Religious Liberty and the Whig Interpretation

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am by Peter Leithart

Religious Liberty and the Whig Interpretation 2017-09-07T00:03:08+06:00 Peter Leithart

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The following is a portion of a lecture at the NSA disputatio.

WHIGGISH HISTORY
The Whigs were of course a loose British political alliance, the predecessor of today’s Liberal Democrats. The term was first applied, interestingly, to the Scottish Covenanters who marched on Edinburgh in 1648, and then to the alliance that supported the Exclusion Bill during the late 1670s and early 1680s, which would have prevented the Catholic James II from becoming king following Charles II. Whigs were opposed to absolutism and advocated constitutional monarchy, and religiously tended to be Dissenters (non-Anglicans).

The Christian historian Herbert Butterfield coined the phrase “Whig interpretation of history” to describe a particular way of doing history and a particular story of the development of the British Constitutional order, especially as it developed after 1688. The Whig interpretation was evident in Blackstone, Henry Hallam’s history of the British constitution, but was expressed with particular clarity by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II (1848-55), one of the most popular books of its time, a bestseller who was topped only by Dickens and Walter Scott, translated into German, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, Hungarian, Russian, Bohemian and Persian.

Near the beginning of his history, Macaulay states his intentions for the volumes: “I shall relate how the new settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement, the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed incredible; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance; how Scotland, after ages of enmity, was at length united to England, not merely by legal bonds, but by indissoluble ties of interest and affection; how, in America, the British colonies rapidly became far mightier and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro had added to the dominions of Charles the Fifth; how in Asia, British adventurers founded an empire not less splendid and more durable than that of Alexander . . . . (T)he history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.”

This is clearly history in a triumphalist mode, history told by the victors who look back and see everything in the past gradually and smoothly leading toward the present order of things by a natural law of progress. More specifically, the Whig interpretation of British history was a triumphalism of freedom, as the constitutional history of Britain between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries was a story of increasing freedom and order and humanitarian concern. The world of the past was always aiming at the triumph of constitutional monarchy (or, in our time, liberal democracy), but past ages never fully achieved this ideal order until the present. Macaulay was deeply involved in the abolition of slavery, and this could serve as one of the key pieces of evidence of the moral and intellectual improvement of English life. Whig historians say, Every day, in every way, we are getting better and better.

Butterfield was critical of the Whig interpretation on historiographical grounds. Because progress is treated as a natural law, a historian tends to think that recording a succession of events offers a “line of causation.” The Whig interpretation is also selective (as is all historical study), but selective of those events that are related to the present in some direct manner. Instead of attempting to understand figures of the past in their own context, the Whig historian uses the present to judge the actions of historical figures. Historical figures who oppose what the historian sees as the advancement of freedom, humanitarianism, or whatever, are the villains of history; those who support this progress are heroes.

In Butterfield’s own words: “It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present; and though there may be a sense in which this is unobjectionable if its implications are carefully considered, and there may be a sense in which it is inescapable, it has often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present. Through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it; so that a handy rule of thumb exists by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis. On this system the historian is bound to construe his function as demanding him to be vigilant for likenesses between past and present, instead of being vigilant for unlikeness; so that he will find it easy to say that he has seen the present in the past, he will imagine that he has discovered a ‘root’ or an ‘anticipation’ of the twentieth century, when in reality he is in a world of different connotations altogether, and he has merely tumbled upon what could be shown to be a misleading analogy. Working upon the same system the whig historian can draw lines through certain events, some such line as that which leads through Martin Luther and a long succession of whigs to modern liberty; and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation. The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present – all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress, of which the Protestants and whigs have been the perennial allies while Catholics and tories have perpetually formed obstruction. A caricature of this result is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority – a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion. It is illustrated to perfection in the argument of a man denouncing Roman Catholicism at a street corner, who said: ‘When the Pope ruled England them was called the Dark Ages.’”

Butterfield offers an alternative set of assumptions in which the historian “comes to his labours conscious of the fact that he is trying to understand the past for the sake of the past, and though it is true that he can never entirely abstract himself from his own age, it is none the less certain that this consciousness of his purpose is very different one from that of the whig historian, who tells himself that he is studying the past for the sake of the present. Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own. It is not reached by assuming that our own age is the absolute to which Luther and Calvin and t
heir generation are only relative; it is only reached by fully accepting the fact that their generation was as valid as our generation, their issues as momentous as our issues and their day as full and vital to them as our day is to us. The twentieth century which has its own hairs to split may have little patience with Arius and Athanasius who burdened the world with a quarrel about a diphthong, but the historian has not achieved historical understanding, has not reached that kind of understanding in which the mind can find rest, until he has seen that that diphthong was bound to be the most urgent matter in the universe to those people. It is when the emphasis is laid in this way upon the historian’s attempt to understand the past that it becomes clear how much he is concerned to elucidate the unlikeness between past and present. Instead of being moved to indignation by something in the past which at first seems alien and perhaps even wicked to our own day, instead of leaving it in the outer darkness, he makes the effort to bring this thing into the context where it is natural, and he elucidates the matter by showing its relation to other things which we do understand.”

WHIGGISH LIBERTY
Butterfield specifically raises the issue of religious liberty at the end of this discussion: “Whereas the man who keeps his eye on the present tends to ask some such question as, How did religious liberty arise? while the whig historian by a subtle organization of his sympathies tends to read it as the question, To whom must we be grateful for our religious liberty? the historian who is engaged upon studying the sixteenth century at close hand is more likely to find himself asking why men in those days were so given to persecution. This is in a special sense the historian’s question for it is a question about the past rather than about the present, and in answering it the historian is on his own ground and he is making the kind of contribution which he is most fitted to make. It is this sense that he is always forgiving sins by the mere fact that he is finding out why they happened. The things which are most ourselves are the very object of his exposition. And until he has shown why men persecuted in the sixteenth century one may doubt whether he is competent to discuss the further question of how religious liberty has come down to the twentieth.”

