a grassroots cultural build-out.  It's about making enclaves where we can keep the faith alive until all of this blows over.  Any concrete political applications or proposals are down the road, on the other side of a bridge that we should cross when we come to it.

The Bonaparte Option believes that a lot could be done through decisive political action.  If we could just get ourselves a Christian prince with some backbone, willing to knock a few heads, we could put a lot of things right around here.

The Boniface Option is the one I hold, which is a deft combination of the first two.  Start with grassroots foundations: sticking to practical Bible teaching, starting classical Christian schools, beta testing a Christian culture in a small town, writing and publishing on the subject.  Do all of this over the course of many years, hoping to establish an intelligent Christian populace that will provide the necessary support and platform for some decisive Christian leadership.  This is basically the first option, but with the expectation that we are going to get to that bridge we need to cross a lot sooner than the first-option men think we will (FAQ, 133-34).

What Wilson says about the Bonaparte Option is incoherent.  First of all, Napoleon Bonaparte was not a "Christian prince."  As Dreher indicated, Napoleon shut down the Monastery of St. Benedict in Italy because suppressing the Catholic Church was part of his plan for imperial conquest.  In fact, a few paragraphs after the passage above, Wilson says that the proponents of the Bonaparte Option are not necessarily looking for a Christian prince: "We need a strong solution, they think, not necessarily a Christian one."  He goes on to say that what's most likely is that they will put into power someone like Hitler or "a bargain-bin Mussolini" (135).  

When Wilson first proposed these three options, in a 2023 blog post, he said that the Bonaparte Option would be the rule of a "strong man of some sort," and he did not identify this strong man as a "Christian prince."  Nor did he say that the Boniface Option included the Bonaparte Option.  So on the question of whether the Bonaparte Option means the rule of a "Christian prince" or the rule of a fascist "strong man," Wilson contradicts himself.

Wilson does insist that his Boniface Option is not "Christofascism."  Because he does not want "a red Caesar."  He does not want "Donald Trump to be made the Lord Protector."  He does not want "women to be relegated to breeding status only, and forced to wear those scary red dresses."  And he does not want "resurgent antisemitism" (136).  I have written about the Claremont Institute's plan for making Trump the "red Caesar."  Apparently, Wilson is rejecting that.

So it's hard to know what exactly Wilson means by the Boniface Option.  He takes this term from Andrew Isker's book The Boniface Option (2023).  Instead of St. Benedict, Isker argued, Christian nationalists should choose another monk for their model--St. Boniface (675-754).  Boniface was a Benedictine monk best known as a missionary to Germania who converted the pagan Saxons to Christianity, as a reformer of the Frankish Church, and as a promoter of the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty that began with Charles Martel.

The most famous story about Boniface is prominent in Isker's book.  When he arrived in Germania, Boniface found that the Saxons were mixing what little they had learned about Christianity with their ancestral paganism.  In their "sacred forest," they had altars to both the Germanic gods and Jesus Christ.  At the center of the forest, was Thor's Tree, a large oak tree that overshadowed Christ's altar.  Benedict wanted to show that Thor had no power and therefore could not be the one true God.  He announced to the Saxons that he was going to cut down Thor's Tree with an axe, and the Saxons gathered around to see Boniface killed by Thor's lightning bolts.  After one swing of the axe into the roots of the tree, according to one of his biographers, a mighty wind swept down from the sky and quickly toppled the tree.  The Saxons who saw this quickly converted fully to Christianity.

For Isker, this story illustrates what he means by the Boniface Option: instead of withdrawing from the pagan world around them and retreating into their cultural enclaves (the Benedict Option), orthodox Christians should become active missionaries to the pagans and seek to convert them.

But notice that there's nothing theocratic about this.  Boniface converted the pagans through persuasion not by force.  And he did not call upon political rulers to help him coercively impose Christianity on the pagans.

The forcible conversion of the Saxon pagans began after Boniface's death, when the Frankish King Charlemagne conquered the Saxons and used violence to motivate conversion in Saxony.    Previously, Christian rulers had used force to correct dissident Christians (heretics and apostates).  But this was the first time that a Christian ruler forced the conversion of pagans.  (See Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity [University of California Press, 1997].)

It would seem, therefore, that the Boniface Option is not illiberal or theocratic because it accepts the liberal principle that religious belief and practice must be voluntary rather than coerced.

