Religion, liberalism, socialism, conservatism - the past casts long shadows

[innonimatu]

Someone accused me of "ranting". I haven't done a proper rant here in years. May as well do one today.

I have been intending to expore the theme of what was probably the biggest failure of liberals and of soviet communism: their approach to religion.

Marx's comment about the opium of the people was a philosophical critique about an aspect of an already existing corpus of liberal critique of religion at the time, on the necessity of religion in a world of downtrodden people. The " abolition of religion" he was analizing when describing secularism explained it as becoming needless only after oppression and suffering had ended. What explains the anti-religious crusade the USSR and several countries under its influence embarked on in the early 20th century almost immeditaely after revolutions? The excuse was this quote. But what was the actual motive?

We need to look at history. It started in thhat long and eventful 19th century. I wonder if we're not still living in it. The wider context of 19th century Europe was one of raging battles between liberals (armed for the ideological fight with public instruction) and conservatives (armed with religion) for who got to control the modern state and reap the benefits. The centre of this battle was France and modern France is its result. French cultural influence over all Europe was predominant in the 19th century and exported these battle lines to every other country. They followed Napoleon's armies. It my country it became knwon as the "liberal wars". In Spain it was the "carlist wars". Etc. Unsurprisingly, the liberals were deeply unpopular with most of the population (which was rural) because they wanted to tear up their way of life. Everywhere they came to power they did it by force of arms, crushing repeated (mostly rural based) insurrections against their new government policies, in re-runs of the french Fronde.

The side in these wars now associated with "individual liberty" and "parliamentary democracy" was a minority imposing minority views what, in a vote with universal suffrage at the time, would have been roundly rejected. But liberalism then was very much not democratic in the current sense used by liberals now: the though of women voting filled them with horror, so did the thought of the poor or the illiterate getting a vote. Only after passing through the new secular (liberal) public education (propagada) would one be allowed to vote. And only men because woman were regarded as given to religious inclinations and were not to be trusted! A small minority did believe in "universal rights" actually having to be universal, but they were quickly ejected from any liberal club and would find themselves leading a third movement: socialism. But the socialist and later the anarchists were taking in essentially liberals rejected by their peers as dangerous radicals. They were that fraction of the products of the new liberal propaganda, universal education, who refused the cognitive dissonance between what it said (individual rights, yey) and what it practiced (rights only for gentlemen, obligations for everyone else) and would not let themselves be co-opted under those terms into the now expanded but still by necessity limited ruling class.

A liberal would contend (did contend, in period discussions) that these were childish impatient rebels because once the new "education" changed everyone's minds the franchise and the rights would be expanded. But liberals with an horror to menial jobs needed peasants and, now in the industrial era, proletartians to exploit. Whatever they actually did they weren't about to share political and social power. The masses needed these to be kept in their place on the base of the social pyramid because there were only so many jobs for liberals in the bureaucracy. The liberal promise of equality was then, as it is now, a conscious deceit, a lie. They were conservatives of a different club.

The liberals won most civil wars. When they won, everywhere they won, they pillaged the old religious institutions and distributed the buildings and the land among themselves. In public auctions supposedly for the benefit of the state, but first they made sure they stiole during th wars enough mony to be the only buyers. As it would be repeated in the 1980s-90s "privatizations", and inspired in Henry VIII's much earlier confiscations. Getting rich at the expense of the community they claim to be serving. The immediate impact was a worsening of the living conditions of the mass of the population because those religious institutions had been the "social security" of the time, flawed and limited though it mught have been. Also much as the enclosures and the poor's law in Britain, this was by design. The peasants and the artisan's whose guilds were terminated would be recycled into proletarians, such was development.

After much fighting and with a new proletarian class led by socialists also putting pressure on the liberals, the franchise was expanded bt this inevitably was part of political reorientations. By mid century after the experience of the July and 1848 revolutions, the liberals and the conservatives were coming to an understanding that the "mob" could be dangerous to both. The Jean Valjeans had gotten rich and "respectable". Many of the old conservatives could be allies of the liberals, now already estabelished as a proprietor class and therefore conservative in outlook, indeed their families would inter-marry. Together they would control this unruly population (se the 18th Brumaire reporting, also by Marx, who was quite a good journalist). Later, after the Paris commune, the big liberal fear reappeared but transferred from conservatives to the socialists. This is just a hasty summary (France's "right" has ever sicne the July revolution been split!) but necessary because the history of this messy century is so often ignored. Inconvenient to talk about not just because it may raise some questions that are still delicate now but especially because it is hard to follow.

Who were the late 19th century socialists? They were products of the liberal remake of Europe at the time. But by this time not necessarily just the outcasts of the liberals. This is getting long so let's move to the Russian Empire case. Lenin was of aristicratic descent. Stalin was the son of a shoe-maker, as prole as one gets. They serve as examples of how the socialist groups in Russia atrratec people of different backgrounds, were a third pole indeed. But the seminary education he got near the turn of the century was a gateway to liberal and socialist ideas. That was inevitable in the era, they were everywhere and literacy spread them. Echos of the reformation... I man not saying that communism was "reformed liberalism", but I'm saying that it could not but contain the bagagge of many previous liberal ideas.

Socialists at that time in the Russian Empire behaved as in thoughout Europe: they fought not just the conservatives but also against the liberals who replaced them in early 1917. But in method, power it is well worth a civil war, our ideas are universal but only in some future we are goind to create, that was a path trodden by liberals earlier. They followed known examples. Russans and amercials (far more alike than most seem to notice) like to thing their countries excaptional, and the russians do go on about Tolstoy and russian mysticism and all that. No. They weren't different, only some circunstances when history happened were different.

The bolsheviks grabbed power. What did Lenin do? The typical liberal programme done a century prior in several countries. Put down dissenters, win a civil war, redistribute property so as to get critical support, pillage the religious institutions as those are the lowest hanging fruit, bribe the middle classes into joining (the NEP). It was a policy to wrestle away power from a previous ruling class, not anything innovative. He did what Kerensky was too feeble to do. A liberal from 80 years earlier would be on-board with Lenin's party immediately.
It was Stalin later who did a real revolution, a break, with the past in Russia in terms of property and power distribution that no liberal in the rest of Europe ever tried or wanted. Stalin did achieve the levelling that had evanded so many prior attemps in modern Europe, since, well, the Levellers. I do not care to argue here about the good and bad of that. I care to look, in this discussion, at the place religion had in this last big revolution of the long 19th century.

I think the mis-handling of religion was the crass mistake of the soviet leadership. As it had been for several liberal republics in Europe. Is the explanation as simple as: the new political powers feared organized religion so much that they felt a need to force-secularize the population?
I do not believe it was the fear of some other power pole. Organized christian religion was originally set up by Constantine as an imperial government helper. It did help (disregard some civil wars - iconoclasm) keep Eastern Rome going for a millenium. In Russia the Tsars always had a use for religion. So does the current russian state. Henry VIII, the model for later liberal consolidations of power, made himself the head of religion, didn not just disband it.
I think the horror to religion was a french creation, an accidental creation of this long 19th century. German phiilosophers made a big thing of it later but german philosophy was born under french influence. This opposition ot religion would be the downfall of many of the political groups that irrationally took it and carried it later. In France religion came to be seen by many intellectuals, after Napoleon III's traumatic (for them) grab on power, as the weapon of their oppressors. The ultramontan (loyal to the pope across the alps - catholic) countryside was Napoleon's ally in his coup, and it was later Thier's ally in his bloody repression of the Paris Commune. But if it was the ally of these two, was it not because it had earlier been alienated by the other sides? Did in not fall into the lap of these two men to be used, neither of them personally caring about religious beliefs past how they could exploit them?

Stalin was smart enough to retreat from supression of religion when Germany attacked the SU and religious belief, that salve for human suffering (looking at what Marx was actually saying), nas needed. But soviet policy never rehabilitated and integrated the idea of religion as a normal part of human experience, to be lived with. Communist parties until the end of the 20th century remained dogmatically opposed to religion, justified solely on a simple speculative paragraph of analysis of previous liberal dogma! This, inevitably as with any frailty during a long confrontation, was exploited by opponents.
This policy, communism = secularism, simply had no basis in any of the orginal socialist ideas. There was no fundamental opposition between the two, indeed in many aspects they were complementary as the proponents of "liberation theology" pointed out after the 1970s in Latin America.

The early liberals set out to destroy religion because they hated it after having been defeated by people using it. It was a trauma, not rational analysis. Feeling it was out of their control, could be used by adversaries, had to be destoyed.

In the soviet-guided communist countries, more than a century after the french revolution, I think the motive was another. What I think happened was a phenomenon here may attribute to Tony Blair, but witch is a much more general flaw: rule for targets.
The end of the "opium of the masses" would be a signal that the masses no longer needed that a salve for the oppressions they suffered. Had been freed from all that alienated them and made them seek supernatural consolation.
So communist governments set out to officially meet the target, instead of achieveing the goals that would produce the target. Faking it: try to administratively supress religious belief and claim that this showed how the masses were alrealy new soviet men (and women) happy and liberated from those sufferings that required the religious opium.

