Property Rights and Religious Liberty

by Larry P. Arnn, President, Hillsdale College,

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on October 16, 2015, in Omaha, Nebraska, at a Free Market Forum sponsored by Hillsdale College.

Many Christians, while they cherish religious liberty, seem to believe that property rights, and the commerce that arises from the establishment of property rights, are somehow un-Christian. At the same time, a lot of free marketers seem to think that all we need are property rights and the rest will take care of itself. Neither of these views is correct, and I will explain why with reference to both James Madison and Winston Churchill.

Many Christians, while they cherish religious liberty, seem to believe that property rights, and the commerce that arises from the establishment of property rights, are somehow un-Christian. At the same time, a lot of free marketers seem to think that all we need are property rights and the rest will take care of itself. Neither of these views is correct, and I will explain why with reference to both James Madison and Winston Churchill.

In writing my book on Winston Churchill, I spent a number of months reading about the founding of the Labour Party in Britain—Churchill detested the Labour Party from the beginning, so I was interested in its origin—and I found that Christians cooperated in its founding, and thus in the founding of British socialism. There were two strains of Christianity involved, one of them sounder than the other I think. The first was a strain that took its inspiration from Jesus’s insistence that we take care of the poor. The second strain—one that is much less sound in exegetical terms—held that since Jesus came down to earth, our task as Christians is to build a heaven on earth. Lots of Quakers in particular seem to have thought that. Although many socialists were atheists, many Christians took up with them for either or both of these reasons.

Today in America we can see as well that at the heart of the leftward movement in our government is a claim against property. The claim goes this way: the divisions among us are as deep as they are because of economic inequality, and if we do not address that inequality today, it will worsen tomorrow. Many well-meaning Christians think this way.

On the other side, recognizing that property is at the heart of the political argument we are having these days, are those who say that all that is needed is to protect property rights. Get money right and get property right, these people think, and leave it at that—leave morality and religion out of the political equation. But that way of thinking too is foolish.

The most formidable enemies of property rights are formidable precisely because they know better than to separate the issue of property rights from the issue of other freedoms, including freedom of conscience and religious liberty. Marx is clear-sighted about this. … he makes clear in the Communist Manifesto that overthrowing the age-old institution of property will involve as well “the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.” If private property is going to be abolished, everything will have to be abolished. Marriage and religion are two prominent examples in Marx’s writings.

George Bernard Shaw, for instance, wrote that “a married woman is a female slave chained to a male one; and a girl is a prisoner in the house and in the hands of her parents.”

There are obvious parallels in our own time and country. … “spread the wealth around”. President [Obama] has altered his position about the nature of marriage, and now the enforcement of a new understanding of gender identity is pressed upon us through powerful means, both legal and social. We at Hillsdale College, servants of an old mission that requires promotion of the Christian faith, wonder if it will remain legal for us to separate our student body into dormitories for men and women. Will we be compelled to join the swelling chorus that denies any connection between nature and sex, and that conjures up countless new so-called genders …

What is it about the family that stands in the way of the socialist project? … my family was not wealthy. But on the other hand, my dad went to college, and he loved to read books. He became a schoolteacher. So there was always someone around to read to me and encourage me to read. And there were always books around to read. That is a blessing, but it is not a blessing that everybody enjoys—and that is perceived as unfair. The president of France has proposed in that country that homework be outlawed, because it is unfair that some parents but not others help their kids with it. Along the same lines, the U.S. Secretary of Education recently said that there are so many broken homes in the inner city—broken families that are subsidized of course by government policy—that we are going to have to think about building dormitories in which to raise the children. Think what this means for the liberal state, if it commits itself to an engineering project to take over childrearing and make everything equal—to remake society on a scientific basis.

The British Fabians wrote about this extensively. They believed that if we could get competition out of society, society would become more productive. People’s talents would be liberated from the necessity of trying to outdo each other. That is the plan of the Fabians in Britain and of the Progressives in America. That is the reason the government of the United States grew to a multiple of its previous size over two generations.

Of the greatest statesmen in history, Churchill is the only one to witness this attempt to apply modern science to human affairs—an attempt that entails a massive increase in state power and is accompanied by the understanding that to make everything better, we are going to have to control everything about the human being. And for one thing that means replacing religion with science, which is why Marx excoriates religion as the opium of the people.

James Madison wrote an essay on property in 1792 in which he connects property rights to all human rights, including freedom of religion, speech, and the press. Madison defines property as “every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right, and which leaves to every one else the like advantage” (emphasis in original)—the italicized words distinguish the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence from the kind of rights proclaimed by socialism, such as the right to a guaranteed income or to free education, which by definition make claims on the property of others.

Madison continues:

In [one] sense, a man’s land, or merchandise, or money is called his property. In [another] sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.

Madison’s point rings in every corner of the American Revolution: give me liberty, and especially liberty of the mind, or give me death. And this liberty is inseparable from property rights. Thus Madison concludes: “In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”

Madison’s broad definition of property is based on the understanding of the integrated human being that I began with—the human being as consisting of a body and a soul. Think of the prime moral virtues, the first of which is courage … but as integrated beings they understand that there are things for which they must risk their lives. The second prime virtue is moderation, which is the correct disposition of the soul toward pleasure. Understood properly, then, to do away with the right to property would be to deprive us of the foundation upon which we exercise our humanity.

Churchill saw this with breathtaking clarity as a very young man.

Churchill saw corresponding dangers confronting humanity in peacetime, in the form of socialism. In the same way that men had transformed their ability to kill, they were transforming their ability to impose tyrannical rule. The proof came about for all to see in the two great tyrannies of the twentieth century, Nazism and Soviet communism. One thing he hated about them was their war on independent thought. Not even family dinners were uncontrolled, because the children were taught by the state to act as witnesses against their parents. Prayers and table talk were dangerous.

Tyranny is not stable, because human nature rejects it. What does it take to make tyranny live? The fifth book of Aristotle’s Politics teaches us that tyrants seek to wear down every excellence in society and to obstruct friendships, especially friendships among the best people, on the principle that if they degrade everyone then people will submit.

In 1931, the year before Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published, Churchill wrote an essay called “Fifty Years Hence,” in which he looked ahead to a time when man might attempt to carry out the whole cycle of human reproduction in a laboratory. Just this past April, in the Wall Street Journal, two Nobel Prize-winning biologists called for a moratorium on the alteration of germ-line cells … And once we do that, then the human being becomes an artifact of the human being. What would that mean? But here is Churchill in “Fifty Years Hence”: I read a book the other day which traced the history of mankind from the birth of the solar system to its extinction. There were fifteen or sixteen races of men, which in succession rose and fell over periods measured by tens of millions of years. In the end a race of being was evolved which had mastered nature. A state was created whose citizens lived as long as they chose, enjoyed pleasures and sympathies incomparably wider than our own, navigated the inter-planetary spaces, could recall the panorama of the past and foresee the future.

He is imagining a utopia created by science.

‘Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Whither are we going?’ No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well.

Knowing the horrors of modern war, Churchill hated and feared war all his life. Yet he made this speech to rally his cabinet, as he would rally the British nation, to war. Why? Because he was possessed of the knowledge of the nature of the human being … He fought for that belief. I think we are going to have to fight for it too.

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