That Wilson's Boniface Option does indeed manifest a Lockean liberal view of religion becomes evident in the last chapter of FAQ with the title "What Christians should be doing now."  He explains nine things that Christians should be doing now:

1. Worship in the splendor of holiness.

2. Put away your idols.

3. Stay in the Word.

4. Love your wife; obey your husband.

5. Read.

6. Make money.

7. Live not by lies.

8. Preach the Word.

9. Keep your kids, and keep having kids.

This is a restatement of Dreher's Benedict Option, and it assumes a liberal social order in which Christians are free to live their Christian lives in their voluntary associations--families, churches, schools, clubs, and neighborhoods.  Nothing theocratic about that.

But then Wilson might respond by saying that this Benedict Option is only preparing the way today for a future time--"maybe in 500 years"--when most human beings around the world will have become Christians, and then it will be possible to move to the Bonaparte Option and have Christian princes ruling Christian nations around the world.  In fact, Wilson argues, God has told us--in the Book of Revelation--that this is inevitable because it is prophesized that Christians will rule over the whole Earth for a thousand years, and this will be the ultimate theocracy on Earth.  After that thousand-year reign of theocracy, Jesus will come back to Earth to usher in the Day of Judgment, with the saved ascending into Heaven and the damned descending into Hell. 

If Wilson is correct in this "postmillennial" interpretation of Revelation, this would prove that Roger Williams and the Baptists generally are wrong in their claim that the New Testament does not support Christian theocratic government.  Because even if the New Testament Christians did not try to establish a Christian theocracy, they saw in the Revelation of St. John a prophecy of Christian theocracy at the end of history.

But as I will indicate in a future post, there is no reason to believe that John's Revelation clearly says that.  If the revelation of Christ to John was perfectly clear, we should be able to define the content of that Christian revelation in a way that all Christians will accept.  Since Wilson admits that his interpretation of what Revelation says about the millennium has not been accepted by all Christians, because there are at least three or more Christian views of the millennium, that means that his interpretation is not the clear revelation of God's word.  It is just "the opinions of some guy."

Douglas Wilson's Theocratic Libertarianism Is Not Theocratic: Esoteric Writing in the Service of Religious Liberty

Pete Hegseth and Douglas Wilson Praying Before a Worship Service at the Pentagon.

Douglas Wilson is a Calvinist pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who has become the most influential proponent of American Christian Nationalism.  His influence extends into the Trump Administration, as indicated recently by his being invited by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon.  Tucher Carlson has said: "Pastor Doug Wilson is the Christian Nationalist they warned you about."

Wilson identifies himself as a "theocratic libertarian."  But if you study what he says carefully, you will see that he's not theocratic at all because he's really a Lockean classical liberal who embraces religious liberty and toleration, and therefore he's closer to the liberal America of Roger Williams than he is to the illiberal America of John Winthrop.  

As evidence for this, I'll be relying mostly on two texts:  his most recent book--Frequently Asked (Shouted) Questions About Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2025) and Ross Douthat's interview with Wilson at the New York Times ("He Believes America Should Be a Theocracy," Oct. 9, 2025).  I'll refer to the book as FAQ and the interview as NYT.

Let's start with a definition of the word "theocracy."  As I noted in my previous post, the English word "theocracy" is a translation of the Greek word theocratia that was coined by Josephus as a term for ancient Israel as ruled by the Mosaic laws.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines "theocracy" as 

"A form of government in which God (or a deity) is recognized as the king or immediate ruler, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom, these laws being usually administered by a priestly order as his ministers and agents; hence (loosely) a system of government by a sacerdotal order, claiming a divine commission; also, a state so governed: esp. applied to the commonwealth of Israel from the exodus to the election of Saul as king."

This is not libertarianism.  On the contrary, it looks more like the theocratic regime sought by conservative Catholic integralists who argue that politics must order the lives of citizens to direct them to the eternal salvation of their souls, and for this the temporal power of government must be subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church.  Some integralists point to the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX in medieval France as their model.  This is a Christian version of Israel under the Mosaic law or of Plato's theocratic city in the Laws. 

This suggests to me that deciding whether a God-centered metaphysics requires a theocratic political regime will depend upon whether one is looking to the God of the Old Testament or the God of the New Testament.  As I have indicated in a previous post, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for denouncing the Puritan rule there as a theocracy enforcing Mosaic law that was contrary to the New Testament, where the Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not persecute heretics or unbelievers.  In Rhode Island, he established a political order that tolerated all religions and even atheists.  This showed how God-centered Christians could reject the theocratic God of the Old Testament and embrace the Lockean liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty suggested in the New Testament.  One can see this, for example, in the Christian Lockean liberalism of C. S. Lewis.

