Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, p. 237
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Henry Pierce, 6 April 1859
The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961
There is a received narrative, a conventional wisdom, about the politics of freedom. Democracy was born in Athens. It is an achievement of the Greeks. The Bible knows nothing about democracy, and if you are sincerely religious you must have qualms about it. Democracy is, after all, about the will of the people. Religion is about the will of God. It was only when European societies began to become secularised in the seventeenth century that the first fruits of freedom began to grow. Liberal democracy is a secular achievement, and the more religion there is in a society, the more its freedom is threatened.
There is only one thing wrong about this narrative. It is false, at best a partial truth. The politics of the West are a consequence of the religion of the West and of the God of Abraham, whose first great intervention in history was to liberate a nation of slaves and bring them out to freedom. Liberty of conscience, the peculiarly modern form of freedom that has no counterpart in antiquity, was born in the most intensely religious of ages, based on religious texts and driven by a religious vision.1
The seventeenth century was the century of the Hebrew Bible. Three factors made this so. The first was the Reformation, whose aftermath was a series of wars throughout Europe culminating in the Thirty Years War of 1618–48. The second was the cumulative effect of the invention of printing, the growth of literacy and the massive spread of books, suddenly affordable for wide swathes of the population. The third was the maxim of the Reformation, Sola Scriptura, ‘by the Bible alone’, meaning that the Bible, not the Church or tradition, was the sole authority in the religious life. These forces combined with explosive force, and they changed the face of Europe.2
Able for the first time to read the Bible for themselves in vernacular translation, people discovered what a subversive document it actually is. Outside Israel, all religion in the ancient world was essentially conservative. It canonised the status quo. It explained why kings are born to rule and why people have to obey. There is a hierarchy in society just as there is in heaven, among the sun, the moon and the stars, the ‘great chain of being’. Without order, there is chaos; without power, there is no order. That is why the gods have given power to their representatives on Earth, and their authority cannot be challenged without provoking the potentially fatal anger of the gods themselves.
The Hebrew Bible inverts this entire way of seeing the world. God is against the established powers, chief of them Mesopotamia, satirised in the story of the Tower of Babel, and Egypt, the longest-lived and most powerful empire of the ancient world. Nothing amuses and angers God more in the Bible than people setting themselves up as demigods, as many ancient rulers did and as tyrants have continued to do ever since, among them, in the twentieth century, Stalin, Mao and President Kim Il-Sung of North Korea.
The story of the Exodus, with its plagues and the division of the Red Sea, is not just about freedom. If it had been, the story could have been told without any of the miracles. It is about God taking a stand against Pharaoh, and by implication all absolute rulers who claim to be god, child of the gods or chief intercessor with the gods. One of the key biblical projects is to demythologise and secularise power.
Here the revolutionary power of monotheism is expressed to the full. In polytheistic religions, a god or gods reign supreme over a certain area. There is a chief god of Egypt (Ra), of the Moabites (Chemosh), of the Babylonians (Marduk) and so on. They are part of the national myth. Their standing among the gods rises or falls with the fate of the nation.
For the first time monotheism introduces a radical split between God and the people. The God of the Israelites is not only the God of the Israelites but of everyone. His power extends not only over their territory but everywhere. Such a God cannot be identified with the power of this or that nation. The point of the plagues is not to hasten the freedom of the Israelites but to show Pharaoh that God’s power extends even over Egypt. The story of the Israelites in Egypt is above all a religious critique of political power. Nothing could have been more counterintuitive to the ancient world than the idea that the supreme power intervenes in defence of the powerless.
Many centuries later, when Judea was captured and Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonians, the prophet Jeremiah interpreted this not as the defeat of a people and its God, but as the defeat of a people by its God, using the Babylonians as his instrument. This is the great paradigm-shifting moment.3 God endorses not might, but right. For the first time, religion becomes not a justification, but a critique of power.
Internalising this, a group of Swiss, Dutch and English political thinkers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, among them Thomas Erastus, Richard Hooker, Hugo Grotius, Peter Cunaeus and the English Hebraists Thomas Coleman, John Lightfoot and John Selden, laid the groundwork for modern politics. James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton and John Locke built on the foundations they had laid. These were the people who argued for constitutional (i.e. limited) monarchy, the principle of toleration and that uniquely modern freedom, liberty of conscience. Their story has recently been told in Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic, subtitled ‘Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought’.4
His case, like mine, is that the received narrative of European politics is misleading. It says that in medieval and Renaissance Europe, political thought was fundamentally Christian and theological. Only with the rise of science did it become secular and thus tolerant. To the contrary, argues Nelson, Renaissance humanism, inspired by the pagan inheritance of Greece and Rome, developed a secular approach to politics. The founders of modern European politics, by contrast, were religious, and their key text was the Hebrew Bible.
