Liberty: The God That Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama by Christopher A Ferrara, 642 pages
In Liberty, Christopher Ferrara takes aim at the "moderate" Enlightenment, as exemplified by Locke and the American Revolution, demonstrating that it was just as essentially inimical to classical and Christian conceptions of politics and virtue as its more extreme counterpart. "Liberty", it follows, is nothing but a euphemism for the revolt against Christendom. In his view, Social Contract theorists merely applied the Protestant notion of private judgement to the political sphere, and in so doing rejected every form of natural human affection in favor of a supposedly "rational" individual consent. For moderns, then, "Liberty is Power unrestrained by moral or theological limits", and necessary unity is maintained in good times by social conformity and general complacency, in bad times by naked force. Any sacrifice being worthwhile in defence of Liberty, the State inevitably asserts a level of control unthinkable in traditional "authoritarian" societies, while the "enemies of freedom" or "democracy" or "the people" are persecuted. The result is not the separation of Church and State but the subordination of churches to the State, so that political dogmas are made the judges of the creeds of the churches.
In an anti-intellectual climate where memories are short, the presence of Obama's name in the subtitle is likely to immediately raise suspicions that Ferrara, writing in 2012, was primarily concerned with the politics of the moment and that his primary target was the then-current president. The opposite is the case. Ferrara attempts to demonstrate that the Obama administration's assaults on religious liberty were not a deviation from but in continuity with the views of the Founders. Along the way, he demolishes the cherished libertarian myths of a pure Jeffersonian constitutionalism corrupted by Hamiltonian centralism and a small-government Confederacy overpowered by the big-government Union. Even more importantly, he warns against the pernicious theological effects of a social order which elevates the will of the people over the will of God.
Ferrara is an unabashed Catholic partisan, and he takes every opportunity to praise the Church and elevate her above merely human institutions. In a history where Catholicism is more visible in its rejection than in its affirmation, this often takes the form of digressions, some of which are fascinating but distract from his central arguments. This tendency is also likely to alienate non-Catholics who might otherwise be sympathetic to at least some of his contentions, although Ferrara would likely maintain that such a partial truth would represent a first step along the road to total error.
