Thread by @William_E_Wolfe

Can a liberal democracy survive without a Christian foundation? This is perhaps the most pressing question of our present moment. Christians and conservatives alike need an answer.

Let's consider one man's answer to that in what's known as the "Böckenförde Paradox." /🧵/

Modernity argues that secularism can provide a moral foundation for society. This is a mirage.

At best, the reality is that secular liberal governments operate on “borrowed capital” from Christianity.

This was the thesis of the German philosopher Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde. /2

Böckenförde was brilliant Catholic academic, legal scholar, law professor, and eventually a judge.

Despite publishing a very risky article at a young age, he went on to have a long and distinguished career as a public intellectual. /3
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst-Wol…

He is best known for the “Böckenförde Paradox” or the “Dilemma," from his essay “The Origin of the State as a Process of Secularization."

In it he argues “The liberal secular state lives on premises that it cannot itself guarantee."

This sentence cause decades of debate. /4

He goes on: "That is the great gamble (wagnis) it has made, for the sake of liberty.”

What is the premise? What is this dilemma?

It's that the secular state only exists because of traditional/religious foundations that it in turn denies and works against. Hence, the paradox. /5

As Hollerich puts it: "The thesis is that the secular state was forced to cut itself loose from traditional means of legitimation, and from religious legitimation above all, for the sake of keeping the peace among its citizens..." /6
commonwealmagazine.org/b%C3%B6ckenf%C…

"whose views on ultimate matters could embrace a range of religious choices or no religion at all."

In other words, a secular state can only exist b/c of an initial Christian foundation, but it feels it must move to pluralism to endure.

Yet this move corrupts the foundation. /7

As @jamesrwoodtheo1 explains, “Liberal societies require a virtuous, and thus religious, citizenry, as many of the Founding Fathers recognized....But, as the Tocquevillians have long argued, liberal societies seem to undermine the very institutions that inculcate such virtue.” /8

The paradox presses on us today in crystal clear severity:

Secularism works against the necessary religious foundations of a free society.

Some prominent Christian/Baptist ethicists are willing to admit this: That the modern secular state can't be viewed as a neutral actor. /9

.@andrewtwalk has encouraged Christians "Don’t be fooled: Secularism is a form of theocracy. It’s very jealous for its own glory, commands our worship, & demands a set of ethics."

Walker’s point here actually goes beyond the Böckenförde Paradox, and helpfully so. /10

The Böckenförde Paradox is just an acknowledgment that secular states require religious assumptions to exist.

Walker rightly argues that secularism, particularly the progressive strain on the ascendancy in the US, functions as a religion itself, and a totalizing one at that. /11

Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus also warned about the same danger in his work "The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America," acknowledging that:

“A perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church.” /12

America is living out the unravelling of this paradox right now.

We were a Christian nation, but in spirit, not enshrined law.

Now, we are a secularizing nation trying to exorcise our Christian spirit and invite the demons of progress to inhabit our body politic instead. /13

As the Danube Institute puts it, this paradox begins

"almost every discussion when it comes to the moral foundations of liberal societies, in which an alleged 'state neutrality' tends to eliminate exactly those Christian foundations without which it cannot sustain itself." /14

Or, in the words of @joe_rigney:

“This is the inescapable question. It’s not whether a nation’s laws and social order will have a foundation, but which one.

Or, to put it another way, it’s not whether we’ll have a religious establishment, but which one.” /15

The Böckenförde Paradox is an essential framework for our moment: "The liberal secular state lives on premises that it cannot guarantee."

Put bluntly, the experiment in secular pluralism is like plucking a flower from it's soil and expecting it to live forever.

It won't. /16

We will either, collectively, find a way to return America to the consensus that we are one nation under God, and that our entire system of government was made for a moral and religious people....

Or we will continue to cannibalize ourselves politically and decline. /17

It's our choice. America is, right now, in the utter limits of the Paradox. The secular state, like a cut flower, cannot long survive.

Liberal societies live off of non-liberal sources that they neither generate nor sustain.

Bockenforde & Tocqueville saw this. Can we?

/end