The long century has not yet ended. We still remain in this tri-partite fight for power: liberals, conservatives, socialists. In their many shades. How do you see religion being pulled and used in the middle of it in the future of "the west"?
Are old traumas and dogmas still guiding politicians?
(I had to specify "the west" because it's obvuious that much of the rest of world is no longer automaticaly following ideas originating there).

 

[Birdjaguar]

How do you see religion being pulled and used in the middle of it in the future of "the west"?

Religion in the west (since the rise of Islam) has always been a divisive force setting one group against another. That is its most effective use. Unite your church against the other churches/mosques. The splintering of Christianity into many new forms has made it harder to use though. Even the Southern Baptist Convention (white evangelicals) cannot unite on basic principles without causing groups of churches to leave. Religion works best at a smaller scale now in the west. Africa with its own style of evangelical Christianity and growing LDS influence will respond differently. Modern legal system make pillaging religious resources less probable than in the past.

 

[Plotinus]

You keep talking about "liberals", but you don't name any or give any concrete examples. Who exactly are you talking about? What evidence do you have that they all hated religion or were consciously dishonest in their aims? What about liberal Christianity? I mean, don't people like Schleiermacher or Harnack or Gladstone or Rauschenbusch, in their different ways, count as "liberals"? If not, who does?

 

[Moriarte]

Since you're on a rant, I don't expect you to engage further with this thread, but in case you do...

The bolsheviks grabbed power. What did Lenin do? The typical liberal programme done a century prior in several countries. Put down dissenters, win a civil war, redistribute property so as to get critical support, pillage the religious institutions as those are the lowest hanging fruit, bribe the middle classes into joining (the NEP).

The bolded description sounds as if there was much to pillage. That was not the case. A few golden crosses, collector's bibles and transfer of ownership from churches to planetariums. It has to be said that planetariums can occupy any type of building, so requisition of church buildings wasn't strictly necessary for success of this branch of kids entertainment. Revitalisation of economics, later collectivisation brought a lot more in daily profit to the economy that could ever be squeezed out of church in a decade.

Soviet leadership was solving the problem of loyalty to the single suzerain, who is above us all, but holds church close to His heart. Beyond that Church was a political power represented throughout Europe and Americas. It had daily lives of peasants under strict supervision and could undermine the functioning of soviet apparatus if it chose to. Most importantly, the church was integrated within capitalist systems and long term was incompatible with the vision of moneyless communist state.

But soviet policy never rehabilitated and integrated the idea of religion as a normal part of human experience, to be lived with.

A common misconception rooted in Cold War propaganda. It was never rehabilitated but it was integrated, thousands of churches never stopped functioning across the Union. After 1943 there was official integration - Patriarch was permitted, once again, to be declared, a government institution was created, which was a liaison between the Soviet Government and the church. Patriarchy received state approval and sponsorship. The deep connection between Christianity and the Russians needs to be understood more fully in the West. One thing is to remove Russians from Christianity, far more difficult to remove Christianity from Russians. Even though an atheist today, I was raised in one of these families. My grandmother and grandfather practiced slightly differing branches (roman catholicism and christian orthodoxy), but both were free to attend their churches.

Public religious propaganda - now that was frowned upon. Simply attending churches and publicly wearing a cross was fine in 1950's, 60's, 70's and further on from direct accounts of friends and relatives, if that anecdotal statistic is of any value to you. More than 13000 Christian Orthodox churches functioned by official government sanction in 1957. However, if you were dead set to find a job at the summit of government, military apparatus - then yes, church membership was more of a burden. However, there were exceptions.

I suggest more extensive reading of original Russian material on the subject, since it is easy enough to auto-translate in this day and age.

Even wiki will do: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Религия_в_СССР

 

[Remorseless1]

Hitler co-opted the Lutheran Church, and Mussolini did the same with the Roman Catholic Church. Religion is a threat to any type of dictatorship, yet religion usually acceded to the demands the government in order to exist. Stalin knew this, asking how many battalions did the Pope have.

Interesting how Western Europeans are less and less religious every year.

 

[Plotinus]

Interesting how Western Europeans are less and less religious every year.

The data on that is quite ambiguous. By some metrics, many (not all) Western Europeans are becoming less religious, but by other metrics they are not. It varies a lot from place to place, both between countries and within countries. E.g. England overall has become (somewhat) less religious over the last twenty years, but London has not.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I wonder how much racial, ethnic, and cultural changes have influenced the religious changes in communities and regions. Has an influx of Muslims (or others) into London made it more religious?

 

[Plotinus]

Yes, and (I think more significantly) African Christian denominations. Just ten minutes of walking along the Old Kent Road or anywhere in that area will take you past more AICs than you can count on your fingers. But London also has significant religious minorities from earlier periods of immigration too, such as the sizeable Jewish community in the northwest.

 

[innonimatu]

The bolded description sounds as if there was much to pillage. That was not the case. A few golden crosses, collector's bibles and transfer of ownership from churches to planetariums. It has to be said that planetariums can occupy any type of building, so requisition of church buildings wasn't strictly necessary for success of this branch of kids entertainment. Revitalisation of economics, later collectivisation brought a lot more in daily profit to the economy that could ever be squeezed out of church in a decade.

Soviet leadership was solving the problem of loyalty to the single suzerain, who is above us all, but holds church close to His heart. Beyond that Church was a political power represented throughout Europe and Americas. It had daily lives of peasants under strict supervision and could undermine the functioning of soviet apparatus if it chose to. Most importantly, the church was integrated within capitalist systems and long term was incompatible with the vision of moneyless communist state.

I still drop by occasionally.

There was pillage. And there was worse, wantom, unnecessary destruction. The most stark example is the big cathedral that was dynamited in Moscow and a couple of decades ago rebuilt. That was an in-your-face hostile act that was not justifiable on any practical grounds. It was a political demonstration of power. Some tried to justify it as such. I argued that it was the kind of thing that, on reexamination, was counter-productive.
But my rant was about the whole anti-religions thing taken to the extreme that spread in western Europe in the late 1800, the USSR just followed the trend.

A common misconception rooted in Cold War propaganda. It was never rehabilitated but it was integrated, thousands of churches never stopped functioning across the Union. After 1943 there was official integration - Patriarch was permitted, once again, to be declared, a government institution was created, which was a liaison between the Soviet Government and the church. Patriarchy received state approval and sponsorship. The deep connection between Christianity and the Russians needs to be understood more fully in the West. One thing is to remove Russians from Christianity, far more difficult to remove Christianity from Russians. Even though an atheist today, I was raised in one of these families. My grandmother and grandfather practiced slightly differing branches (roman catholicism and christian orthodoxy), but both were free to attend their churches.

Public religious propaganda - now that was frowned upon. Simply attending churches and publicly wearing a cross was fine in 1950's, 60's, 70's and further on from direct accounts of friends and relatives, if that anecdotal statistic is of any value to you. More than 13000 Christian Orthodox churches functioned by official government sanction in 1957. However, if you were dead set to find a job at the summit of government, military apparatus - then yes, church membership was more of a burden. However, there were exceptions.

I suggest more extensive reading of original Russian material on the subject, since it is easy enough to auto-translate in this day and age.

Even wiki will do: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Религия_в_СССР

Thants. Bookmarked for later, but I know region was not outright banned. It was, in the USSR as in the end stage of the liberals vs. conservatives civil wars in severral western european regions, supressed, strangulated as a matter of policy. The pendulum shift was too extreme, and created reactions. I know well the history of that in my country, and in Spain. I can easily argue that the 20th century civil wars and dictatorships here would have been avoided if the repuiblicans were not so fanatically anti-religion. It was an historical mistake.

Hitler co-opted the Lutheran Church, and Mussolini did the same with the Roman Catholic Church. Religion is a threat to any type of dictatorship, yet religion usually acceded to the demands the government in order to exist. Stalin knew this, asking how many battalions did the Pope have.

Interesting how Western Europeans are less and less religious every year.

I don't know if co-opted would be the correct word when talking about what dictatorships did. But I claim no knowlege of the specifics of 1930s nazi politics towards the german churches. Mussolini, he got power handed over to him, by the king and some of the other parties. They could have resisted his march. Hitler too now that I think of the superficial knowlege I have, von Papen was representing the catholic party?

In Portugal's case Salazar was very much a creature of the Church, promoted with their intervention. But once in power he demanded its loyalty. And got it. His old friend Cerejeira was promoted by the Vatican, openly opportunistically, in a project of regaining privileges for the Church in exchange of political support. Made it only to cardinal, not to Pope like a pole decades later, but history repeats itself often, in broad terms. Impossibly to separate who was the manipulator and who was manipulated. Both apply.

This could be decried by the republicans as the evil Church showing its colors, and how it has always plotted against the republic. But the hostilities were in fact initiated by the republicans. I do not like linking to wikipedia on history but the religion section on that First Republic entry there in imo, as a summary, correct. And I'm trying to keep this short on the examples.