The issue of religious liberty provides an excellent case in point of the limits of Whig history. Liberal democracy as known today is characterized not only by representation, elections, free expression, and so on, but by a particular organization of religion-and-politics. This is usually characterized, particularly by whiggishly inclined historians, as freedom of religion or the free expression of religion, but it could as easily, if more cynically, be described as an issue of the political management of religion. For a Whiggish historian of liberal democratic sensibilities, historical figures who worked to separate church and state, who promoted free expression of religion, are heroes skillfully riding the wave of historical progress, while those who oppose it are villains who want to stop the movements of the tides.

The actual history of religion-and-political in the modern world is much more complex. Management of religion, and particularly management of what was seen as religion’s politically disruptive potential, was central to the political practice and theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, when modern political order began to take form. And the goal of political life and political theory was to come up with ways of managing religion and religious fervor. We can look at this theoretically and practically, and in both cases, the story is not simply one of increasing religious freedom.

Theory first: In his history of the idea of toleration, the late A.J. Conyers summarizes the arguments of Robert P. Kraynak on the development of Locke’s thought on religious toleration. The puzzle is this: Locke’s early works are absolutist in a Hobbesian vein, invoking the supreme magistrate’s power to oversee religion for the good and peace of men. Of course, the later Locke became one of the most important apologists for religious toleration. Kraynak argued that Locke didn’t fundamentally change his perspective, but merely offered alternative tactics for the management of religion. Religious war and sectarian hostility was the main political problem for seventeenth century theorists, including Locke. Orthodoxy was contested, and in this pluralist situation there were two options.

In Conyers’s summary: “One option is ‘secular absolutism, in which the state establishes a religion but makes no claim it is the true religion.’ This was Hobbes’s solution, and it became in essence the option first taken by Locke. The other option is liberal toleration. In this case, religion is no less subordinated to the state: it is relegated to the sphere of private life and prevented from having meaningful political influence because ‘the disestablishment of religion deprives them [the priests] of all pretexts for interfering in politics.’ The change that students of Locke have noticed, and puzzled over, as they have compared the early writings to the later, is a change in strategy, as Kraynak sees it, and not a change in ‘purpose and principle.’”

Locke is not alone here. Conyers’s entire book is an effort to show that states and theorists have advanced the idea of toleration and mechanisms of toleration as a means of extending their own power. Establishing toleration weakens the power of any formerly established church, and reduces each of the churches to competitive sects who expend their energies trying to best each other rather than trying to control the state. Sects lack the power structure successfully to challenge state power. Conyers sees toleration as a strategy whose purpose is less to ensure the survival of minority groups and more to bring minority groups under the aegis of the central authority. As Conyers says, “One can easily see why this strategy is important in the effort to form large, centralized nation-states. The greater the population, and the more diverse, the greater is the threat to a nation’s unity. For the more diverse the peoples, the more they are bedeviled by their different ways of seeing, understanding, and desiring. The rise of the nation-state in modern times, with its central authority and its political ambitions to maintain and even extend rule, made the governance of diverse populations a critical necessity . . . . This means that minority groups within the nation-state must be brought under the central power and must not pose a danger to the overall political design . . . . To the extent that minorities maintain their claim to some kind of independent authority (such as happens in the church), measures must be taken to assure that it does not interfere with the machinery of government.” This might be done by establishing a single church, but more often in modern polities since the 19th century, it is “done by insisting that the state will take no part in religious disputes, suggesting that religion be restricted to the sphere of private choice.”

So, what appears to a Whig to be progress in religious liberty is a strategy for the extension and solidification of the state’s authority. In practice, too, we find that in many cases modern states have established what looks like a “pluralistic” and “free” religious situation through fairly brutal means. Liberals (ie, advocates of religious liberty and democracy) have often been virulently anti-Catholic, and were willing to advocate the deployment of state power to achieve what appeared to be liberal goals – specifically, limiting the power of the Catholic church. During the 1870s, for instance, Bismarck’s Germany embarked on a legislative program that aimed among othe
r things at secularizing education and resulted in a religiously pluralist Germany. This could look like progress in liberty and toleration, but the whole process was driven by anti-Catholic hatred and prejudice, and by fear about clerical dominance of the state. It was a move expanding state power under the cover of the liberal goal of freedom. In December 1871, the “pulpit law” that made it illegal for any preacher to criticize the Reich was overwhelmingly passed. The May Laws of 1873 required that candidates for ordination “be German citizens and graduates of state grammar schools and theology faculties at state universities; moreover they had to pass ‘cultural examinations’ in history, literature and philosophy, after they had completed their theological training, examinations designed to test patriotic commitment” (Michael Burleigh). The state was also given the right to veto church appointments, and Catholic bishops who ignored or circumvented the law were imprisoned. Some Catholics were expelled from Germany, and the fate of five Franciscan nuns was made famous by Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “The Wreck of the Deutchland,” which described the Catholics as “Loathed for a love men knew in them/ Banned by the land of their birth.”

In short, the events that led to our current situation of established religious pluralism is not a Whiggish progression of smoothly expanding liberty. It’s a story of struggle and conflict, with more complex causes and results than Whig history would suggest.

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