The trouble with liberalism is the trouble with all heresies—it has no idea that it is a heresy. It believes that it developed sui generis, without parents, as a sudden insight of an enlightened mind which finally decided to be rational, see all men as equal, abhor slavery, recognize democracy as the ideal form of government, posit the nature of man as a self-interested actor, relegate religion to the sphere of private belief, and otherwise constitute the world of open elections and iPad sales
that we know and love today. In fact, liberalism is an interpretation of Scripture, the sum of many heretical commentaries on the Bible which were extremely popular between the 16th and the 19th centuries, and which have now become normative. To live as a “modern” is simply to live out this set of commentaries without citing them. Unlike the Medieval or the Patristic commentary traditions, where orthodox and heterodox thinkers alike clearly set out to provide a gloss on a particular passage of Scripture or an attack on a particularly onerous theology, liberalism blossoms within a literary tradition of long-windedness. As Jacques Ellul put it, a “characteristic of this scientific literature is that it attempts to set down in one book the whole realm of knowledge.”1 Within this tradition, no one bats an eye when Locke interprets the Tower of Babel as the establishment of a Commonwealth in his Treatises on Government; when Hobbes calls Moses an absolute sovereign in the parts of Leviathan that no one reads; when John Adams includes in his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson an argument disdaining the “total lack of political realism on the part of the [Hebrew] prophets.” It falls to the critic to pull out the scriptural exegesis from the humanistic attempt to say everything about everything; but without addressing the liberal fathers’ appeal to Scripture, we fail to understand them, and thus their progeny—ourselves. Most fundamentally, liberalism is…
