Archives for May 2014

“Liberty, the God that Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, From Locke to Obama” is a big book with a big title and even bigger ideas.

Written by Christopher Ferrara, a pro-life lawyer who has argued on behalf of the civil rights of the unborn and Catholics in a lifetime’s worth of cases before state and federal courts, “Liberty, the God that Failed” lays out its case with a lawyerly combination of cool reason and spirited rhetoric.

When Ferrara speaks of Liberty with a capital “L,” though, he is not speaking of true freedom, which our Lord promised when he said that “the Truth will set you free,” but the liberty which, time and again, has proven to be the false mask of unbridled political power.

“In sum…Liberty has not made men free,” Ferrara asserts in his thesis, “but rather it has relentlessly opposed and driven from the life of the State the very Truth that makes men free.”

An expansive and intensive overview of U.S. history, from its beginnings as a British colony up to the present day, held hostage to a bloated and tyrannical bureaucracy, “Liberty, the God That Failed” serves as an excellent touchstone for Catholic social teaching set against the familiar yet complex ebb and flow of America’s fortunes.

But before examining the familiar narrative of American independence, Ferrara returns to the cradle of Western Civilization, ancient Greece, which established the traditional understanding of politics as a way to lead men not to modern notions of “Liberty,” but to the moral virtues and transcendent truths which offer true liberty.

“Given man’s very nature as an ensouled creature whose end is the life of virtue and the encounter with God, both Plato and Aristotle teach that man’s perfection requires life in the State, originating in the society of families with its organ s of government,” he writes. “The state is a ‘creation of nature’ and ‘man is by nature a political animal’ as Aristotle so famously observed. Hence the Greeks, as for the Christian statesmen who will follow them centuries later, the good State is the one whose laws and institutions take care of the soul by promoting and protecting both virtue and religion over and above mere security in person and property.”

Over and against what he calls this “Graeco-Catholic synthesis” of political thought, Ferrara argues that the modern state – which holds neither virtue nor religion as the highest attainments of its citizens – is really a secularized version of the Protestant Revolt which first sought to do away with the cooperation of “altar and throne.” It was under this cooperation of Church and state that Christendom flourished from the day that Constantine embraced the crucifix to the day that Martin Luther’s 95 Theses served as a declaration of independence from Church authority.

But it was not Protestantism per se which led to the overthrow of virtue and religion as matters of government but rather, Ferrara argues, a sort of secularized Protestantism which we now know to be liberalism – the belief that, through private judgment and without the teachings of Jesus Christ, as handed down through His holy Church, mankind could make its own way. Leading the charge in this second revolt against the Church were two Englishmen who influenced the Founding Fathers – Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

“By the time Hobbes and Locke were done, the Christian story had been rewritten and a new story had begun,” Ferrara writes. “[T]he world of secular governments unrestrained by any religion; the absolute rule of the majority; the consequent growth of government beyond all limits hitherto known; the rise of a commercial civilization in which anything can be bought and sold without restraint by Christian morality, and human affairs, including marriage and family, become contractual arrangements; the world in which religion, if one has a religion, is reduced to a purely private affair. In short, the world of Liberty.”

So in his analysis of the American history and in particular the American Revolution and what he calls “the Second Revolution,” that is, the American Civil War, Ferrara sees the same spirit of “Liberty” at work – one which demands of the common folk a sacrifice at the altar of “Liberty” which far outweighs the benefits received in return.

A little further on in his same analysis, Ferrara intones the great theme of his work – that a liberty without God (despite the lip service the Founders had paid to God, Ferrara claims – and supports with proof – most of them were either deists or nominally Christian) is merely a synonym for unbridled will to power.

“Another lesson learned [from the Civil War] is that when sovereign power is said to rest on nothing more than an illusory ‘consent of the governed,’ rather than God and fear of His justice on the part of both ruler and subject, the ultimate support for the government devolves into raw power – the essence of Liberty under its political aspect, as both the Union and the Confederacy had revealed to the hapless masses who were subjected to their authority.”

It might seem that Ferrara’s thesis seeks to dismantle everything we’ve been taught about American history and American political thought. His ideas might also seem a bit pie-in-the-sky and seek to “turn back the clock,” but as one who has seen the destruction of innocent life being defended as the law of the land (in much the same way that the enslavement of human life in the antebellum South was ratified by the country’s leaders) Ferrara urges Catholics and Christians everywhere to recognize that Christian civilization has more to offer the world than the liberalism and “the first practical realization of the Lockean vision of Liberty” does.

So powerful a case does Ferrara make for a Catholic understanding of liberty that “Liberty, the God That Failed” would be a felicitous addition to any Catholic high school or college curriculum seeking a truly Catholic view of American history.

In his conclusion, then, Ferrara does not seek to turn back the clock but to seek true progress through a common cause in prayer and personal sacrifice, to move with true liberty beyond the secular state which has dominated the 20th and early 21st century, and to recapture those same vital principles which first built Western Civilization.

“A civilizational return to the sociopolitical recognition of man’s true nature and destiny,” he writes, “is as near as the God who has endowed us with infinitely more than ‘unalienable rights’: a rational soul, an intellect governing our free wills, the law written on our hearts, reason perfect by the supernatural gift of faith, the capacity for regeneration in grace, the promise of life eternal. The divine dispensation Plato anticipated so many centuries ago in his quest for the good State that would foster the good man has always been ours for the asking. ‘Excita Domine potentiam tuam et veni ut salvos facias nos – Stir up your power O Lord and come that you may save us.’ We need only call upon the Word Incarnate as one people and then watch the world begin to change again.”

*This review originally appeared in the May 15, 2014 issue of The Catholic Times, newspaper of the Diocese of La Crosse.