Therefore, to identify Wilson's Christian Nationalism as theocratic, we would have to see him clearly argue for returning America to Winthrop's Puritan theocracy based on the Mosaic laws of the Hebrew Commonwealth as incorporated into the "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" (1647).  

I emphasize that we would need to see him clearly argue for this because while I admit that what he says conveys a superficial impression of an argument for Puritan theocracy, I never see him clearly and explicitly saying this.  I see him engaging in what Leo Strauss used to call esoteric writing: Wilson wants to convey a secret teaching to his careful readers that will not be seen by the less careful readers who would be shocked by the secret teaching.  

There are two reasons for believing that Wilson is a secret writer.  First, the weaknesses in his arguments for theocracy are so clear that any attentive and well-informed reader can see them.  That's one of the main techniques of the secret writer: he makes his arguments for his surface teaching so easily refutable that the careful reader suspects that the writer is not taking these arguments seriously, and he is inviting his reader to look for the secret teaching. 

The second reason for thinking Wilson is a secret writer is that he contradicts himself in a way that is easily noticed by the meticulous reader, which is another technique of the secret writer.  Wilson seems on the surface of his writing to be arguing for a theocracy like that of Winthrop's Puritans in Massachusetts.  But if you look carefully at what he proposes, you will see that it does not follow the model of the Puritan theocracy, and it actually looks like the sort of liberal social order that Williams established in Rhode Island.  

Wilson then distracts his theocratic readers from seeing this contradiction by promising them that his final goal is the "ideal theocratic republic," but he puts this off to the distant future--"like 500 years from now," as he says to Douthat.  So those who want theocracy will have to wait at least 500 years!  And even that promise depends on Wilson's debatable interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelations as teaching a postmillennialist eschatology. Until we reach the "end-times," Wilson advises his theocratic readers that they should be happy to live in a liberal regime that secures their religious liberty in a pluralist society.

WEAK ARGUMENTS

The first question in FAQ is "What is Christian Nationalism?"  Here's Wilson's answer:

Fundamentally, Christian nationalism is the belief that human societies require a transcendent anchor to hold all our cultural, political, and social assumptions in place, and that this transcendent anchor should be the true and living God, not an idol.

All ethical judgments, in order to be ethical judgments, rely on some form of "Thus saith the Lord."  Otherwise, they are not ethical judgments at all, but rather the opinions of some guy.  For an atheist, they are the burbling of certain protoplasmic chemicals, reacting as they always would under these conditions and at this temperature.  Whatever the case, they have no authority at all.  This is a foundational principle, one that every Christian accepts, at least implicitly.  Justice is not arbitrary--it's rooted in the character of God himself.  But the thing many Christians miss is that this principle applies to communities as well as individuals. A law is either righteous or unrighteous in the same way that an action is either righteous or unrighteous.  The basic reality doesn't change just because the scale is larger.  If we want a standard for right and wrong--regardless of whether that standard is going to be applied to a next-door neighbor or to Congress--we need God's word for it.

. . . At the end of the day, if our standard of judgment originates from somewhere other than God, then the only authority it possesses is that of power. . . .

Christian nationalism thus holds that we cannot order our corporate lives without reference to the divine. . . . (1-2).

This conception of Christian nationalism assumes a Divine Command Theory of ethics--that the only standard of right and wrong is the command of God: whatever God commands to be done is right, and whatever God commands not to be done is wrong.  And since the only standard of right and wrong is supernatural, there can be no purely natural standard.  The truth of this claim depends on at least two factual assertions about human history. 

First, there's the Fact of Supernatural Law--that the true God has clearly revealed his supernatural moral law to all human beings who sincerely want to know it.  

Second, there's the Fact of No Natural Law--that human beings cannot know a natural moral law by natural human experience without any supernatural revelation.

Wilson does not provide any strong arguments or evidence to support these two factual claims about human history.  On the contrary, much of what he says indicates that both of these factual assertions are false.

Supernatural Law?

In chapter 13 of FAQ, Wilson asks: "Is Christian nationalism fine with other forms of religious nationalism?  Hindu nationalism in India?  Jewish nationalism in Israel?"  His answer is no.  "Generic religious nationalism is no good."  The only good religious nationalism is Christian nationalism because "Christianity is the true religion."  Therefore, the Hindus in India should become Christians and establish India as a Christian nation with Christian laws and government.  And the Jews in Israel should become Christians and establish Israel as a Christian nation with Christian laws and government.