Using it as their warrant, they developed three revolutionary principles. The first is that all legitimate constitutions are republican. Monarchy is at best a concession and derives its authority, by social covenant or contract, from the will of the people, or, as the American Declaration of Independence was to put it, ‘the consent of the governed’. The second – in contrast to Hellenistic principles – is that one of the tasks of the state is to fight poverty, if need be by redistribution of income and the widening of land ownership. The third is the principle of toleration, that it is no business of the state to legislate in matters of religious belief.
All three propositions were based, not on Plato or Aristotle, but on Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the books of Samuel and Kings. Even Hobbes, an atheist, based his political philosophy on the Bible, which he quotes 657 times in The Leviathan. The one exception was Spinoza, who, though he spent much of his time analysing the Bible, based his political theory on philosophical principles alone. How, then, do you get from Abrahamic monotheism to the free society?
Politics is about power, and at the heart of the Abrahamic vision is a critique of power. Power is a fundamental assault on human dignity. When I exercise power over you, I deny your freedom, and that is dangerous for both of us. The opening chapters of Genesis are about the abuse of power. Cain murders his brother Abel, and two chapters later we read, ‘The Earth was corrupt in God’s sight and it was full of violence’ (Genesis 6:11).
Abrahamic monotheism is based on the idea that the free God desires the free worship of free human beings. The historical drama of the Bible turns on the question of how to translate individual freedom into collective freedom. How do you construct a free society without the constant risk of the strong dominating and exploiting the weak? That is the issue articulated by the prophets, and it was never completely solved. Politics is a problem for the Bible, precisely because it believes that no human being should exercise coerci
ve force over another human being. Politics is about power, and Abrahamic faith is a protest against power.
This is the point made by the profoundly religious historian Lord Acton, who said, ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ People have always sought power as the way of ensuring that their will predominates over others. Hobbes, that cold-eyed analyst of the human condition, characterised the ‘general inclination of all mankind’ as ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death’.5 The politics of the Abrahamic tradition is only secondarily about the use of power. Fundamentally it is about the limits of power.6
Can a political order exist without the use of power? As Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt understood, there is only one alternative, namely the act of promising.7 Promising is the fundamental moral act. When I promise, I voluntarily agree to bind myself. It is this ability of humans to commit themselves to do or refrain from doing certain acts that generates order in the relations between human beings without the use of coercive force. Nietzsche was the first thinker to say this clearly:
To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise – is that not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? Is it not the real problem of humankind? … [M]an himself will really have to become reliable, regular, necessary, even in his own self-image, so that he, as someone making a promise is, is answerable to his own future. That is precisely what constitutes the long history of the origins of responsibility.8
A free political order is possible only when the fundamental political act is a mutual promise between governor and governed. But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she has access to power – a power not available to opponents. Sooner or later, if not in the lifetime of the ruler, then in that of his or her descendants, there is an inescapable risk of tyranny. Freedom can only be guaranteed in a political system where the constitutional sovereign is God himself, where he has sought and obtained the free consent of the governed, and where he has bound himself to respect human freedom. That is what happens in Exodus 19–20, the making of a covenant – a mutually binding promise – between God and the children of Israel.
Covenant is the most radical attempt ever undertaken to create a politics of freedom by taking all sovereignty out of human hands altogether. Whoever governs in Israel does so only under the authority delegated by God on the one hand, the people on the other, and can be criticised, and dethroned, for exceeding that authority. That is why, simultaneous with the birth of monarchy in biblical Israel, the prophet-as-social-critic with the right to criticise kings in the name of God, was born.9 That right of opposition, first embodied in the prophet as the man or woman mandated to speak truth to power in the name of God, is fundamental to the free society.
* * *
Covenant was reborn as the key idea of the new politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Calvin’s Geneva and the Dutch Republic, among the Scottish Covenanters and the English Puritans, and the Pilgrim Fathers of America. Though it faded as an idea as Europe became more secularised in the eighteenth century, it has remained part of the vocabulary of American politics to this day.10
Covenantal politics is a politics of new beginnings, of a people pledging themselves to one another and to the common good, a politics of ‘we, the people’. It is a politics of moral principle and collective responsibility. This is what John F. Kennedy meant when he said, ‘In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course,’11 and Barack Obama when he said, ‘For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.’12 Unlike hierarchical societies where rulers rule, a covenant society is always based on the mutual responsibility of citizens as a whole. The fate of the nation lies with the people, not with the rulers of the people.
