Why Liberty Needs Religion

The only cleric to sign the Declaration, Witherspoon gave voice to an important proposition, as important today as it was in 1776: as religion needs liberty, so too does liberty need religion. His perspectives on the interrelations of liberty, conscience, religion, and politics help us appreciate strands of early modern Presbyterian political theology, which had an outsized influence in the early American republic.

The idea that there is a codependence between religion and liberty has sometimes been underappreciated by libertarians. It was, however, a conviction held by many of the American Founders. The freedoms of conscience and religious exercise are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The support of those freedoms themselves, however, in both law and culture, depends on ethical commitments. Some of the Founders believed those commitments would wane, or simply not obtain, without religious convictions. John Adams maintained, the “Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”¹ George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address described “religion and morality” as “indispensable supports” of “political prosperity,” worthy of the support not just of “the pious man,” but “the mere politician.” For, he asked, “where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, [without] the sense of religious obligation? Reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”²

Witherspoon’s thinking on these matters can be found in his influential May 1776 address at Princeton, “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men” and his 1782 Thanksgiving Address.³ The political implications of the arguments were further developed in his highly influential Lectures on Moral Philosophy at Princeton⁴—lectures which were attended by nine future attendees of the Philadelphia constitutional convention, twenty future national congressmen, and one future president, James Madison.⁵ Few of the Founders articulated the interconnections between liberty and religion as richly as Witherspoon.⁶

Why does religious liberty matter most? Liberals often answer by saying that if we want to coexist peacefully in a pluralistic society, we ought to abstain from forcing our theological views on others. Witherspoon doesn’t make that point directly, but he did mount a different consequentialist case: “The knowledge of God and his truths,” he claimed, “have from the beginning of the world been chiefly, if not entirely, confined to these parts of the earth, where some degree of liberty and political justice had been seen.”⁷

Even if that claim is false (or non-​falsifiable), Witherspoon can be interpreted as making an important point—a liberal point: pursuing religious truth depends on religious liberty because of our epistemic limits. Truth does not present itself clearly to the human mind once and for all, in all its granular details. It must be investigated and pursued, and those activities require liberty. Such a conviction informed Witherspoon’s ecumenical posture. He admonished his audience not to take his exhortations to Christian piety as encouragement to “furious and angry zeal for the circumstantials of religion, or the contentions of one sect [of Christianity] with another about their peculiar distinctions.” He continued, “I do not wish you to oppose any body’s religion, but everybody’s wickedness. Perhaps there are few surer marks of the reality of religion, than when a man feels himself more joined in spirit to a truly holy person of a different denomination, than to an irregular liver [sic] of his own.”⁸

Witherspoon affirmed the sacredness of conscience, in line with the 1674 Westminster Confession, which declared: “God alone is Lord of the conscience.”⁹ Affirming the sovereignty of God and not man over conscience is, as Lord Acton later described it, the ultimate “repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom.”¹⁰ To maintain that God is sovereign over the conscience is to maintain that the seat of final moral judgment can never rest with any human institution.

Respecting God’s jurisdiction over the conscience implies that each should be granted the freedom to do what she feels she ought, so long as her exercise of that freedom does not conflict with another’s. That precept restrains political power. The rights of religious liberty call for the protection of civil liberty, and historically the two have been inseparable.

Witherspoon asserted, “there is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.”¹¹ Free religious exercise requires—and from a political perspective is often indistinguishable from—civil liberty: freedom of speech and the press, freedom in one’s person and property, and the consequent rights to voluntary association. When we diminish civil liberty, then, we diminish religious liberty.

How are we to preserve our liberties? Part of the answer of course involves law and constitutional design. We need, as Madison argued in The Federalist no. 51, a way to constrain men from doing evil as citizens, and then to constrain the constrainers from doing evil as governors. But Witherspoon emphasized that constitutional design was not enough. He, like John Adams and George Washington, believed that religious and civil liberties would erode over time, even under the best framed constitution, if citizens and statesmen did not retain the moral conviction that those liberties should be protected.

Witherspoon affirmed the sovereignty of God over the passions of men. God may even use evil to further His good plans. As Joseph said to his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive today” (Genesis 50:15, ESV). But Witherspoon entertained no illusion that private vices could somehow be arranged such that they alone would sustain the temporal good of the public. A flourishing society requires a substratum of moral soundness: “Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners makes a people ripe for destruction.”¹²

Law can constrain and channel the vice of citizen’s temporarily, but evil will eventually infect the execution of the law itself and the society will unravel: “A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for a time, but beyond a certain pitch even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue.”¹³ In his 1782 Thanksgiving Address Witherspoon extended the analysis with the claim that “all laws must give way to the tide of popular opinion, and be laid prostrate under universal practice.”¹⁴

Witherspoon taught that “the manners of a people are of consequence to the stability of every civil society; [and] of much more consequence to free states.”¹⁵ To preserve the rights that constitute liberty, it is not sufficient that citizens believe that these liberties are useful for promoting their own ends, or that they interpret them as part of a social compact or convention. They must believe they are sacred and right, and they must energetically promote and defend them for their own sake. If rights are not viewed as sacred, the temptation to violate them for personal or short-​term gain will be too high. Good laws may help in the short run, but they will not solve the problem—they can only hold the “rotten materials” together for so long. Law is unreliable without the belief that law ought to be obeyed and enforced.