In the end the militant anti-clericalism of the republican (liberal) parties, up to the stunts of stealing churches from it and putting them to deliberately offensive uses, drove a Church hierarchy which in the late 19th century was more or less resigned to losing influence gradualyl and keep out of active politics, to react and make sure the republican regime collapsed when it was weakened (for other reaons, WW I). These were silly, cheap stunts becaus ethey barely made a dent in what was still a very catholic country, but they were politicized on purpose by the republicans and as a consequence produced that reaction. Needlessly making enemies for a regime that was always unstable and lacking in legitimacy. Political suicide.

What led me to write the rant was not just the history, though this is the place to discuss historical details, but that I see this as a recurring mistake. The first French Republic a full century earlier became an easier prey for Nepoleon due to the same kind of mistake.
Are we doomed to see the same kind of mistake repeated in the future?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Religion in the west (since the rise of Islam) has always been a divisive force setting one group against another. That is its most effective use. Unite your church against the other churches/mosques. The splintering of Christianity into many new forms has made it harder to use though. Even the Southern Baptist Convention (white evangelicals) cannot unite on basic principles without causing groups of churches to leave. Religion works best at a smaller scale now in the west. Africa with its own style of evangelical Christianity and growing LDS influence will respond differently. Modern legal system make pillaging religious resources less probable than in the past.

Religion has always been a divisive force setting one group against another, period. It hasn't been enough to unite one church against another (or whatever other place of worship). There are consequences both social and financial, and possibly physical toward those who either want to leave or who never joined in the first place.

You keep talking about "liberals", but you don't name any or give any concrete examples. Who exactly are you talking about? What evidence do you have that they all hated religion or were consciously dishonest in their aims? What about liberal Christianity? I mean, don't people like Schleiermacher or Harnack or Gladstone or Rauschenbusch, in their different ways, count as "liberals"? If not, who does?

I've always been a bit confused about the word "liberals" as defined by non-Canadians. I know what they are in Canada, both for the parties and what we call "small-l liberals" (people who support some of the Large-L Liberal policies but can't bear the thought of voting for them because family voting history, they hate Trudeau (either Pierre or Justin or both), etc.

Since you're on a rant, I don't expect you to engage further with this thread, but in case you do...



The bolded description sounds as if there was much to pillage. That was not the case. A few golden crosses, collector's bibles and transfer of ownership from churches to planetariums. It has to be said that planetariums can occupy any type of building, so requisition of church buildings wasn't strictly necessary for success of this branch of kids entertainment. Revitalisation of economics, later collectivisation brought a lot more in daily profit to the economy that could ever be squeezed out of church in a decade.

Soviet leadership was solving the problem of loyalty to the single suzerain, who is above us all, but holds church close to His heart. Beyond that Church was a political power represented throughout Europe and Americas. It had daily lives of peasants under strict supervision and could undermine the functioning of soviet apparatus if it chose to. Most importantly, the church was integrated within capitalist systems and long term was incompatible with the vision of moneyless communist state.



A common misconception rooted in Cold War propaganda. It was never rehabilitated but it was integrated, thousands of churches never stopped functioning across the Union. After 1943 there was official integration - Patriarch was permitted, once again, to be declared, a government institution was created, which was a liaison between the Soviet Government and the church. Patriarchy received state approval and sponsorship. The deep connection between Christianity and the Russians needs to be understood more fully in the West. One thing is to remove Russians from Christianity, far more difficult to remove Christianity from Russians. Even though an atheist today, I was raised in one of these families. My grandmother and grandfather practiced slightly differing branches (roman catholicism and christian orthodoxy), but both were free to attend their churches.

Public religious propaganda - now that was frowned upon. Simply attending churches and publicly wearing a cross was fine in 1950's, 60's, 70's and further on from direct accounts of friends and relatives, if that anecdotal statistic is of any value to you. More than 13000 Christian Orthodox churches functioned by official government sanction in 1957. However, if you were dead set to find a job at the summit of government, military apparatus - then yes, church membership was more of a burden. However, there were exceptions.

I suggest more extensive reading of original Russian material on the subject, since it is easy enough to auto-translate in this day and age.

Even wiki will do: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Религия_в_СССР

Planetariums are more than places where kids go to be "entertained." They are places of learning for all ages. We don't have one in my city; the only times I've ever been to one were school trips to either Edmonton or Calgary, or when a "portable" was brought here (now those are more for kids than adults, given how you have to access the damn things by crawling on the floor through a tube-like tunnel to get to the domed part).

 

[Grey9]

I have been intending to expore the theme of what was probably the biggest failure of liberals and of soviet communism: their approach to religion.

I'd counter and propose that the failure of liberals is their approach to humanity as a whole.
----
I'd opine that firming up a definition of what liberalism is about is as important as a lot of people here have suggested, I'd also add that getting a usefully concrete definition of religion is very important.

___
Liberalism is a bit nebulous because 'What is Freedom' is a question with radically different answers from person to person. In any case freedom per se isn't really central to any kind of liberalism, despite the rhetoric to the contrary.
I'd place the most important liberal ideal to this conversation to be the idea that humanity was in a perfectly harmonious anarchistic state of nature before -insert social phenomena here- happened and ruined it all. We see this in Rousseau noble savage, in Adam Smiths ideas about capitalism, in the forgery 'Coming of Age in Samoa' and we see it today in the general idealization of peoples outside of the Euro-Asia cradle of civilization. This is why groups like Maori or Cherokee are idealized while Chinese and Scotsmen are not. The idea that civilization per se is the root of all evil and the uncivilized state is an anarchistic utopia is very much a driving factor underpinning liberal thought. Yes this assumption about the perfect natural state is more absurd than any Sunday school garden of Eden pop up book but it really is a consistent underpinning presupposition of liberal thought and it is critical to understanding WHY liberalism has so much animus to religion per se.
Blank slate (the notion that everyone is born with the same potential) and 'The Ghost in the Machine (the 'real' you is your soul not your body) combine to support the core dogma of liberalism: egalitarianism. Egalitarianism comes in the mostly older flavor that all males are equal while females are not (The french revolutionary liberals largely thought that way) or more commonly and currently that all humans are equal. Equal in what way? If you ask you might get a vague answer about human dignity but as far as I've seen this equality is simply an unsupported dogma.
Because equality is presumed rather than proven it follows that every perceived inequality is the cause of some injustice, and because the natural anarchistic utopia (which again is unobserved and unproven) did not have these injustices the injustices must have been constructed by society.
Those three core presuppositions and their resulting assumption of natural equality permeates liberal thought no mater if it's a work from three hundred years ago or thirty minutes ago. I'd say they're as close to 'core tenets' as you can get.
What do you say to that definition?

