Previously:
Asking [about liberty of conscience] is fair and expected, since I have called for public institutions and culture to be Christian. But, in most cases, these questions arise from serious confusion about classical Protestant political theology and from ignorance on how Protestants justified civil action for true religion.1
Immediately at the outset of the chapter on liberty of conscience we are presented with an appeal to authority logical fallacy. What the fallible men of the reformation thought about liberty of conscience should only have an advisory influence when determining the morality of the subject. To order society solely based upon one’s interpretation of their opinions, instead of directly exegeting the infallible word of God (what amounts to a game of telephone with Scripture), is to abandon the very principle of Sola Scriptura that those men risked their lives for. We must start with Scripture.
It bears repeating that the reformation-era view that “civil magistrates protect and support true religion and suppress false religion”2 - a view that was far from uniform, even between the different Swiss city-states - has more in common with the medieval Roman Catholic tradition than the earliest Christian government. As stated above, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine, decreed that all citizens and subjects should be allowed to practice their varying religions in peace. This was the milieu in which one of the church’s most revered thinkers, Augustine of Hippo, was converted from Manichaeism to Christianity, seven decades later.
Wolfe next claims that those who, “for centuries”, have disagreed with his preferred conclusion on liberty of conscience have “improperly state[d] the question” and “asserted a non sequitur”3; could it instead be that they simply drew a different boundary around what constitutes immorally suppressing thought? This type of unnecessary strawmanning of his opponent has become characteristic of his rhetoric, and is a sign of the weakness of his own position. Regardless of how one spins it, suppressing “liberty of conscience” and/or “liberty of tongue and practice” is prosecuting thoughtcrime.
His subsection on internal religion can be best summed up as, “You can disagree with me about religion, but you better not say so,” which is an absolutely totalitarian position. A larger genetic logical fallacy than the one presented in this subsection cannot be made; take any body of thought, in of itself, other than religion and apply it to Wolfe’s statement that “… the civil government must ensure that truth is taught and that harmful false teaching is restrained…”.4 Is it the government’s responsibility to determine “truth” and utilize state-violence to prevent “harmful false teaching” on finance, medicine, art, literature, humanities, or foreign and domestic policy to name a few subjects? Wolfe’s premise requires the unprovable assumption that his definition of “Christian” is, in every aspect he wishes to enforce, the objectively correct and most beneficial one; otherwise his government would immediately be in violation of the Third Commandment. Furthermore, what constitutes harmful? What are the boundaries of such ideological restraint? Later in the chapter, Wolfe will answer these questions in a way that a majority of Western Christians would find abhorrent.
External religion includes professions of faith (vocal or written), ceremonies of worship, teaching, etc. These are outward and visible and can affect others, and so external religion belongs to the kind of things that external authorities can regulate.5
Often when people make this point, as shown earlier with William Wolfe6, the example given is of ritualistic human sacrifice, a crime that can be prosecuted as a Second Table violation of the Sixth Commandment, without outlawing public profession of the false religion itself. I believe this is because most Westerners, especially Americans, have accepted freedom of speech as non-negotiable. Most of those arguing for active suppression of false religion, consciously or not, know a direct case for First Table enforcement, such as the previous example of outlawing Hindu temples, would be outright rejected by the average Christian. Stephen Wolfe, to his credit, does not bother with such obfuscation and will soon make the argument that words are violence, demonstrating the horseshoe theory of postmodern “Wokeism” and Christian Nationalism.
Suppressing false religion is a means, not an end in itself. Thus, the question is not whether the suppression of external false religion by civil government is a good in itself or ought to be pursued for its own sake;7
Whether or not the ends of “true religion” is a “good in of itself” is a wholly separate question from whether suppressive means are morally justifiable. I am flabbergasted that Wolfe, with a straight face, would seemingly make such a blatant argument for ends justifying means; the brunt of his argument, in the next section, will be that utilizing suppressive means will produce the desired ends of “best outward conditions”. Later in the chapter such means will be expanded to include the execution of “arch-heretics” and proselytizers of false religion. As he nears the end of the explication of his theory, its totalitarian aspects become increasingly apparent.
Wolfe closes out this section with the statement that his is a “classical” view of liberty of conscience, in direct contradiction to the “modern” view. This is yet another genetic logical fallacy, in that “classical” is not inherently better than “modern”. Also, classical thought goes beyond 16th century Northern Europe; if classical is better, Constantine is more classical than Zwingli.
Next:
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 353-354.
Ibid., 354.
Ibid., 354-355.
Ibid., 356-357.
Ibid., 358.
Stephen Wolfe, 358.