Why Libertarian Theophobia Is Misguided—Part IV 

Philip Vander Elst

      Philip Vander Elst is a British freelance author, journalist and lecturer. For many years he was editor of Freedom Today and has worked on the staff of the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs. This is the fourth and concluding article in the series. These articles are from the pamphlet, “Libertarianism, A Christian Critique,” published by The Christian Institute.

            Libertarian theophobia is not only foolish because atheism is philosophically untenable; it is also misguided because it ignores the obvious implications of the discovery of God’s existence and nature.

            If reason, let alone revelation, tells us that we are the products of an infinitely good, loving, and powerful Creator, it means that we owe the gift of life to God. It means that our whole being, our whole capacity to think, and feel, and act, is dependent on God, who not only created all that exists, but sustains it in being. How, then, can we regard Him, or the very idea of Him, as tyrannical? How can we argue against God when He alone enables us to think and reason, and is the source of all our moral perceptions? How, given who God is, can He ever be in the wrong and we, somehow, in the right? The whole notion is surely absurd and pathetically presumptuous and arrogant.

            The truth is, if God is our Creator, to knowingly ignore or reject Him is to be like a plant that refuses to grow towards the sunlight. It is an act of ingratitude and supreme idiocy. If, on top of this, we subsequently reject His grace and forgiveness, it will separate us in eternity from the true source of all life, love, and joy.

            What, then, is the proper response to God, and how should this affect the way we think about liberty?

            As the Bible repeatedly teaches us, our first and most important duty is to love, honour, and obey our Creator, who has made us in His image, and has given us free will, so that we can share His love, His life, and His joy. Reason and the Bible also tell us that all our gifts, talents, and resources, come from God and are therefore to be used in His service to make the world a better place to live in. This means that God gives us the wonderful opportunity to share in His continuous creative act, by making our own personal contribution to the pursuit of beauty, knowledge, and goodness. Since we are not biological robots, but have free will, we can either make good use of our freedom or prey on other lives and become evil. If we make the wrong choice, we cannot blame God for the suffering we inflict on ourselves and others.

            Our knowledge of the Moral Law not only reveals our link with God and challenges us to love and obey Him; it is also an essential part of our inner freedom to choose and act. Without this sense of right and wrong, our ability to control our desires and appetites, and resist our worst impulses, gradually weakens, and we eventually lose control over our wills and actions.

            If it is the case that a belief in objective moral values sustains our inner freedom and teaches us our duties towards each other, what is likely to happen if people stop believing in God? The answer ought to be obvious. Belief in the absoluteness of the Moral Law will tend to wither, and the fear of violating it will also tend to vanish, since it is no longer perceived to have an eternal sanction behind it. This in turn will sooner or later have a predictably harmful effect on personal behavior.

            That is precisely what has happened in our increasingly godless and secularised Western societies. As high-minded 19th century agnostics like T. H. Huxley and George Eliot feared, not to mention Matthew Arnold and Dostoyevsky, the erosion of religious belief and Christianity in the West has been followed, after a long time-lag, by the cultural and social decay we see around us today. As a result, liberty itself is now in danger of committing suicide, because the moral self-discipline required to sustain a free and civilized society is rapidly disappearing.

            Libertarian theophobia not only encourages license and social dissolution: it also fails to see the importance of the State in restraining evil in society—something St. Paul refers to in Romans 13. The greater the lack of moral self-discipline in society, the more the State will be forced to intrude in personal affairs. As the great Conservative philosopher, Edmund Burke, famously observed in the 18th century:

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power on will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

            Our modern day cultural and social decay would not have surprised the great philosophers and statesmen of the old Western liberal tradition. As an American scholar, M. Stanton Evans, has shown in his book, The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition, (Regnery, 1994), most of these figures were Christians, from Aquinas and John of Salisbury in the Middle Ages, to Milton, Sidney, and Locke in the 17th century, and the “Founding Fathers” of the United States in the 18th century. It is therefore appropriate that I should conclude with George Washington’s famous warning to his countrymen, contained in his farewell address to Congress as America’s first President (17 September 1796):

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports . . . . Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.     Ω