There are two claims here.  God has clearly revealed to all human beings that Christianity is the only true religion.  And God has also clearly revealed to all human beings that every nation should establish a Christian theocratic government with Christian laws.  Can Wilson give us proof--or at least plausible arguments and evidence--to support these claims?  If not, then they are just "the opinions of some guy."

Wilson seems to assume that most of his readers will be Christians, and therefore he does not have to argue for Christianity being the true religion since his Christian readers will take that for granted.  But if so, doesn't that mean that the foundation of his whole argument is not some clear revelation from God but just "the opinions of some Christian guys"?

Now, of course, the Christians will say that it's not just a matter of their "opinions" because they look to the clear revelation of God's commands in the Bible.  But then the Jews will say that the Hebrew Bible is a clear revelation of Judaism as the true religion and the God of Israel as the one true God.  After all, God revealed Himself to Moses, speaking to him out of the burning bush, telling him that he was to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt.  God then revealed his name--Yahweh, which is usually translated as "the Lord" in English Bibles (Exo. 3:1-15).  Later, Yahweh met Moses on Mount Sinai and gave him his law summarized as Ten Commandments (Exo. 19-20, Deu. 5).  

The first commandment was "You shall have no other gods before (or besides) me" (Exo. 20:3).  Although this is often said to be the first declaration of monotheism, it's unclear what exactly is being said here.  Notice that Yahweh speaks of "other gods."  So it's not clear whether Yahweh is really saying that He is the only god who exists (monotheism), or that He is the one god among many that the people of Israel should choose as their god (henotheism), or that He is the only god among many who is worthy of worship (monolatry).

There is some evidence in the Hebrew Bible that the people of Israel had to choose from among the many gods that were believed to exist.  Genesis 33:20 says that Jacob "set up an altar and called it El Elohe Israel," which means "El is the God of Israel."  In the ancient Levant, El was the white-bearded king of the gods who ruled over an assembly of the gods.  So it's possible that El was the first patron deity of the people of Israel.  Notice that "El" is even part of the name Israel (yisra-El).  But it seems that eventually the people of Israel chose Yahweh as their god, who was a subordinate god of weather and war.  They might have chosen him because they needed a more militarized theology.  That Yahweh was not the only god is suggested elsewhere in the Bible--such as Psalm 82, where Yahweh "presides in the great assembly" and "renders judgment among the gods."  The Bible thus creates some doubt as to whether Yahweh is the only god that exists.

But even if we set that aside and say that Yahweh the god of Israel is the only true god, that creates a problem for Wilson. How can he say that Judaism is not a true religion?  Because the New Testament has revealed Jesus as the son of God who established Christianity as the true religion that supplanted Judaism?  But apparently that revelation was not clear enough to persuade most of the Jews to convert to this new religion.  Presumably, Wilson will say that the revelation of Christ was perfectly clear, but most of the Jews were stubbornly resistant to that revelation.  But couldn't the Jews respond to this by saying, "this is just the opinion of some Christian guy"?

If the revelation of Christ was perfectly clear, we should be able to define the content of that Christian revelation in a way that all Christians will accept.  Wilson suggests:

The definition of Christian in this context is straightforward.  It refers to the system of belief expressed by the Apostles' Creed, with those beliefs being accepted and received as the truth of God, by means of faith alone.  In the American context, the expression of this faith is by and large Protestant and evangelical (FAQ, 5).

Here's an English translation of the Latin Apostles' Creed:

I believe in God the Father almighty,

Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.

Amen.

The origin of this text is unclear, but it was probably developed in southern Gaul sometime around the middle of the 5th century.  It is shorter than the Nicene Creed adopted in 381, and unlike the Nicene Creed, it does not explicitly define the divinity of Jesus or the Holy Spirit, although it does affirm the Trinity of God, Son, and Holy Spirit.  It's called the Apostles' Creed because it originally was believed to have been written by the twelve Apostles, and some copies of the text even divide it into twelve parts, with each of the Apostles contributing a part.  But there's no clear historical evidence that the Apostles had anything to do with this.