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As for religion, the Carlylian sense of religion is a very useful one for a broad discussion. A mans religion is the totality of how he thinks things got here and what he's supposed to do about it, it's first his metaphysics and second his ethics derived from his metaphysical view. This nicely covers all varieties of religious practice without entertaining any nonsense about 'Buddhism isn't a religion' or anything like that. It gets to the meat of the type of ideas were talking about without being too bothered by the accouterments. Ultimately any rational actor will have their ethics informed by their metaphysics insofar as they understand either. But of course humans are probably not consistently rational actors, and a persons Carlylian faith may not match his spoken creed.
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Certain liberals may object that that their metaphysics is categorically different than the metaphysics of any given religion and so they shouldn't be called a religion, but if the shoe fits.
Even if you really hate calling liberalism a religion the fact is that it is a set of metaphysical assumptions, and it's a somewhat novel pell mell of said assumptions that is contradictory to any other religion on earth. So one answer to 'why is liberalism contradiction to all other idea sets' is simply that it's not compatible with any other idea sets. Christianity and Islam can kind of get on sometimes with both being based on classical theism. Shinto and Buddhism can kind of get along because a decent chunk of their principles are compatible and mutually influenced where they coexist. Something like Mongolian Tengri gets along well with a lot of other religions because it's pretty bare-bones in it's assumptions and what it does assume was pretty agreeable in one way or another to everyone from Russia to China. Buddhists still did an ethnoreligous genocide against them under the Ming but that's more on the Ming than the Mongols.
But the whole 'everyone is equal and we will have world peace and harmony if we abolish society' thing is not compatible with anyone, anywhere.
It's the same problems as tolerance. If you have any principles you cannot tolerate that which directly opposes your principles. So a functionally tolerant society has clear lines of 'this is what you can't do' and then everything else is fine. But tolerance per se is intolerant of everything, including itself. Tolerance cannot be it's own first moral principe. The notion that everyone is equal is an absolutely intolerant ideology, the notion of anarchy being a utopia allows for no other systems of order. Liberalism in power cannot tolerate any religion or ideology and tolerates only what it has completely subjugated. And that's subjugated in a way that other religions sometimes also demand, but most other religions, most other systems of metaphysics, do have logical room for tolerance, while liberalism does not.
So reason #1 is that liberalism doesn't have the room to tolerate religious competition.
Reason #2 is that religion is always part of the social order and, and in liberalism the social order is the thing that prevents us from having an anarchist/socialist/liberal utopia. On the same note religion always includes some expression of social hierarchy, and hierarchy is similarly anathema to the liberal religion. It does not matter that liberal society also creates a type of social order and hierarchy pointing that out just loops us back to problem #1.
Talking about your Marx quote, Marx was more introspective about humanity and religion than his liberal predecessors. Adam Smith and such just pegged religion as a means to control the masses. Noting that religion generally gave the masses pain relief and comfort was a step up. But reason #3 is by and large the fact that liberal thinkers don't spend a lot of time thinking about why social systems exist or what practical alternatives would be before they tear things down in reaction. Marx did think a lot more than Smith, but Gramsci really brought a lot to the table on the subject, and he's probably worth the read if you're interested in the subject from either the liberal or perrenialist view. Of particular note is when he talks about how religion affects how people think about thinking contrasting Doyles Sherlock Holmes with Chestertons Father Brown. But you'd also get affirmation that 'Socialism is a religion' from him as well, so it's not at all just that I'm a prerrenialist that I frame it that way. But Gramsci in power, if such a thing were to have happened, probably wouldn't have had religious purges like other liberal nations had. And he probably would have preformed better overall for other reasons as well. So on that note I think the thesis of your rant is pretty smart.
_____
Above I confined myself to giving critical reasons liberalism was anti-religious based on liberal theory. I'd like to offer a fourth from a perrenialist perspective if you don't mind.
As a quick outline in this perspective there are three major sources of social power and social order. The family and military are one, they gain power by blood, both biological links and violence. Religion and philosophy is another, they have power through ideas and wit. And finally there is industry and commerce, they have power through production and distribution. The hereditary monarchy, the theocracy, and the republic. They represent three aspects of society that check and balance each other in a healthy society. Liberalism is strictly industrial/commercial in terms of it's power base, and so actively works to suppress the social power and influence of family and religion. Everyone has to have soldiers and thinkers as well as money, and when liberalism needs the first two it typically just buys them. Where you see a liberal revolution I usually see a coup by some mix of foreign and international financial interests. Malcontents are the cheapest pawns you can buy and media ownership allows you to amplify that small group into a facsimile of popular opinion. Unemployable upper class gits are happy to get paid to prattle on about the working class that finds them insufferable. And the factory owners and financiers promoting all this don't give a damn if they wind up being mayor Pennybags of capitalist town or general secretary Pennybags of communist town, they have a controlling interest over the people either way.
The kinds of 'contradictions' and 'gotchas' reactionaries like to point out are all kind of obvious when you look at it this way. Why are 'for the working class' revolutionaries always so out of touch with the actual working class? Why do they usually wind up massacring the proletarian they're supposedly there to help? And if they're obviously not supported 'by the people' where do they come from and where do they get their resources to wage a 'revolution' from?
It's not even really any specific or particular money-power group, the players change all the time. But it's money-power as a social force trying to extend it's reach to dominate all aspects of society. And yes this applies to both capitalist liberalism and socialist liberalism, as socialism functions as a state-centralized corporation anyway.
Money power itself is a good thing, but it needs the other types of social power to keep it in check.

We still remain in this tri-partite fight for power: liberals, conservatives, socialists. In their many shades. How do you see religion being pulled and used in the middle of it in the future of "the west"?
Are old traumas and dogmas still guiding politicians?

Those there are not discrete forces that are fighting each other so much as a more or less singular force fighting the general population. I mean, they do squabble over the loot a bit, but they're the same set of people and they'll share with each other before they let off the masses.
It's hard to deny that fundamentalist Islam has a lot of potential to rise. There's a non zero chance that some shred of Christianity will arise to counter what's happening too. Other major world religion players probably have some chance as well. New players are probably not hitting the scene right now although new factions of either of those two religions could appear and make waves.
Liberalism appears to have become a dead religion already, it could still limp along for a long time, but I don't think there are all that many 'true believers' in equality in anyone under 40. Liberalism pretty much just has institutional control and old people. It's like how the Grecian polytheistic religion was kind of dead by the time of Plato but it's institutions stuck around long after that. It doesn't take more than a few sharp questions for people to reveal they don't really believe in the democracy/equality/tolerance dogmas, the same isn't true if you talk to Christians about the virgin birth or Muslims about Islam. Belief in liberalism is cynical and pragmatic in the west nowdays. Yes old people really do believe it but that isn't very important in the long run. Yes there is always cynical and pragmatic belief in whatever the dominant religion is, but something has really fallen off with liberalism in the last twenty years and it has at least one foot in the grave.
Since liberalism kills its own people it loses when it wins. It's not the first religion to do this and it won't be the last.
Assume politicians are acting pragmatically in their own self-interest. In democracy their self-interest is very often 'loot while I'm here and fly away when I'm done'.

@Valka D'Ur
Religion has always been a divisive force setting one group against another, period.

See, the two liberal assumptions in play here is that people are not naturally divided, and that ideas are not worth dividing over.
Per Maistre ""Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists". Early religious sites, in Mesopotamia at least, exist as a neutral ground for hammering out terms of truce and peace. You know the whole 'You may not shed blood on Holy Ground' thing? It's old. Old Hobbes is right that the state of nature is 'War of all against all', not some peaceful utopia. Religion serves as a secondary power to keep 'might makes right' in check.
But people do actually have to share ideas and beliefs for this to work. If people do not share at least some beliefs, if they don't have religious common ground, then it's 'war of all against all'. Differing religions is an expression of ideological division, and so people who were going to fight anyway might as well throw 'different religion' on the heap of reasons too. Even so 'Religion' isn't usually on the top of 'reasons a war happened' even in the so-called religious wars.

It hasn't been enough to unite one church against another (or whatever other place of worship).

The miracle is that such large and varied groups of people ever united in the first place. Personally I'm rather happy we don't have one world ideology towering over everyone. And still I do believe some ideas are worth fighting over.

 

[Plotinus]

I honestly don't think that's an accurate description of "liberalism", and it suffers from the same issue dogging the OP's: a lack of examples. Certainly some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century people we might broadly call "liberals" believed in a pre-civilisation utopia, but who believes in that today? Is it more associated with liberalism than with other political viewpoints? I'd have said that "liberals", if the word means anything, are people who (among other things) believe in the power for good of civilisation and the state, and who seek to use that power to improve society. If there are people who believe that civilisation is negative and want to get back to some imagined purer earlier state, they sound closer to libertarians. To say that (e.g.) the Liberal Democrats here in the UK, or the FDP in Germany, want to achieve their aims by abolishing society is obviously not true. Or if these aren't the "liberals" you're talking about, who are?

And again, you claim that "liberalism" is fundamentally opposed to religion, but that doesn't take into account the existence of religious liberalism, as I said before. You say that liberalism involves "a set of metaphysical assumptions" that are opposed to religion, but you haven't listed any, and I'm not convinced that "liberalism" involves any metaphysical assumptions at all.

If liberalism and religion are so opposed, how do you explain people like Locke, Gladstone, Strauss, and the rest, or for that matter Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama, or indeed David Jenkins or Rowan Williams? Are you going to say that they're not really liberals, or that they're not really religious, or that their views are incoherent in ways that they don't realise?

 

[Snowygerry]

I don't believe equality is a central tenet of liberalism either, the early liberals wanted to rid themselves of the restrictions imposed by the church and the existing government, that were "infring(ing on) their ancient customs and privileges".

Mostly they reacted against the feudal system and the Catholic church that supported it, they wanted to be free to elect their own "Prince", not necessarily govern as equals.

They invoked God often in their writings, they just rebuked the Popes of Rome, and the heridetary rulers that were supported by them, in practice the King of Spain.

This is the text of the original declaration of independence, dated 1581, translated in English.

Plakkaat van Verlatinghe 1581 july 26 < Before 1600 < Documents < American History From Revolution To Reconstruction and beyond

Nothing screams anti-religionist or egalitarian there, although it does demand the prince treats his subjects equaly they are still his subjects, not his equals.

As it is apparent to all that a prince is constituted by God to be ruler of a people, to defend them from oppression and violence as the shepherd his sheep; and whereas God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects (without which he could be no prince), to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them. And when he does not behave thus, but, on the contrary, oppresses them, seeking opportunities to infringe their ancient customs and privileges, exacting from them slavish compliance, then he is no longer a prince, but a tyrant, and the subjects are to consider him in no other view. (...)

 

[Grey9]

I honestly don't think that's an accurate description of "liberalism", and it suffers from the same issue dogging the OP's: a lack of examples.

Contrarily too many direct examples drags down the flow of reasoning in a discussion. The OP gave a good overview of direct examples and did a very good job obliquely demonstrating he had many more examples in his head and has done his reading more than his post lets on. For example the odds are pretty high he's read Durgin and he has certainly read some pretty decent overview histories of the things he's talking about if not more in depth, and yet the OP does not merely ape any particular source (that I know of) and is writing his original ideas derived from that study. It's a very good post, even where I disagree with it or could nitpick some things.

Similarly I gave an overview of examples from early liberalism to present day to spare people the absolutely tedious list of important liberal philosophers that held some variation of those metaphysical assumptions.

