Jordan Peterson reminds us that civilizations work on life’s deepest problems for centuries. One of the greatest of those problems is what should be the nature of our government. All over the globe, from the time of Athens and Jerusalem through the Middle Ages and into modern times, issues of government and politics have been hashed out by politicians and philosophers, monarchs, despots, and revolutionaries. America has offered its own answer of government by the consent of the governed and recognition of the unalienable rights of each person.

The competing claims of the various faith communities even just within Christendom, cannot … co-opt the force of the secular government.

Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn recently engaged Pastor Kevin DeYoung in an extended dialogue about the role of covenant in the founding of America and its compelling vision of what good government should be. Their extended conversation, available online through Hillsdale, is a model of unpretentious and plain-spoken erudition. They know their topic deeply and they feel it deeply, so they engage the mind and the heart and the spirit. Their commitment to their enterprise invites the listener into deep consideration of this topic of pressing importance. In this age of rampant nihilism, they show where meaning lies and give an example of how to join in the centuries-old civilizational process of giving a working answer to the question of good governance.

Religion and government have been intertwined throughout human history. Rulers claimed divine right, or even that they were divine beings. Religions claimed a supreme mandate to rule people’s lives and take worldly authority into their hands. In modern times, in the West, the concept of religious freedom began to rise. America enshrines it in the First Amendment. Many revere it as the greatest and most important of human liberties, with good reason.

How did civilization come to this answer? After more than a century of the progressive educational project, the idea has become widespread that religion is opposed to freedom. It proposes an inverse relationship between the hold of religion on a civilization and its embrace of religious liberty. As Eric Nelson puts it:

We are told that the rise of [religious] toleration depended upon the advance of secularization … that only when religion had finally lost its grip on the European imagination could theorists begin to contemplate broad protection for nonconformist religious belief and practice. We are also told that toleration depended on, and emerged out of, the belief that church and state should remain fundamentally separate, neither encroaching on the prerogatives of the other.

Hillsdale College is among the leaders in correcting the cultural record on this topic. The premise of this conversation, as well as of Hillsdale and other institutions of similar inclination, is that religion itself proposes this answer to this major part of the great question of governance. This dialogue is a solid contribution to the counterrevolution against the leftist orthodoxy.

DeYoung spelled out what he believed to be the roots of freedom of religion in Biblical texts and in his own Reformed/Presbyterian tradition. A highlight of the discussion was when Arnn probed how the Reformed doctrine of predestination could be compatible with a system of law that champions personal liberty and accountability. The ensuing discussion was a model of respectful critical engagement that in itself puts to shame the intolerant and incurious Social Justice Fundamentalists who claim cultural hegemony.

DeYoung is a student of the Presbyterian influence on the American Founding. Accordingly, he looks to the church influences beginning in the 18th century, when prominent Presbyterians were major contributors to the American revolutionary cause. John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister, university president, and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, was the subject of DeYoung’s Ph.D. thesis. He knows this material intimately and it is clear that it is not just abstract knowledge, but soul gripping.

The core ideas that DeYoung proposed are Witherspoonian: since human knowledge is imperfect, we are not competent to judge other’s religious beliefs and thus must leave the realm of religion to the individual’s conscience; and religion is necessary to make a free political order possible. To quote Witherspoon on the latter point:

Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction … He is the best friend of American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.

This idea is inviting and generous. The promotion of true and undefiled religion is here not used as an excuse to suppress differing views. Witherspoon argued against any established church, even his own, and both DeYoung and Arnn cite sources common to their differing Christian approaches which ground this argument for religious freedom in biblical texts.

The implications of this invitation stretch further. Given that “true and undefiled faith” is indispensable to the project of political liberty; and given that the nature of what is pure and undefiled cannot be dictated by any human power; it therefore, follows that everyone dedicated to serving that which is highest, no matter their particular faith community, has a contribution to make to the project of governance.

So, here is a small start at that. More than a century before the Declaration of Independence, Britain fought its own civil war, in which the discussion about governance became increasingly confrontational. In the 1640s, Presbyterians in Scotland took a leading role in the fight against King Charles in his fight with Parliament. On gaining the upper hand, Presbyterians sought to supplant the Episcopal Anglicans as the established church of England. At the Westminster Assembly, that attempt was stymied largely by the scholarship and persuasive power of John Selden, whose knowledge of Common Law and Jewish law sources were unparalleled in his day. Despite a numerical advantage, the Assembly was unable to affirm the attempt to remove the episcopacy or even to affirm a divine right of its own to enforce judgments of heresy.