The most obvious question here is why do Christians need these "creeds" at all?  If the text of the New Testament is clear in its teaching to all Christians, there should be no need for an interpretive summary of its doctrines in the form of a creedal text composed by some church council.  If the Protestant Reformers were right about their principle of sola scriptura, the meaning of revelation as conveyed in the Biblical text should be clear enough that all Christians can agree on what it means without the need for priests or church traditions to interpret the Biblical text for them.  But then the Catholic Church argues that the Protestants are simply wrong in assuming the perspicuity of the Bible--that the meaning of the Bible is clear to all believers--because the Bible is actually so obscure that it needs to be interpreted by the tradition of the Church as expressed in the councils of the church that agree on the various creedal statements.  This is suggested in the Apostles' Creed by the affirmation of "the holy catholic Church."  And, of course, the Roman Catholic Church can claim to be the one true Church by virtue of the Apostolic Succession of the Popes from Saint Peter.  A Protestant like Wilson must reject this.  But this illustrates the problem, Christians can't agree on what exactly is revealed in the Bible because that Biblical revelation is obscure.  And that's why there have been hundreds of heresies and schisms in the Christian church over the past two thousand years.

This Illumination from a 13th-Century Manuscript Shows the Twelve Apostles Writing the "Apostles' Creed," While Receiving the Inspiration from the Holy Spirit (the Dove at the Top).

This illustrates what I have called the problem of the Holy Spirit or the problem of religious pluralism.  Notice that in the Illumination, the Holy Spirit (symbolized as a dove) hovers over the Apostles to inspire them with the correct interpretation of the Biblical revelation.  But if that shamanic spirit really speaks to Christians, he does not speak clearly enough for them to agree on what he is saying.  Consequently, as John Locke observed, "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every church is orthodox to itself." And if that is true, that means that any coercive theocratic interpretation of orthodoxy imposed on a nation is just "the opinions of some guy"--or the opinions of some priestly tyrants.

Moreover, you should notice that while Wilson points the Apostles' Creed as the defining statement of Christianity, the Creed says nothing about Christian nationalism or theocracy, and thus it provides no support for his argument.  God's supernatural revelation in the New Testament does not include a clear revelation of God's command that his moral law be enforced by a Christian theocratic government just as it was previously enforced by a Hebrew theocratic government.

Actually, Wilson admits that there is a "conspicuous absence" in the New Testament of anything like the Mosaic theocracy that was present in the Old Testament (NYT).  That was Williams' point in his debate with Winthrop--that the Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts was a turn away from New Testament Christianity, because the Christian churches in the New Testament were voluntary associations that did not have and did not seek theocratic political power.

Wilson says that while for the early Christian churches, enacting civil penalties in the name of Christ "was still centuries out," they were "nevertheless preparing for that day" (FAQ, 52).  But Wilson cannot cite any passage in the New Testament where the early Christians say they are preparing for the day when they will have theocratic political power.  Wilson is simply reading into the New Testament his own personal preference.  Similarly, Wilson says: "What Paul did was preach the gospel, plant churches, and wait for three centuries" until the "conversion of the Roman empire," when he could have "his audience before Caesar"--that is, Constantine.  But, again, Wilson cannot cite any passage in the New Testament where Paul says or even implies that he's waiting for a Roman Christian theocracy (FAQ, 138).  This is not a supernatural revelation of God's command in the New Testament.  This is "the opinions of some guy."

Natural Law?

If God's revelation of his supernatural moral law is so obscure that human beings cannot agree on what it means, then we have to wonder if there is a natural moral law that human beings can know by their natural human experience.  Wilson says no, because as a Divine Command Theorist, the only standard of right and wrong for him is the supernatural law of God's command: "Thus saith the Lord."  And if that is true, then there can be no stable moral order in any society without some theocratic enforcement of God's commands.

This was the fundamental issue in the dispute between Roger Williams and John Winthrop.  Williams argued that not only did the Christian religion not depend on the support of human laws, but the civil government did not depend on an established religion, because as Williams indicated, the "civil peace" of a political community did not depend on the "spiritual peace" of a true church.  After all, Williams noted, native American Indians and pagans have kept the peace of their communities without belonging to the true church of God.  Here Williams agreed with Pierre Bayle that a society of atheists could live together in a peaceful social order based on their natural moral sense without any religious beliefs in a supernatural moral law.

This natural moral sense is what C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man called the Tao--the universal sense of right and wrong rooted in human nature.  Remarkably, although Wilson recommends the reading of The Abolition of Man, he says nothing about Lewis's account of natural moral law and how that supported Lewis's rejection of theocracy (FAQ, 9, 151). 