Certainly some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century people we might broadly call "liberals" believed in a pre-civilisation utopia, but who believes in that today?

Remember that 'Coming of Age in Samoa' I referenced? It was taught as fact throughout the liberal branch of academia in at least the entire anglosphere though the 60s and 70s, and was still taught in the 80s and 90s decades after it was discredited. Why was it taught so much, even after it was discredited? Because it is a central part of the overall liberal worldview. Boomer and Generation X liberals were absolutely taught that a state of pre-civilization utopia was not only real, but achievable if only we tear down the various hierarchies and morals of western civilization. This book and this larger idea it expressed is a substantial part of the driving force of what is called the sexual revolution and has had a tremendous impact on the liberal-power dominated west of today.

So who believes this today? Old liberals and a smattering fanatical liberals. Why don't more people who identify as liberals believe it? Because liberalism as an ideology is dying.

Yes I can make a laundry list of 'anarchist utopia' or 'pre/post civilization utopia' liberals from Marx to Frazer to Rand and yes these are all very different types of liberals in nuance, that's why this is one thing that is so important in understanding the liberal worldview because it is common across all branches.

Is it more associated with liberalism than with other political viewpoints?

Yes. The normal view that we can see from France to Japan and from Sumeria to the British Empire is that Civilization comes to hold back the darkness and chaos of a hostile and wild natural world. And no these peoples ain't actually that antagonistic to nature, but they share some variation of the idea that social constructs are good things designed to protect people from a much worse state of natural chaos.

Now, the idea of original innocence is very common, but normally it's something internal that is ruining it. Sin for Christians, desire for Buddhists, karma in Jainism, etc etc... It's something people do to themselves by their own choices and the solution is self improvement and virtue. Liberalism externalizes and collectivizes that and places the 'loss of innocence' on society as a whole, and to my knowledge it's the first philosophy to do so. I mean, Zoroasterism externalizes it to evil spirits but the effect of that is promoting individual virtue, just like the other religions. While liberalism has the same kind of blame but it's externalized into an offensive against society as a whole.

I'd have said that "liberals", if the word means anything, are people who (among other things) believe in the power for good of civilisation and the state, and who seek to use that power to improve society.

If you're defining it that pedantically the word doesn't mean anything. It's insanely childish to define yourself as 'good guy team' and expect it to mean anything. It actually belies a lack of empathy, a lack of ability to clearly create a theory of mind of others, to try to define yourself that way. Every major ideology is trying to do good for its society and improve it, no one can do anything without reasonable ways to determine and define what is good and what is improvement (and what is society, for that mater). Everyone else discussion starts with 'this is what I believe good is and why and this and how we can try to achieve it' while an astonishing amount of whats left of modern liberals do start with 'I'm the good guy' like reality was some pop-fiction hero story.

If there are people who believe that civilisation is negative and want to get back to some imagined purer earlier state, they sound closer to libertarians. To say that (e.g.) the Liberal Democrats here in the UK, or the FDP in Germany, want to achieve their aims by abolishing society is obviously not true. Or if these aren't the "liberals" you're talking about, who are?

It's not at all obvious that that isn't true. These parties have done substantial things to weaken the social fabric of their countries and undermine the social constructs that keep societies cohesive. And they do that in predictable ways as a direct result of liberal metaphysical assumptions. Homogeneity keeps societies on the same page and leads to more altruistic people, but the ideology of equality can't have that now can it? Patriarchy keeps family formation up and keeps families stable which is the cornerstone of social well being, but tabula rasua makes that unfair because both sexes should be essentially the same. We could go on but yes liberal political parties do very much dismantle their societies bit by bit when they're in power.

And again, you claim that "liberalism" is fundamentally opposed to religion, but that doesn't take into account the existence of religious liberalism, as I said before. You say that liberalism involves "a set of metaphysical assumptions" that are opposed to religion, but you haven't listed any, and I'm not convinced that "liberalism" involves any metaphysical assumptions at all.

No metaphysics means no rational basis for goodness. You're just calling liberals idiots who do random things for no reason if you're claiming they don't have metaphysical assumptions.

I listed the most common trifecta of natural utopia, blank slate, and ghost-in-the-machine.

These all play out boldly and predictably on the political scene. Lets look at the ghost-in-a-machine theory of soul for a minute. In ghost in a machine the ghost part is the 'real' person and the machine is the shell. Thus if a persons thinks they do not match their shell the logical thing to do is to try to modify the shell. This is why liberals stances on transgenderism are what they are (and this has come up before with liberalism). Contrast that with Aristotles theory of mind from De Anima: the substance of the soul is integrated with the physical matter of the body, in this paradigm it's irrational to claim a soul has a wrong body, so to an Aristotelian the correct course of action if someone says their body and mind don't match is to correct their way of thinking.

Why EVERYONE does what they do flows from their metaphysical assumptions. These three things are absolutely liberal metaphysical assumptions because they clearly and cleanly explain the oddities of liberal behavior as rational outgrowths of their central faith. That and these are the things liberal philosophers say they believe, I mean, that's a good reason to say 'these are their metaphysical assumptions'.

If liberalism and religion are so opposed, how do you explain people like Locke, Gladstone, Strauss, and the rest, or for that matter Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama, or indeed David Jenkins or Rowan Williams? Are you going to say that they're not really liberals, or that they're not really religious, or that their views are incoherent in ways that they don't realise?

I more concisely said that liberalism is a religious point of view that tolerates no others. And everyone holds some incoherent views, it's a feature of humanity, not a bug, but it is better to keep it in check.
You did read the bit about Carlylian religiosity right? The creed and the actual religion don't have to match.
Locke's separation of church and state alone puts him out of orthodox Christian political philosophy, so liberalism is his religion. Deism->Humanism (depending on era) tends to be a metaphysical element of the liberal religion, but it's not consistent enough to mention with the others I talked about. Unitarianism and process theology and oddments like that crop up. Gladstone I don't know the details of. Strauss is basically a reactionary, I don't know if the name 'classical liberalism' confused you here but classical liberalism is quite strongly opposed to enlightenment liberalism and the whole libertarian-communist gammit that I and I think the OP mean when we say 'liberals'.
In American politics 'Democrat' doesn't firmly mean 'liberal', nor does 'Republican' mean 'conservative' for that mater. Certain subsets of liberals cluster in each party but it's not as clean cut as it is for those of us with more than two parties to vote for. Carter was not very liberal, and he was actively opposed by the Democratic parties liberal wing. He described himself as a 'conservative-liberal-centrist' which is nonsense but it's normal political nonsense. Obama is complicated in ways that are somewhat normal for a mulatto, liberalism is very much a white mans ideology so Obama has his white/left presenting side that his liberal base loves and he has a much more practical and perrenialist side connected to black america. To his credit he's shown at times that he's acutely aware that these worlds and ideas are incompatible, a recent example is his exasperation with his democratic party as he points out 'brothers aren't gonna come out and vote for a woman' more or less saying they handed Trump the election both times. The liberal faction of the democratic party has grown a lot between Carter and Obama and Obama has expressed quite a few times frustration that the liberal faction really doesn't understand the democratic party as a whole or its own voter base.
No idea who Jenkins is, dunno enough about Williams to say.
The point is liberalism prescribes some actions that are mutually exclusive against others, so functionally a person cannot be, for example, an ideological liberal and orthodox Christian. They can say they are, but when they have to choose between policies that conflict they have to choose one or another. Like, you can't have just price economic policies and liberal capitalism or liberal communism, they're policies that are not compatible.
Most saliently is the theory of soul itself, liberalism has a 'you are whatever you want to be no matter who you were born as' thing going while Christianity has an 'accept who you are and the reality of your own limitations and become godlike from there' ethos. These approaches to self are not comparable at all and things like the transgender topic just bring to bare a conflict that's been escalating for a very long time. Liberalism doesn't have a better time with other religions, I only bring up Christianity as much because it interacts more directly with liberalism than others do.

@Snowygerry
I don't believe equality is a central tenet of liberalism either, the early liberals wanted to rid themselves of the restrictions imposed by the church and the existing government, that were "infring(ing on) their ancient customs and privileges".​

I'd like to ask on what basis you annex that particular group into 'early liberals'? I do accept that both Marx and Pope Pius X made cases that some of the discontents of the 16th century (more the Anabaptists than the Dutch) were a sort of prototype of some elements of liberalism, communism, or modernism but they don't call them early liberals.

When I hear early liberals I expect talk about Montesquieu and Locke and Rousseau and the Deceleration of the Rights of Man and such things. They very much place equality as a central tenet and their ideas are very well reflected in the political and social landscape of today wherever liberalism has a slice of power. It's a few hundred years removed from the thing you're talking about.

 

[Snowygerry]

That is the enlightenment I think, to be honest the term “liberalism” was only first used in the 19th century iirc. Montesquieu would no doubt be surprised to be called a liberal, and Rousseau was a philosopher that only remotely touched on the issues relating to statecraft.