A covenant always has a narrative. In the case of the Bible, it is the story of the Exodus. In the case of the United States, it is about a journey from oppression to freedom in the new world, the almost promised land. The narrative is retold at significant and symbolic moments – in the United States in presidential inaugural addresses – and they are accompanied by an explicit or implicit renewal of the covenant, a commitment to keep faith with the founders and their vision. The politics of covenant is about faith and hope, the faith that together we can build a gracious future and the hope that history can be redeemed from tragedy. A nation predicated on covenant can always renew itself.13 It is highly doubtful whether other political formations can do so.
Covenant is politics scored for the right brain. It is based on story-telling, not abstract theory. It focuses on us-together-in-relationship, as opposed to the atomic individual of social contract theory – the citizen who works out that it is to his advantage to cede some of his powers to a central authority so that he can live in peace. It is a politics rooted in a religious vision of human dignity and equality.14 It is a politics of ‘one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’. It is a politics inconceivable without God, for only belief in the sovereignty of God is strong enough to set limits to human ambition and empower a population to overthrow those who overstep the bounds of ‘liberty and justice for all’.
That is the irony as well as the strength of Abrahamic politics, that though its vision is religious, its conception of power is secular. Judaism expressed this by its principled distinction between kingship (government) and priesthood (religion). Priests must never hold political power. Christianity did so, somewhat differently, by its statement, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ (Matthew 22:21). The vision that drives this secularisation is religious through and through. It says that power is not to be sacralised. Rulers, kings and emperors are not holy. They are there to serve, not to be served. All power is subject to the overarching imperatives of the right and the just. The moment it oversteps those limits, it is ultra vires and may rightly be opposed.
Politics, in the Abrahamic vision, is not the highest good. It is not where we meet God, not where we construct our deepest relationships, not where we exercise our highest virtues, not where we achieve individual and national glory. It is a means to an end, no more, no less. It is there to secure peace, security, safety and law-abidingness so that we can get on with our lives, serving God in work and worship, in family and community, arenas we do not entrust to politicians and the state because they require absolute liberty. It is the secondary nature of politics in the Judeo-Christian vision that is the surest guarantor against an intrusive state. Where politics is primary, politicians rule supreme; and where politicians rule, freedom is in danger.
That is the key difference between liberal democracy and Athenian democracy, the democracy Solon introduced into Athens some five centuries before the Christian era. In Greece, the citizen served the polis, the state. In liberal democracy, the state serves the citizen. In Athens and Sparta and later in Rome, the state was the vehicle of the people’s highest ideals. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: ‘It is sweet and right to die for your country.’ The supreme virtue was to sacrifice everything for the glory and welfare of the city. Patriotism was the overarching value, and those who died in the course of war achieved the highest honour. The purpose of education, said Plato, is to make one ‘desire and love to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled with justice’.15
The law of the state requires absolute obedience, but there is no higher law, no transcendental ethic, no divine norm, to which the state is answerable and in the light of which it can be criticised and if need be opposed. That is why Athenian democracy has within it the potential to become a tyranny, even if it is a tyranny of the majority. When politics is the highest value, it becomes a way in which the people worship the collective embodiment of themselves, and they can sacrifice many essential liberties to it, including the libe
rty of the minority.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible, by contrast, politics is seen as a necessary concession to reality, no more. Ideally the people should need no king, no government, no state. God was their sovereign; that should be enough. As the military hero Gideon said in the book of Judges (8:23) when the people offered to make him king, ‘I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you.’ The great ideals of justice and compassion, human dignity and social inclusion belonged to an arena where people related to one another not as citizens of the state but as neighbours and friends, covenantal partners. That is where we meet not as rulers and ruled but as co-creators of the good society.
Fundamental to Abrahamic politics is a distinction between the state on the one hand and civil society on the other. Civil society – the domain of families, communities, religious congregations, voluntary associations, charities, neighbourhood groups and the like – is where we relate to one another on the basis of friendship, reciprocity and a moral bond, without the use of power. Abrahamic politics depends on a strong civil society to counterbalance the power of the state, a power that has an inbuilt tendency to grow over time.
Few people said this better than Thomas Paine, the English radical and the only individual to have had a significant role in both the American and French revolutions. His pamphlet Common Sense was published in America in January 1776, and became an instant best-seller, selling 100,000 copies almost immediately. Its impact was huge, and because of it he became known as the father of the American Revolution. Here is how it begins:
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices … Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.16
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 14