Lewis saw the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). Natural law is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).

The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).

Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become skeptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with (61).

At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.

At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).

Lewis saw that this natural law of the Tao did not require coercive enforcement by a theocratic government because for Lewis the primary aim of government was securing individual liberty in private life:

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.  A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time (Mere Christianity, 169).

Notice that the State's concern here is with human happiness "in this life"--not in the next life.  A government that would be directed to eternal salvation would be a theocracy, and Lewis said that "theocracy is the worst of al governments," because any government that would pretend to have the power of salvation would be tyrannical.

Lewis thought that government did not need to promote Christianity in order to provide a common morality for society because Lewis believed that God had imprinted His moral law on every human heart, whether or not that person had come to faith in Jesus Christ.  Consequently, Lewis accepted the Lockean argument for the toleration of all religions.

One good illustration of how the Lockean moral law arises naturally in the human mind is in Lewis's essay "Delinquents in the Snow."  He tells the story of how some young hooligans had been caught stealing and vandalizing Lewis's home, and how they had not been properly punished by the legal system.  He complained that "according to the classical political theory of this country," we "surrendered our right of self-protection to the State on the condition that the State would protect us" (98-99).  But if the State does not protect our natural rights, including the right to property, the natural right to protect ourselves and our property reverts to the individual.  This is what Locke called the natural "executive power of the state of nature."  This natural right to protect oneself, one's property, and one's family from attack arises naturally in the human mind without any need for a Christian faith that such a natural law is divinely ordained.

Although Locke denied that government needed to inculcate virtue, Dyer and Watson observe, his Thoughts on Education is all about inculcating virtue.  So that even without the legal enforcement of virtue, which would threaten individual liberty, Locke assumed that the education of children in their families, their churches, and the wider society would shape the moral and intellectual virtues. Lewis agreed.  In fact, his fantasy writing for children--such as the Chronicles of Narnia--was intended to contribute to the moral education of children supervised by parents rather than the State.

So, as a Lockean liberal, Lewis denied that Christian citizens have any right to use their political power to coercively impose their Christian morality on their political community.  This is particularly clear in the way Lewis speaks about homosexuality, religious education in schools, and divorce law.

Although Lewis was clear about homosexuality being a sin, he saw no justification for the State punishing that sin as a crime.  In a letter, he observed: "Of course, many acts which are sins against God are also injuries to our fellow-citizens, and must on that account, but only on that account, be made crimes.  But of all the sins in the world, I should have thought homosexuality was the one that least concerns the State.  We hear too much of the State. Government is at its best a necessary evil. Let's keep it in its place."  Lewis's view of homosexuality was probably influenced by his life-long friendship with Arthur Greeves, who was a homosexual.

In the passage just quoted, Lewis seems to assume John Stuart Mill's harm principle--that the only justification for limiting anyone's individual liberty is to prevent harm to others. While this seems to be a uniquely modern principle, it can be found in the premodern natural law tradition.  It's stated by Thomas Aquinas: "Human law is framed for the mass of men, the majority of whom are not virtuous. Therefore, human law does not prohibit every vice from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more serious ones from which the majority can abstain, and especially those that harm others and which must be prohibited for human society to survive, such as homicide, theft, and the like" (Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 96, a. 2).

Lewis also showed his Lockean liberalism in which he said about the place of religion in public education.  He saw England as becoming increasingly secularized, and if most of the public school teachers are not Christian, we cannot expect them to teach Christianity.  Christians should raise their children as Christians and send them to Christian schools, without expecting the public schools to inculcate Christianity in the children.

A third illustration of Lewis's Lockean liberalism is in what he said about marriage and divorce.  Since Christianity teaches that marriage is for life, Lewis observed in Mere Christianity, divorce is not normally allowed. But he saw no justification for legally enforcing this Christian condemnation of divorce.

. . . I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused.  The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question--how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself, you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the  British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. This distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not (101-102).

If we bring together what Lewis says here about marriage and what he says about homosexuality, we might infer that Lewis could have supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, with the understanding that the rules of marriage enforced by the State will differ from the rules enforced by the Church.  In fact, I have argued that a Lockean natural law argument can be made for legalizing same-sex marriage.

 

CLEAR CONTRADICTIONS

Although presumably Wilson would disagree with Lewis's claim that "theocracy is the worst form of government," he often contradicts his arguments for theocracy in ways that invite his careful readers to wonder whether his secret teaching agrees with Lewis's condemnation of theocracy.