Now obviously everybody writes the history of something and we write the history of liberalism in the Low Countries here, and such we start with the pivotal period, that is the 80 years war, and the emancipation of the Flemish and Dutch cities, and to a lesser extend the local noblity, from their feudal overlords the Habsburgs.

Inno above (writing the history of Portugal I suppose) takes the wars following the French revolution as a starting point, which makes sense since the feudal system in the Iberian peninsula was pretty much intact when the French armies arrived there afaik.

Here that was not the case, the French revolutionairies overran the first Belgian Republic in fact, and interrupted our own revolution against the Habsburgs, although on the battlefield they faced (and defeated ) the armies of the absolute monarchs of Prussia and Austria.

If we want to be really thorough, we start several centuries earlier even, see below, but I figured the first written declaration of independence was a good starting point

https://historyofeconomicthought.mcmaster.ca/pirenne/BelgianDemocracy.pdf

Others will write the history of liberalism in Germany for example, and if you write from the US you may want to start in the colonial period, experiences vary.

The Lost History of Liberalism

The changing face of the liberal creed from the ancient world to today

press.princeton.edu

 

[Plotinus]

Thanks for such a detailed answer. I'll try to keep mine brief, partly because I don't want this to devolve into an argument about the relative merits or otherwise of the views in question. (That would belong in Off Topic, and this is World History!)

Contrarily too many direct examples drags down the flow of reasoning in a discussion. The OP gave a good overview of direct examples and did a very good job obliquely demonstrating he had many more examples in his head and has done his reading more than his post lets on. For example the odds are pretty high he's read Durgin and he has certainly read some pretty decent overview histories of the things he's talking about if not more in depth, and yet the OP does not merely ape any particular source (that I know of) and is writing his original ideas derived from that study. It's a very good post, even where I disagree with it or could nitpick some things.

Similarly I gave an overview of examples from early liberalism to present day to spare people the absolutely tedious list of important liberal philosophers that held some variation of those metaphysical assumptions.

I grant that too many examples is overwhelming, but you didn't give any at all, apart from people in the eighteenth century. I'm not asking for examples because I doubt your or the OP's expertise, I'm asking for them because I genuinely literally don't know who you're talking about, at least in the modern day. I'd call myself a "liberal" in most things, and most of the people I know probably are as well, but I do not recognise most of the ideas you're talking about. I'm aware that the definition of "liberal" varies quite wildly from one country to another, so that may be part of it.

But I'm struck particularly by your suggestion that there's a long list of "important liberal philosophers" who hold the metaphysical claims you attribute to liberalism. The kind of dualism you're attributing to liberals is very much out of fashion in most philosophical circles today, at least as far as I'm aware. The only philosophers that I'm aware of today who defend that kind of dualism are Christians! (Property dualism is much more common, but that is something quite different.) So it would be helpful to have at least an abbreviated version of the list.

Remember that 'Coming of Age in Samoa' I referenced? It was taught as fact throughout the liberal branch of academia in at least the entire anglosphere though the 60s and 70s, and was still taught in the 80s and 90s decades after it was discredited. Why was it taught so much, even after it was discredited? Because it is a central part of the overall liberal worldview. Boomer and Generation X liberals were absolutely taught that a state of pre-civilization utopia was not only real, but achievable if only we tear down the various hierarchies and morals of western civilization. This book and this larger idea it expressed is a substantial part of the driving force of what is called the sexual revolution and has had a tremendous impact on the liberal-power dominated west of today.

Well I'm Generation X (just about) and I was never taught anything of this kind! Perhaps this was mostly in America? Mead was American, after all. I'm not sure, by the way, it is accurate to describe it as "discredited". Certainly it became very controversial after Freeman's attack on it in the early 1980s, but scholars are still debating it. Paul Shankman wrote a whole book (The Trashing of Margaret Mead) as recently as 2009 undermining Freeman's criticism of Mead, so we can observe, nicely, that even discreditation can later itself become discredited.

So who believes this today? Old liberals and a smattering fanatical liberals. Why don't more people who identify as liberals believe it? Because liberalism as an ideology is dying.

But who are these "old liberals"? Can you identify any politician, say, or cultural figure active today whom you would call a "liberal"? Again, this isn't meant as a challenge, just a request for clarification. (I'm puzzled by the claim that there are people who identify as liberals but who don't believe in what you've identified as liberal ideology - doesn't this just mean that "liberalism" is really broader than the school of thought that you're calling "liberalism"?)

The liberal faction of the democratic party has grown a lot between Carter and Obama and Obama has expressed quite a few times frustration that the liberal faction really doesn't understand the democratic party as a whole or its own voter base.

This doesn't seem to me to be consistent with the above-quoted section. If liberalism is dying out, how can it be true that the liberal faction of the Democratic party has grown? How can you talk about Obama - a two-time US presidential winner of recent years - presenting as a liberal in order to appeal to his base if that base consists only of a few eccentric extremists?

If you're defining it that pedantically the word doesn't mean anything. It's insanely childish to define yourself as 'good guy team' and expect it to mean anything. It actually belies a lack of empathy, a lack of ability to clearly create a theory of mind of others, to try to define yourself that way. Every major ideology is trying to do good for its society and improve it, no one can do anything without reasonable ways to determine and define what is good and what is improvement (and what is society, for that mater). Everyone else discussion starts with 'this is what I believe good is and why and this and how we can try to achieve it' while an astonishing amount of whats left of modern liberals do start with 'I'm the good guy' like reality was some pop-fiction hero story.

Pedantic? I? But perhaps I didn't express it clearly enough. I didn't mean to define "liberals" simply as people who want to do good. You're quite right that that is too simplistically broad. Rather, I meant that liberals are (as far as I can tell) people who mostly think that the state, and civilisation in general, is a good thing, or at least can be used for good. As opposed to your claim that they think that good is achieved only by getting rid of the state and civilisation.

It's not at all obvious that that isn't true. These parties have done substantial things to weaken the social fabric of their countries and undermine the social constructs that keep societies cohesive. And they do that in predictable ways as a direct result of liberal metaphysical assumptions. Homogeneity keeps societies on the same page and leads to more altruistic people, but the ideology of equality can't have that now can it? Patriarchy keeps family formation up and keeps families stable which is the cornerstone of social well being, but tabula rasua makes that unfair because both sexes should be essentially the same. We could go on but yes liberal political parties do very much dismantle their societies bit by bit when they're in power.

Well, I would disagree about the effects of these policies, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument. Let me ask explicitly: which of the following are you saying?

(1) Liberals pursue policies which, as a matter of fact, tend to destroy society.
(2) Liberals intend to destroy society.

What you said previously is (2), or something like it, but the examples you give here are (1). And clearly a person can pursue a policy that, unbeknownst to them, is detrimental to society. Perhaps they're just misguided. So again I'd ask: if you think that liberals consciously want to dismantle civilisation, what evidence is there that this is their actual goal, rather than merely an unlooked-for consequence of their misguided policies?

No metaphysics means no rational basis for goodness. You're just calling liberals idiots who do random things for no reason if you're claiming they don't have metaphysical assumptions.

I don't agree with that at all. I don't think that most ordinary people have any "metaphysics" at all, and I don't think that you need metaphysics to provide a rational basis for goodness - unless you're going to call the belief that there's a difference between right and wrong a "metaphysics", in which case you're using the word incredibly broadly. But this isn't really germaine to the topic.

I listed the most common trifecta of natural utopia, blank slate, and ghost-in-the-machine.

These all play out boldly and predictably on the political scene. Lets look at the ghost-in-a-machine theory of soul for a minute. In ghost in a machine the ghost part is the 'real' person and the machine is the shell. Thus if a persons thinks they do not match their shell the logical thing to do is to try to modify the shell. This is why liberals stances on transgenderism are what they are (and this has come up before with liberalism). Contrast that with Aristotles theory of mind from De Anima: the substance of the soul is integrated with the physical matter of the body, in this paradigm it's irrational to claim a soul has a wrong body, so to an Aristotelian the correct course of action if someone says their body and mind don't match is to correct their way of thinking.

Can you give some actual examples of modern-day "liberals" who explicitly endorse this dualistic conception of the self that you're attributing to them?

The reason I ask is that I wonder whether this is a case of the following kind of reasoning:

(1) Belief X entails belief Y.
(2) Person A believes X.
(3) Therefore, Person A believes Y.

It's an invalid argument, because even if (1) and (2) are true, you can't conclude (3), because you can't be certain that A is aware of (1). In the case of trans rights, I'm aware that some people argue that being pro-trans entails some kind of dualism about the human person. I'm afraid I'm not at all convinced by such arguments, which seem to me to be quite muddled and circular. But I won't get into that here, for the aforementioned reason that this isn't Off-Topic. The point I want to make is that even if it's true that being pro-trans rights logically entails dualism, you can't conclude just on that basis that pro-trans people are dualists, because perhaps they just haven't drawn that logical conclusion yet. (Perhaps they just don't understand it as well as you do.)

So it would be helpful if you could clarify this. Are you saying that liberals implicitly believe in dualism and we can infer this on the basis of their policies? Or are you saying that they explicitly endorse it? Because if it's the former, I think that's quite a weak argument for the reason just given. If it's the latter, then some examples of people actually saying it would be useful.

