We can confidently make two predictions about the next decade. First, more public intellectuals will convert to Christianity, motivated in part by the sense that Western civilization identity is under siege. We should expect to see more testimonies similar to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s, in which defending the West eventually means embracing its ancestral religion, Christianity. Second, these conversions will provoke pushback from those who define the West in secular terms. Critics will claim that defining Western civilization in terms of Christianity is an assault on the legacy of Enlightenment itself, and therefore a departure from the true core of Western civilization. These arguments will intensify if a Republican in the mold of J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio wins the White House in 2028—both politicians are on record defending the intrinsic connection between Christianity and Western civilization, and both were recently chastised by the liberal luminary Francis Fukuyama for contravening an alleged secular Enlightenment.
But the version of Enlightenment that shaped the American Founding doesn’t demand that Americans “push religion into the realm of private belief,” as Fukuyama puts it. Rather, the version of Enlightenment that influenced Americans requires the public acknowledgement of the divine basis of natural law and affirming the duty of government to promote sound religion.
The Declaration of Independence contains a significant phrase: the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This expression, imitating one from John Locke, connects the idea of natural law to its ultimate foundation. “Princes,” wrote Locke in his Second Treatise, “owe subjection to the laws of God and nature. No body, no power, can exempt them from the obligations of that eternal law.” Here, Locke echoed what had been taught about natural law since Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Natural law is knowable through our rational faculties, but it participates in the eternal law, and therefore it is also knowable through Christian revelation. One does not need revelation to recognize the natural law imprinted on our hearts—we can apprehend the natural law by understanding its usefulness for achieving human happiness. Locke noted that law is “the direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest.” If law was not required for happiness, it would vanish “as a useless thing.” But Christian revelation helps us understand the full force of the natural law and the strength of its obligations. As the influential minister Thomas Reese argued in his 1788 treatise An Essay on the Influence of Religion in Civil Society, “Christianity is a very important confirmation of natural religion”; conclusions of reason are “corroborated and rendered more certain” by divine testimony. A full understanding of the natural law requires us to understand that it is part of the eternal law of God. For the Founding era’s most important legal thinker, James Wilson, “the true source of all authority” is God our creator: “in him we live, and move, and have our being.”
The Declaration’s “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” enshrines this theology within America’s unwritten constitution. It permits of two ways to justify the natural law: through practical reasoning and through acknowledging divine authority. Neither excludes the other, and it is possible to arrive at the same conclusion from multiple starting points. As Thomas West writes in The Political Theory of the American Founding, if we asked the Founders “whether their arguments are ultimately grounded in the sacred or in the useful, in virtue or advantage, they would probably reply ‘both.’”
In his Farewell address, George Washington cautioned against indulging “the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” He was expressing a centuries-old admonition. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke had written that atheists could not keep oaths. In the Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson went further, tying belief in liberty and good government to belief in God. He argued that the liberties of a nation would not be secure if we removed “their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God.” John Adams famously held that “our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He also argued that belief in God underwrote one’s commitment to moral absolutes. If one believes that the world is “without a father,” he will conclude that “murder itself [is] as indifferent as shooting a plover.” While Adams was not an orthodox Christian, his reference to a “father” is not a reference to a distant watchmaker. His statement is an expression of the social importance of theism for sustaining a prohibition against intentional killing of innocents.
The Founders settled on publicly celebrating a generic form of Christianity. This settlement became another part of America’s unwritten constitution, giving meaning and direction to the written documents. By the mid-19th century, public life had become organized around a big-tent, non-denominational Protestant Christianity. With public days of prayer and thanksgiving, schools taught religious topics, organized prayer, and read the Bible. This lasted in state-supported education until the 1960s.
When it comes to belief in God the creator and the legislator, the claims of this version of Enlightenment are straightforward. Public professions make us happier. They provide for better government. They maintain desperately needed moral absolutes, particularly those that prohibit killing.
In the United States, the Enlightenment shaped eighteenth and nineteenth century political life toward embracing rather than repudiating public religion. But today, many are captivated by the idea of an enlightenment that banished religion from public and political life. They contrast this innovation with a backwards, medieval era shaped by Christian belief.
Secular enlightenment is a product of what we can call “year-zero liberalism.” It constructs an enticing political fantasy of a rational break from a backwards past, but this fantasy is the invention of a much later period. Hence the importance of the 1960s. The Warren Court decisions abolishing school prayer during those years had no constitutional or historic basis. But they were the fruit of a mid-twentieth century elite that looked back to the early modern period to legitimate a distinctive project of emancipation from religious, moral, and sexual constraints in the present. Christianity, presumed to be the source of such constraints, was their chief target. To ensure freedom, Western political life needed to remove its explicit Christian compass.
Year-zero liberalism was a far-ranging experiment to replace one unwritten constitution (and sometimes written ones) with another, and it largely succeeded. Since the Warren Court era, America’s written constitution as interpreted now presumes to provide a “wall of separation” that excludes any profession of Christianity in state-supported education. Somewhat strangely, this same public secularism is also taken for granted in countries where the written constitution repudiates it. In the United Kingdom, it’s easy to find politicians touting secularism as a perennial British value—this in a country with state funding for Christian schools and an established church. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently chastised Marco Rubio for speaking about a “Christian nation,” arguing that Canada is a civic one. But Carney is the prime minister of a country where there is not only government funding for Christian schools, but where the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has a more explicit embrace of divine authority than the whole U.S. Constitution (according to the Charter’s preamble, “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the Supremacy of God.”)
These contradictions tend not to trouble the enthusiasts of year-zero liberalism. They have other priorities, and when those activist passions seize their attention, the moral vision underwriting their secular Enlightenment is brutally exposed. There is a clear example of this taking hold in many Western and American jurisdictions.
From Canada to California to the state of New York, the trajectory of contemporary end-of-life care is not shaped by an explicit Christian creed, let alone a generic one. A therapeutic, hedonistic mindset has taken hold, that celebrates comfort and is scandalized by pain. Activities that require sacrifice, bearing burdens, and living with suffering are at best foolish and at worse an obstacle to individual satisfaction. Life is reordered accordingly. Behind its therapeutic language, this mindset establishes a ruthless hierarchy that places institutional pressure on those whose lives require sacrifices from others. If you pose a burden to others, your life isn’t worth all that much. If you’re elderly and in pain—or just in pain—expect to find more people tasked with helping you and treating you whispering in your ear that there’s a way to make it all go away. Assisted suicide and euthanasia will be proposed more openly as strategies to save the welfare state and save public health care. To save the system, human life is expendable.
For some, this is what the telos of the modern West is all about—not to embrace assisted suicide, Andrew Roberts argued in the UK House of Lords last year, is to preserve “a medieval and sadistic practice.” Roberts represents those who want to complete the substitution of one unwritten constitution with another. Standard medical practice is too medieval, too Christian; Enlightenment is all about getting rid of the last vestiges of public Christian belief. Roberts provides a lucid expression of how our conception of what Enlightenment is shapes our civilization’s sense of what is right and wrong. Either we embrace the new Enlightenment and accept its moral implications; or we learn again to appreciate another, more ancestral one.
Nathan Pinkoski is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. He has written for academic and popular journals, including Compact, First Things, Perspectives on Political Science, and The Claremont Review of Books. His book project, Actually Existing Postliberalism, examines the transformation of the West since 1989. He is also translating Éric Zemmour’s bestseller The Suicide of the French (Le Suicide français) into English for Encounter Books.
Photo by Johannes Adam Simon Oertel – https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibit/pulling-down-statue-king-george-iii-new-york-city, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12821681