No Rerun of "Christendom 1.0"?

Wilson told Ross Douthat: 

I've been arguing for a mere Christendom, or a Christendom 2.0, OK?  Christendom 1.0 had some bugs in it.  I don't want a rerun of Christendom 1.0--don't want that.  The Christians screwed it up in different areas.  "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition," as Monty Python taught us--and I don't want the Spanish Inquisition again, OK?  I want a Christendom that learns from history.

Elsewhere in the interview, Wilson explained: "I really do want Christendom 2.0 to have learned the lessons of criminalizing things that were sins, not crimes."  

If the whole point of Christian theocracy is to punish sins as crimes, then Wilson has just declared that Christendom 2.0 will not be theocratic.  For example, the Mosaic law in the Old Testament and the "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" (1647) both treat the sin of adultery as a capital crime.  But Wilson agrees with Douthat that adulterers should not be put to death.

And yet, there are at least two sins that Wilson clearly wants to criminalize--abortion and homosexuality.  But even so, it's notable that he does not say that these should be capital crimes.  Homosexuality was a capital crime in Puritan Massachusetts.  Nothing was said about abortion.  Perhaps this was because the Bible says nothing about abortion.

The Ten Commandments begin with commandments about the proper worship of God, and therefore theocratic regimes have punished people for not worshiping God in the right way.  But Wilson told Douthat that he was "a libertarian on how people worship," and so he would allow Catholics and Jews to worship as they please.

This is very different from the laws of Massachusetts Bay, which required that anyone teaching "damnable heresies" should be banished from the Colony.  The laws also excluded Jesuits and all priests or bishops of the Catholic Church.  They were to be banished.  And if they returned after being banished, they were to be put to death.  Clearly, that's what Wilson does not want for Christendom 2.0.  But that means that his Christendom 2.0 will not be theocratic.

When Douthat warns Wilson about "pushing toward Puritan New England," Wilson responds: "the warning is well taken."  Indeed.

A "Godless" Constitution?

The United States Constitution as ratified in 1789 and as amended in 1791 supports religious liberty and the separation of church and state in three ways.  First, unlike most of the state constitutions, the national Constitution is literally "godless" in that it says nothing about any divine being, which suggests that the national government does not need the support of a national religion.  Second, there is the provision in Article V of the Constitution that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."  The third way is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Wilson insists that "our Constitution was written by Christians--and the goal . . . was to create and preserve a Christian community" (FAQ, 108).  But Wilson does not explain why these Christians who wrote the Constitution refused to introduce into that document any reference to God, Jesus, or Christianity.  Nor does Wilson say anything about the long history of Christians complaining that the Constitution was "godless," and that it needed a "God Amendment."  The most prominent example of this movement to put God into the Constitution was the National Reform Association that emerged during and after the American Civil War.  This was a movement of evangelical Protestant ministers, theologians, academics, lawyers, and judges, who claimed that the Civil War was God's punishment of America for having a godless Constitution, and that this showed the need for amending the Constitution.  They formally petitioned President Lincoln and the Congress to support an amendment.

They proposed an amended version of the Preamble to the Constitution--with the new language in italics:

We the People of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America (National Reform Association 1874, p. 7).

They could persuade neither Lincoln nor the Congress to take their proposal seriously.

Wilson says nothing about this history, although he does admit that there needs to be "an acknowledgement of Christian orthodoxy at the federal level, in the Constitution" (FAQ, 122).  He thus invites his reader to wonder, why hasn't this been done?

Wilson accepts the "no religious test" clause because he thinks the Founders "didn't want to introduce denominational strife" at the federal level (FAQ, 87).  But he is silent about those many Christians who have complained that without a religious test that requires public officers to be Christians, America cannot be a Christian nation.  For example, one speaker at the Massachusetts constitutional ratifying convention warned that having no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."  

Wilson points out that the "no religious tests" clause applies only to federal offices, which allows religious tests at the state and local level, and he notes that at the time of the Founding, "they were commonplace at the local level."  He does not tell his readers, however, that by 1800 all of these religious tests at the state and local level were eliminated.

Wilson accepts the no establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment because he agrees that having a national church like England had would have been a mistake.  He points out, however, that the no establishment clause applies only to the national Congress, and thus it leaves the states free to establish state churches.  In fact, he observes, at the time that the First Amendment was ratified, nine of the thirteen states had established a Christian denomination.  But he does not tell his readers that by 1833 all state establishments of religion had been abolished.