I more concisely said that liberalism is a religious point of view that tolerates no others. And everyone holds some incoherent views, it's a feature of humanity, not a bug, but it is better to keep it in check.
You did read the bit about Carlylian religiosity right? The creed and the actual religion don't have to match.
Locke's separation of church and state alone puts him out of orthodox Christian political philosophy, so liberalism is his religion. Deism->Humanism (depending on era) tends to be a metaphysical element of the liberal religion, but it's not consistent enough to mention with the others I talked about. Unitarianism and process theology and oddments like that crop up. Gladstone I don't know the details of. Strauss is basically a reactionary, I don't know if the name 'classical liberalism' confused you here but classical liberalism is quite strongly opposed to enlightenment liberalism and the whole libertarian-communist gammit that I and I think the OP mean when we say 'liberals'...

No idea who Jenkins is, dunno enough about Williams to say.

I find this quite illuminating. It sounds like most of the "liberals" you're familiar with are not Christians. So it's hardly surprising that you'd conclude that liberalism and Christianity are incompatible. But if you're going to talk about the relationship between these two things, it's surely a big oversight not to consider someone like Gladstone, who is both arguably the most successful and iconic classically liberal politician of all time and the archetypal Victorian pious Christian. Doesn't he represent a perfectly legitimate variety of liberalism? Perhaps not, but you surely need to say why not - you can't just ignore that entire tradition!

I'm not convinced by the dismissal of Locke. The mere fact that he separated church and state may put him outside then-standard Christian political philosophy, but that doesn't make him somehow unChristian. Plenty of Christians have held that church and state are distinct. If that's liberalism, then Tertullian was a liberal! More fundamentally, if Locke held a liberal view that was at odds with traditional Christianity, that doesn't mean "liberalism was his religion". To say that is to assume (1) that Christianity and liberalism are incompatible religions, and (2) that if someone appears to be both then their liberalism trumps their Christianity. But (1) is what you're meant to be demonstrating, so you can't assume it; and you haven't given any reasons to think (2). Why couldn't one just as legitimately say that Locke believed lots of Christian doctrines, so his religion was Christianity, despite his also holding some liberal views? To compare: Thomas Aquinas believed a number of things on the basis of Aristotelianism that were at odds with the orthodoxy of his day. Would one therefore say that "his religion was Aristotelianism" and he wasn't really a Christian? Well, Stephen Tempier seems to have thought so, but I doubt many church historians would.

Indeed Locke was, if anything, a counter-example to the views you attribute to liberals. You've claimed that dualism about the human person is a key doctrine of liberals. But in Locke's day, such dualism was the orthodoxy, and Locke got into theological trouble precisely because he claimed that, although dualism is true, it cannot be rationally proved. That's what Stillingfleet got so angry about and argued that Locke was effectively arguing for materialism. So on that score, Locke was less liberal (by your definition) than most people at the time.

The point is liberalism prescribes some actions that are mutually exclusive against others, so functionally a person cannot be, for example, an ideological liberal and orthodox Christian. They can say they are, but when they have to choose between policies that conflict they have to choose one or another. Like, you can't have just price economic policies and liberal capitalism or liberal communism, they're policies that are not compatible.
Most saliently is the theory of soul itself, liberalism has a 'you are whatever you want to be no matter who you were born as' thing going while Christianity has an 'accept who you are and the reality of your own limitations and become godlike from there' ethos. These approaches to self are not comparable at all and things like the transgender topic just bring to bare a conflict that's been escalating for a very long time. Liberalism doesn't have a better time with other religions, I only bring up Christianity as much because it interacts more directly with liberalism than others do.

I don't think this is true. Christianity is incredibly varied and always has been, much more so than people commonly think. "Christianity", per se, has no position on economics or the nature of the soul or the correct attitude to take towards one's physiology, because all the possible opinions on these and many other topics have been held, at some point, by Christians of one kind or another. Now you may well say that some of these positions are more authentically Christian than others. You may even be right. However, that is a theological claim, not a historical one, so it doesn't belong in this forum. The job of the historian of ideas, as I've said, is to determine what people do or did believe, not what they should believe.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Remember that 'Coming of Age in Samoa' I referenced? It was taught as fact throughout the liberal branch of academia in at least the entire anglosphere though the 60s and 70s

Not at all. Hippie culture of the 60s and 70s invoked going back to nature and a tribal life as a popular approach to life but that was never a part of academia nor did it capture the core population of American life. By the 80s, it was all go go business and make money.

 

[Grey9]

That is the enlightenment I think, to be honest the term “liberalism” was only first used in the 19th century iirc. Montesquieu would no doubt be surprised to be called a liberal, and Rousseau was a philosopher that only remotely touched on the issues relating to statecraft.

So this whole line of discussion is pretty interesting to me because we're working to define the bounds of 'what is liberalism' in a meaningful way and I do understand the perspective you're coming from.

Now, I want to give an alternate context for defining terms, and I would like you to tell me where you agree and disagree with it. For the word 'capitalism' the general usage today is something like 'market economics' + 'deregulation', and if you push a lot of pro-capitalist folks they'll very often fall back on the claim that capitalism is just economics as it always was.
But capitalism is not economics as it always was, it's a set of ideas that were contrary to established ideas about economics, and as far as Adam Smiths work goes it actively rejects the market theory of value, proposing labour theory of value or cost+labour theory of value or such. Capitalism rose up against a variety of economic systems that today get broadly called 'mercantilism' but functionally used some form of Just Price theory of economics. And Just Price is Publius Maximus 'Everything is worth what it's purchaser will pay for it' plus 'when not under duress'. So Just Price is also not just 'economics as it always was' but a certain set of ideas built on another set of ideas. And Capitalism isn't economics as it always was' but an active rejection of the ideas held in Just Price.
To say capitalism is just market economics is to destroy the distinct meaning of capitalism in history, and capitalists adopting the market theory of value undermined what capitalism was about in the first place. I would go so far as to opine that capitalism primarily exists as a buzzword today, it no longer cleanly points to any particular economic theory or even set of economic theories. Liberalism may well be in the same boat.
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I agree that it's a stretch to call Montesquieu a liberal. It's a stretch to call Locke 'the father of liberalism' as in practice he advocated for some very serfdom like social structures. I called them early liberals in the context that the later actual liberals very consistently call on specific parts of their ideas as liberal ideas. In the same way when you invoke lowlands independence movements as being in some way related to liberalism I certainly acknowledge that notable liberals (like Marx) and anti-liberals (Like Pius X) noted similar things.
But 'the first written deceleration of independence' would probably go to some Mesopotamian tribe thousands of years ago. Wars of independence against foreign occupation and colonies declaring Independence either peacefully or violently is older than written history. What's called the American Revolution is a misnomer, King George III sat on the throne after it was done. If we're calling the general revolutionary spirit 'early liberalism' then yes the Americans had a lot of liberal influence in their war, but the end result was not really that liberal now was it? Nor was the result of the Dutch independence of Spain particularly liberal. But those last two sentences are not fair in that we're talking about 'what is liberalism', so I'll come more to the point, do you think the beliefs and values of those two groups of people are either agreeable to liberals today or directly and consequently leading to liberalism today?
And the actual decline of feudalism was well before liberalism and related more closely to urbanization, unless we're calling the revolutionary/enlightenment ideas 'liberalism' (which is reasonable to me) in which case liberalism really did end feudalism in France, Russia, China, and a few others. But in that case Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau are accurately called 'early liberals'. This definition fits with @innonimatu s usage and it definitely does include 'universal equality' as one of the new and defining ideas.
What meaningfully distinct ideas do you believe liberalism encompasses and how do you support that?

Thanks for such a detailed answer. I'll try to keep mine brief, partly because I don't want this to devolve into an argument about the relative merits or otherwise of the views in question. (That would belong in Off Topic, and this is World History!)

And you as well. But what is history if not reflection on the merits of peoples ideas and actions?
but you didn't give any at all, apart from people in the eighteenth century
I brook some umbrage at this, as only one person I mentioned was the eighteenth century.

but you didn't give any at all, apart from people in the eighteenth century.

I brook some umbrage at this, as only one of my initial references was from that era.

but I do not recognise most of the ideas you're talking about

Would you expect yourself too? I don't generally expect Christians to recognize the ideas around Hypostatic Union and the far reaching sociopolitical consequences both of declaring the idea itself and the moral theory that comes from it. This is not a knock at you, for most people ideology and religion are 'team colors' which their not really interested in the particulars of. But you're not forthcoming with a meaningfully distinct definition of the term, which at this point indicates you don't have one, now do you? Isn't it more a team colours for you than a values system?

Replace soul with consciousness and you'll not have trouble finding the dualism I'm talking about. In any case it is probably the least-distinct of the ideas.

nicely, that even discreditation can later itself become discredited.

I feel I've entrapped you a bit here: the argument was about if anyone actually believed in the 'uncivilized utopia' and the fact that Meads work is still being defended and propped up proves that yes, they do.

But who are these "old liberals"?