What was Jewish law doing here? No Jews had lived in England for centuries by this time. There is a story to tell here and it is essential to the story of religious freedom.

Selden was a scholarly critic of the claims for denominational doctrines to be divinely enforceable law. This was extremely significant in the struggle for religious liberty, as the claim of a law to have divine sanction puts it above the ability of humans to do anything other than to enforce it. Such indeed had been the way of the religious battles that had consumed Europe and were rending Britain then as well. Selden was among a number of influential thinkers who wanted to find an approach to law that could get past such warring and establish domestic and civilizational peace. And the path they found was not the progressive mode of bypassing religion, but of looking for God’s opinion on what good governance is in the Bible. And that took a long time to come around.

The problem, stated in very broad terms, was that Christian civilization had tended to leave law for the Empire to decide and turn its search for the highest somewhere else. Church thinkers often derided law as a rejected way to approach God. But everywhere, people live under laws and governments. Thus over the years law became either that of the late Roman Empire (and Justinian’s Code is a barren place to look for liberty) or canon law, the knowledge of which extended only to a very tiny elite.

But by the late sixteenth century and then into the seventeenth, Protestant European scholars begin turning to the Talmud and other rabbinic literature for insight into a highly developed tradition of divine law (having Catholic humanists like Reuchlin to thank for having introduced this study into the European universities) that had something to say about governance and religion. Starting with the Swiss scholar Erastus, they suddenly found Jewish law crucial for understanding the right relationship of the church to the secular sovereign. They found in it a well-developed and ancient system of law that understood itself as divine law. And spearheaded by Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius and then Selden, they focused on the Noahide law covenant.

The Noahide law as set forth in Jewish law tradition is divine law. Unlike the 613 laws given at Sinai, which focused on laws binding only the people of Israel, the seven Noahide laws bind all the children of Noah — humanity as a whole. Seventeenth century scholars drew conclusions from this to the political questions of the day. They alike concluded that there are only a few basic divine laws that are binding on all human societies. The competing particular claims of the various faith communities even just within Christendom, cannot play the trump card of jus divinum, and co-opt the force of the secular government. They may only make their claims and present their arguments to the secular power like anyone else.

Grotius and Selden were not advocating Judaism, but rather seeing in the Jewish law tradition what divine law looks like. They saw that toleration of other religions was a matter of law for the Jews: other nations were not expected or required to become Jews, but were asked to observe in common only a basic framework that establishes the civil order that is God’s intent, and blesses the authority of each nation to promulgate, enforce, and adjudicate the distinct legal order it feels best suits its own national life.

Thomas Hobbes read Grotius and Selden, and penetrated to the heart of the matter. Israel’s case is unique and is not to be misunderstood and so misapplied, for in the nation of Israel, God was the civil sovereign, a claim no other nation can make. Eric Nelson summarizes Hobbes’ conclusion:

Where God is the civil sovereign, a substantially greater number of religious matters will acquire civic significance. What follows, of course, is that very few religious matters will take on such significance when God is not the civil sovereign.

The argument, based on a sound understanding of the structure of Jewish law as transmitted by Grotius and Selden, was that humans are out of their place in trying to enforce religious law, for by confusing the nature of its legitimate authority, they will injure the workings of the civil state. This argument is one resumed and expanded later by John Locke, though in Locke, the connection to Jewish law scholarship is now at a double remove: through Hobbes, and Hobbes himself had leaned on the extraordinary rabbinic scholarship of Selden.

The grounding of religious freedom in its Western religious roots is a momentous event, one passed over by the progressive political culture, and overdue for correction. It is especially significant as well for taking seriously those Jewish threads of what many now call the Judeo-Christian tradition, which had not been seriously examined over the course of centuries save by isolated scholars. As people like Drs. Arnn and DeYoung continue to teach publicly a fuller and more authentic account of the relationship between America’s stand for freedom and its religious roots, may we look forward as well to the role of Jewish law as well being a part of the discussion.

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