Remarkably, Wilson says he thinks having established churches at the state level is "a bad idea" (FAQ, 21).  So, here again, we see a remarkable contradiction in his arguments.  On the one hand, Wilson argues for a theocratic Christian nationalism.  On the other hand, he argues that an establishment of religion at either the national or the state level is a bad idea.  His careful readers have to suspect that his apparent argument for Christian theocracy is not his true teaching.

The "Boniface Option"?

In Wilson's FAQ, the final question is: How do we get a Christian nation?  He says there are three common answers to this question: the Benedict Option, the Bonaparte Option, and the Boniface Option.  Wilson defends the Boniface Option as a deft combination of the other two options.

In my next post, I will try to unravel Wilson's ambiguous account of this Boniface Option.

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Science of Liberty, Slavery, and the Bible

I am reposting this from last year.

On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born in England, and Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky.  They had more in common than just the coincidence of their birth on the same day.  Almost every February 12th, I have posted an essay on some of the common themes in their lives.  I have identified ten points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.

1. Both saw the Universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life and human beings.

2. Both denied that the Bible was a divine revelation, and they denied the Biblical doctrines of divine special creation in the first chapters of Genesis and the divinity of Jesus in the New Testament.

3. Both were accused of being atheists or infidels.

4. Both spoke of God as First Cause in a deistic sense.

5. Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion that could correct the Bible's moral mistakes (such as the Bible's endorsement of slavery).

6. Both rooted that natural moral sense in the evolved moral sentiments.

7. Both abhorred slavery as an immoral violation of evolved human nature, and they saw the American Civil War as a crucial turning point for the abolition of slavery.

8. Both were moral realists.

9. Both saw human history as moving through a Big History of three evolutionary eras--the foraging era, the agrarian era, and the modern commercial and liberal era.

10. Both were classical liberals.

Although there is no evidence that Lincoln ever read Darwin, we do know from William Herndon that Lincoln was persuaded by his reading of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to embrace an evolutionary science of the history of the Universe very similar to Darwin's theory.

Now, we have a new book by David Kent--Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln's Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America--about how Lincoln's life-long study of modern science and technology shaped his moral and political life.  Although Kent recognizes some of my ten points of similarity between Lincoln and Darwin, he is remarkably silent about the second, third, fifth, and ninth points.

Kent says nothing about the popular charge against Lincoln that he denied the truth of the Bible and therefore was an atheist or infidel.  When Lincoln ran for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1846, his opponent--Peter Cartwright, a Methodist minister--circulated a rumor that Lincoln was an infidel.  The basis for this charge was that as a young man, Lincoln had read some notorious books of skeptical deism--particularly, Volney's Ruins of Empires and Tom Paine's The Age of Reason--and he wrote his own pamphlet arguing that the Bible was not divinely inspired and that Jesus was not truly the Son of God.  His friends warned him that the reputation for being an infidel or atheist would ruin his life, especially if he wanted to have a political career.  So, he burned his pamphlet,  and he became very secretive about his religious beliefs.  Darwin was similar.  As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), Darwin denied that the Bible was a divine revelation and that Jesus was divine; but he wrote about this only in private correspondence.  Kent is silent about this.

Kent has a long section in his book on Lincoln's "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions."  But he does not notice how Lincoln mocks the Bible in that lecture.  As I have indicated, Lincoln suggests that "in the beginning," there is no divine creation of man, and man depends totally on himself "to dig out his destiny" without any guidance from God.

Kent also does not notice Lincoln's suggestion that the Bible's endorsement of slavery needs to be corrected.  While Kent surveys some of the attempts to justify slavery as supported by the Bible, he does not confront the fact that the Bible really does affirm slavery.  Frederick Ross's Slavery Ordained by God (1857) shows that all of the references to slavery in the Bible are proslavery.  Lincoln read this book, and Kent points to Lincoln's note on the book's proslavery theology.  But Kent does not notice Lincoln's failure to refute Ross's reading of the Bible.  Nor does Kent reflect on Lincoln's remarkable observation in his Second Inaugural that in the Civil War between North and South, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

Kent also fails to see how Lincoln's Darwinian evolutionary science of human history moves through three eras--from foraging to farming to commerce.  By embracing the moral progress to the modern commercial society, Lincoln shows the classical liberalism that he shares with Darwin.