They're people who believe that the type of society described in "Coming of Age" can exist stably in reality and that it desirable.
From the way you're taking it kind of indicates that you, personally, are quite of the people I'm talking about. To the point: Do you believe the type of society described in that book is or ever was real? Even if you personally say no you've very clearly acknowledged you do in fact know who I'm talking about and they are real people today.

if you think that liberals consciously want to dismantle civilisation, what evidence is there that this is their actual goal, rather than merely an unlooked-for consequence of their misguided policies?

The stated ends of both the arch-communist Marx and arch-capitalist Smith is to have a post-government utopia. Society involves hierarchies and social roles and government which are intrinsically illiberal.

To define liberalism meaningfully you have to to have an idea of 'freedom from what?', and 'freedom from social mores and demands' and 'freedom from want' are the normal answers from liberals. And there is a tension between them because societiy provides for needs and makes demands of people. So yes every liberal from the libertarian to the communist are intentionally and consciously trying to dismantle society while at the same time increase social support networks (libertarians beleive dismantling government social support is the best way to provide for social support, so eh).

Every ideology has tensions between it's various goals and trade offs, so liberalism wanting 'big government but also no government' or 'a society that provides for all and demands nothing' isn't outrageous or a condemnation of that system per se.

The unlooked-for consequence is that dismantling certain elements of society has harmful consequences for real people. Liberals do not intend to harm people when they dismantle society. Is that fair?

If liberalism is dying out, how can it be true that the liberal faction of the Democratic party has grown?

They have accumulated institutional power. They made a point to occupy institutional power in the last century when they did have more true believers, they can probably continue to run on it with fewer and fewer true believers for a few decades to come.

It's not at all unusual for an ideology to be 'dead' in term of 'very few people believe in it' long before it dissapears from the public scene.

in which case you're using the word incredibly broadly.

I usually use it in the Aristotelian sense. Ones first ideas, ones epistemology, ones ideas about actions and their consequences (wisdom), and ones ideas about God.

No one can claim any knowledge without at least an implicit idea about epistemology. Humans lack perfect knowledge so they are obliged to operate on a variety of primary assumptions about things. Wisdom is 'how do actions and consequences relate', so you have to have ideas about what wisdom is to be a rational actor. And you need all those things (and a theology or lack thereof) to even start defining what 'good' is much less start talking about how to achieve it.

I agree people generally don't think about these things, but 'An unexamined life is not worth living' and all that. Even if you didn't know I was using the Aristotelian idea of metaphysics I did define Carlylian religion quite clearly, and I think you can see that absolutely everyone has to have a religion of that sort to be a rational actor.

Are you saying that liberals implicitly believe in dualism and we can infer this on the basis of their policies?

Rather I'm saying liberals implicitly believe in dualism and we can infer this on the basis of their policies. They act on this belief no mater if they acknowledge it or not, and you can reasonably predict their actions by playing out the logical consequences of that belief.

It means twenty years ago when people thought transgenderism would never be an issue in the west I would be rolling my eyes saying 'yes of course this issue will come here as long as liberalism is in power' or some such thing.

Liberals themselves generally did not predict this at that point in time. But if you read their literature and follow their logic then it was easy to predict that given enough liberal power, it would be an issue. Heck, Cleese predicted it ages before I was around. Cleese is arguably pretty liberal but he followed the logic and found the same conclusions.

like Gladstone, who is both arguably the most successful and iconic classically liberal politician of all time and the archetypal Victorian pious Christian.

Classical liberal as in Strauss?

So it's hardly surprising that you'd conclude that liberalism and Christianity are incompatible.

'Because their major writers have fundamentally opposed assumptions about reality' isn't reason enough?

that if someone appears to be both then their liberalism trumps their Christianity

As a point of order I don't assume exactly that. I have Catholic liberal cousins whos Catholicism absolutely trumps their liberalism over and over to the point that they have next to nothing in common with their liberal parties ideas or policies. But 'team colors' you know?

What's the Christian saying 'a man cannot serve two masters'?

I'm not convinced by the dismissal of Locke.

Fair points. Tretullian is a weirdo and elsewhere I've had long long discussions about if some of his Catholic works are actually from his Montanist era. Church and state are distinct entities with distinct and separate functions, to be sure. To say they have to be separated formally is a radical change to the sociopolitical order. Aquinas didn't suggest such types of changes, and access to Aristotle wasn't as novel to his time as people today seem to assume. Access to Aristotles works was more limited in the late classical period and Platonic ideas were generally dominant, but Aristotle was engaged with and his views were used from the get go.

The job of the historian of ideas, as I've said, is to determine what people do or did believe, not what they should believe.

When acting as a historian have to accurately categorize discriminate between different idea sets. There's a sort of fallacy where someone asserts because variations within a set exist meaningful distinctions between different sets ought to be downplayed. For example there is a lot of genetic variation within any given ethnicity, possibly more within an ethnicity than between others. But you can still very easily see if people are of very different ethnicity by genetics by understanding the ranges we're talking about.

There absolutely is a discernible range of Christian economic ideas, ideas about soul, and ideas about ones self. And there is a discernible range of liberal ideas about those things.

Can you define liberalism in a meaningfully distinct way that does not reduce to 'team good guy' and actively excludes these core ideas of universal equality and an idyllic ungoverned state of humanity?
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@Birdjaguar Not at all.

If you're replying to the idea that 'Coming of Age' was taught as fact, yes it was absolutely taught as fact and apparently is still being defended as fact today.

Being taught as a fact in acedemia is being part of acedemia.

If you're referencing the larger civilization impact: I agree it was never popular. Liberalism has never been a popular movement anywhere, that's why it has to kill the commoners off every time it takes over. The core population of America (or anywhere else) is not, was not, and never will be the same as liberal elite culture. But as part of institutional capture liberals do occupy more positions of influence and power in their societies than they have as popular. I don't disagree that the ideas I'm talking about never captured the core of American life, they only captured the legal system and eventually the media.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I listed the most common trifecta of natural utopia, blank slate, and ghost-in-the-machine.

Thank you for your reply above. I am pretty sure that what you wrote and what I quote ^^^ is just wrong. As a boomer I have lived through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and so on for many decades. Your ideas on what liberals are and what they believe do not match the reality of US politics. If you want to just dwell in the foggy miasma of unhealthful philosophy, do so, but that has little to do with actual experience of living breathing people.

What is a US liberal? Some key characteristics are:

• Change is good and should be used to improve many peoples lives
• The pace of that change is less important
• Bad policies and practices of the past should be undone
• Government can and should be an agent for those change
• People are fundamentally good
• More freedom is generally better than less

Over the past 80 years real world events have influenced the application of these ideas:

• Genetics has replaced any thoughts of a blank slate
• Globalization of trade and travel is erasing racism and cultural biases
• More local ideas are becoming global
• Air and water pollution and its clean up (or not)
• Earth from space

There is no blank slate, coming utopia or ghost in the machine.

Capitalism

For the word 'capitalism' the general usage today is something like 'market economics' + 'deregulation', and if you push a lot of pro-capitalist folks they'll very often fall back on the claim that capitalism is just economics as it always was.
But capitalism is not economics as it always was, it's a set of ideas that were contrary to established ideas about economics, and as far as Adam Smiths work goes it actively rejects the market theory of value, proposing labour theory of value or cost+labour theory of value or such.

Capitalism as we know it today had its start in 1602 when

Dutch East India Company, was a chartered trading company and one of the first joint-stock companies in the world.[3][4] Established on 20 March 1602[5] by the States General of the Netherlands amalgamating existing companies, it was granted a 21-year monopoly to carry out trade activities in Asia.[6] Shares in the company could be purchased by any citizen of the United Provinces (Dutch Republic) and subsequently bought and sold in open-air secondary markets (one of which became the Amsterdam Stock Exchange).

Public ownership of company shares is the fundamental aspect of capitalism, even today. That led to maximizing share value which has become more important than most other financial goals of public or now even many privately held companies. Public companies do all kinds of things, some of which are unsavory, in order to maximize share value.

 

[Snowygerry]

If we're calling the general revolutionary spirit 'early liberalism' then yes the Americans had a lot of liberal influence in their war, but the end result was not really that liberal now was it? Nor was the result of the Dutch independence of Spain particularly liberal.

Idk about the US - but the Dutch Republic was definitely liberal yes, compared to anything else that existed at the time.

They were not anti-religious though, many were Calvinists or even Catholic, the freedom of religion in the Republics attracted also Jews, and refugees from elsewhere.

And they were far from egalitairian.

do you think the beliefs and values of those two groups of people are either agreeable to liberals today or directly and consequently leading to liberalism today ?

Obviously yes, certainly the second - though not directly, a lot water would pass under the bridge before my ancestors could establish the current liberal-democratic nation state of Belgium as we know it today.

All of this is well studied, even in English, like here for example :

The United States of Belgium. The Story of the Revolution That Shaped Belgianness - the low countries

Jane Judge’s book provides a profound analysis of the rich sources surrounding the events that shaped the Belgian identity.

www.the-low-countries.com