POSITION · THE LIBERAL CORNER
Consent, self-ownership, and freedom as its own end
Liberal, in its first sense, names the view that the right to rule comes from the people and that government exists to protect what each person owns, starting with himself. In this sense, not the party sense, both American parties are liberal. We are not, because Scripture places authority in God, denies that a man owns himself, and gives freedom a purpose outside itself.
01
Where did it come from?
John Locke gave the answer its classic form in the Second Treatise of Government (1689). Political power, he wrote, is “that power, which every man having in the state of nature, has given up into the hands of the society” (§171), and its chief end is “the preservation of their property” (§124), by which he meant men’s “lives, liberties and estates” (§123). The Declaration of Independence grounded the “just powers” of government in “the consent of the governed.”
Every member of Congress, of either party, is bound by oath to support a Constitution ordained by “We the People” (Preamble, Art. VI). Ronald Reagan closed his presidency saying that “‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us,” and he called that belief “the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do.”
02
What truth has been twisted to produce it?
Locke did not set God aside. Men, he wrote, are “all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker … they are his property, whose workmanship they are” (§6). That much is Scripture: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; the world, and all that dwell in it” (Ps. 23:1 [24:1]). Twenty-one sections later Locke wrote that “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself” (§27). Read together, they say no man owns another because God owns every man. Liberalism keeps the second and drops the first.
Liberalism takes a true thing, that no man belongs to another because all belong to God, and turns it into a false one, that every man belongs to himself.
03
Where does it lead?
A man who belongs to himself can be ruled only by his consent or to stop him harming others. John Stuart Mill drew that line in On Liberty (1859): “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” and his “own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant” for power over him. In 1992 the Supreme Court went further: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey). All three justices who wrote that opinion were Republican appointees. Once each man defines his own existence, consent is the only line the law has left to hold.
04
Why we are not liberal
Authority does not come from the consent of the governed: “there is no power but of God” (Rom. 13:1). A people can recognize a ruler but cannot give him what it does not have. A man does not own himself: “ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). Freedom is not the end of politics. Scripture gives liberty to serve, “use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13), and calls the ruler “the minister of God to thee for good” (Rom. 13:4). Mill said a man’s own good cannot justify power over him. Paul said it is what power is for.
None of this excuses theft or tyranny, which Scripture condemned before Locke (3 Kgdms 20 [1 Kings 21]), and none of it licenses resistance. We submit to rulers for the Lord’s sake (1 Pet. 2:13), pray for them (1 Tim. 2:1–2), and speak God’s law to them.
Sources
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§6, 27, 123–124, 171.
Declaration of Independence (1776). Constitution of the United States (1787), Preamble; Art. VI.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ch. 1.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), joint opinion of O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ. Supreme Court of the United States, “Justices 1789 to Present.”
Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the Nation, 11 January 1989.
Published by Beyond Left and Right. The New Testament is quoted from the King James Version and the Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint (1844). Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com
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