Even a Hobbesian Leviathan would face high costs to monitor all potential violators of the law at once. But even if the monitoring problem could be overcome, the problem of law enforcement remains. There can be no sufficient guarantee by higher-​order law that laws will be equally and uniformly enforced, even if all violators could theoretically be observed. To ensure enforcement of a law, the lawgiver can put another law behind the first law, to punish those who fail to punish violations of the first law. But that would recreate the problem, for the enforcement of this higher-​order law will again depend on the willing compliance of law enforcers, which will depend on their conviction that these laws ought to be enforced. The constitution must inevitably, at some level, rely on mores, manners, and the conscience of citizens and lawgivers.

What is the source of the mores and manners necessary to sustain a free society? Witherspoon believed they derived from religion, hence his claim: “He is the best friend of American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.”¹⁶ A flourishing free society, he suggested, rests upon a widespread affirmation of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, an affirmation that brings a conviction of sacredness of human life and individual human agency. That conviction, when properly nurtured, flows into a zeal for liberty and justice. Without a grounding in religious principle, Witherspoon believed, this zeal will dissipate, gradually paving the road away from liberal political practice and towards despotism.

Liberty is desirable as it promotes and protects the sacred right of the individual to pursue the good as he feels he should. But the sustaining of liberty itself for Witherspoon requires a moral substratum, which only will be sustained if the population is sufficiently religious. If the proper role of the state is to protect liberty, and sound religiosity is necessary towards that end, it would seem there is a public interest—that is, an interest of both the public sector and the public at large—in promoting proper religion.

In something of a paradox, one might conclude from these lines of reasoning that the government ought to promote some form of religion for the sake of preserving liberty. But how can one affirm liberty (including religious liberty) and support government affirmations of certain religious principles? Wouldn’t such affirmations be a flagrant violation of the very ethical principles they allegedly aim to promote? Wouldn’t they set an incredibly dangerous precedent for government abuses in the name of “true religion”—the very sorts of abuses from which many early Americans fled?

Witherspoon reflected on these question in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, which he developed and delivered over the years at Princeton during his tenure as President (1768-1794). He began with the point discussed above, that just dispositions and manners of the people are essential to the proper and reliable execution of the law, and that the law, therefore, cannot be neutral on the issue of ethical formation. “When the general disposition of the people is against the law, they cannot long subsist, even by strict and rigorous execution on the part of the rulers.” Thus, a truly excellent constitution will feature civil laws that not only “punish [men] when they do evil” but also “have a tendency to prevent offences and make men good.”¹⁷

If piety and virtue are “inseparably connected,” as are virtue and liberty, “to promote true religion is the best, and most effectual way, of making a virtuous and regular people.” If the people earnestly believe in their ethical duty to love God and love people, “civil laws will have little to do.” But how, exactly, is the government to promote “true religion,” especially given a plurality of religious sentiment in the polity, and the natural, inalienable right—“even in society”—that each has to “judge for himself in matters of religion”?¹⁸

Witherspoon offered his students three proposals. First, the magistrate ought to “make [piety] an object of public esteem” and to “encourage piety by his own example.”¹⁹ In practice, this could involve insertion of general religious language into various public proclamations (“in God we trust”, “one nation under God”), designating holidays for (voluntary) fasting and thanksgiving, and participating publicly in religious ceremonies, gatherings, and celebrations. Above all, it would involve magistrates making themselves personally responsible for cultivating their own faiths, on the understanding that leaders capture the public eye and become, one way or another, natural objects of emulation.

Second, the government “ought to defend the rights of conscience” by tolerating “all religious sentiments that are not injurious to [others].”²⁰ Monotheistic faiths, he claimed, are naturally rivalrous toward one another by virtue of their exclusive claims about the nature and worship of God. The government ought to take care to protect religious groups from one another, so as to ensure the peace in civil society, but also so as to preserve the continuation of what Witherspoon taught to be the true Christian religion. It should be noted that in the discussion of this point he advocated toleration for Catholics, as had been largely achieved in Holland.

His third proposal—the only one at odds with the liberty principle—was that the government ought to enact regulations for the punishment of impiety and profanity. He doesn’t specify certain regulations, but one might imagine he had in mind restrictions on prostitution, public indecency, alcohol consumption and production, and perhaps prohibitions against blasphemy.

Of Witherspoon’s three proposals for state promotions of religiosity, the last offends some modern classical liberals and libertarians. But the broad sweep of his ideas remains relevant for us today.

Liberty, in the Adam Smithian sense of allowing every man to pursue his interests his own way, does not carry with itself the spiritual and ethical resources needed to sustain itself in social and political practice. It relies on underpinnings in culture, and these have traditionally come from religious sensibilities. Whether there are now viable substitutes for religious faith in the landscape of science and secular humanism can be debated. Witherspoon clearly did not believe that could be the case—only an ethical framework derived from faith in the Judeo-​Christian God could sustain liberty.

Regardless, friends of liberty today need to think seriously about the culture of liberty. It is not just Witherspoon who worries for liberty without God; it is also many others, including arguably John Locke,²¹ Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Lord Acton, and even Friedrich Hayek (see the final paragraph of The Fatal Conceit). We classical liberals need to ponder the processes of ethical formation by which individuals come to esteem life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for themselves and their neighbors. Religion is our ally here, as our great founder John Witherspoon reminds us.