The United States was founded, as John Adams put it, “not as a Christian nation, but as a nation of Christians,” and a surprising number of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were trained ministers. I like to think of the Constitution as a libertarian document, but classical liberalism is an Enlightenment concept, and the Enlightenment is a direct descendent of the Christian world, where Judeo-Christian morality collided with Greek philosophy.
That is not to say the Constitution is only for Christians.
There is this strange thought today that the West is too Eurocentric, but, while certainly European countries have uniquely European cultures, healthy cultures borrow from one another, and the central tenet that undergirds classical liberalism—that each person should be free to live their lives however they wish provided they allow others to do the same—makes just as much sense outside the West as do tacos or pizza. Nor is the Judeo-Christian moral order European. It originally comes from the Middle East.
The founding generation did not only include Christians. It also included theists, rationalists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. Pennsylvania Quakers had little in common with the slaveholding Baptist planters of South Carolina, or the Anglican gentry of Virginia. Every colony, and every region within those colonies, carried its own customs, its own economic realities, and its own religious views. Culture varied from place to place.
What held these communities together was the revolutionary idea that people should be equal under the law, and should be free to live their lives as they see fit provided they allow others to do the same. That principle—ordered liberty—was the only thing strong enough to bind a people who otherwise had every reason to separate.
And they did separate. The original 13 colonies came together to fight for independence, but as 13 nations. The first attempt at post-British rule was not the Constitution we use today, but the Articles of Confederation of 1781, which created not something that resembled a nation of states so much as a collection of independent nations with a common enemy. This confederation looked more like NATO than a unified country, each nation with its own currency, its own trade policies, its own legislature, and most of its own powers.
Congress under the Articles could request money and coordinate defense, but it lacked the authority to tax, regulate, or raise a permanent army, leaving the confederation weak and vulnerable to both internal disorder and external threats. As the states began to bicker, there was fear that some of them might even go to war with one another, giving the 13 nations under the Confederation every reason to form “a more perfect Union.”
The Constitutional Convention defined a federal system with just enough central authority to secure liberty and commerce across borders, while preserving each states’ distinct character. This balance is what made the American experiment possible.
The founders knew slavery contradicted the claim that all men are created equal. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence not only specified this, but it blamed the King of England for the slave trade. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner when he wrote the Declaration, but he was also an abolitionist who wanted to tell the King, “We seem stuck with this abhorrent practice and it is all your fault.” (George III ironically completely agreed with Jefferson, and had nothing but the most haughty contempt for the enslavement of Africans.) What the founders lacked was the political will to end slavery at the national level. They compromised by leaving it to the states.
When we pretend the sins of the founding era were national sins rather than the sins of specific states, or when we pretend that our ancestors’ failure to live up to their own ideals renders those ideals guilty, we trade a more perfect union for what would become a very different union, in which the state no longer referees disputes, but instead manages the public. In that union, the right to live as one wants is gone.
Human beings have always wanted liberty for themselves. The desire to be free is universal; the willingness to extend that freedom to others is not. This is because we desire more than mere freedom; we desire the divine right of kings, and, in that respect, many modern Americans are no better than the slaveholders of two centuries ago. We just updated the chains.
If we are honest about human nature, it is not about freedom so much as control. We all want to be in control of ourselves, but we also want control over other people. Personal liberty is not a goal so much as a compromise in which we all say, “I will not try to control you, and in return you will not try to control me.” Slavery conflicts with that compromise.
Slavery was not an American invention either, nor even a Western one. It has been a near-constant part of human history, across every continent, up until the last 200 years. Nobody gave it a second thought when it was the norm, and a child born today, raised in ancient Rome would grow up a Roman. If placed in a wealthy household, this child would likely own slaves—mostly from places like what we now call Spain, France, or Britain. The word “slave” derives from “Slav,” and for centuries the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe supplied a large share of the human chattel in the Islamic world.
It is en vogue today to claim that it was the Islamic countries that first recognized the independence of the United States, but the truth is that Britain paid tribute to the Barbary nations of Northern Africa so that the Barbary pirates would leave British ships alone. When we became an independent nation, the Barbary pirates began attacking American ships and taking American crews into slavery. When we sent envoys to ask why, we were told that we were no longer covered by British tributes, and that the Qur’an demands that Muslims enslave anyone who is not Islamic unless they pay the jizyah. We were told to either pay tribute as a form of jizyah, or to watch our ships getting seized and their crews becoming slaves, for all time to come.
Thomas Jefferson responded by sending the United States Marine Corps, whose hymn starts with “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” based on Tripoli being one of the capitals of the Barbary states. Our very first war as an independent nation was against the Islamic states of North Africa, and it was fought against slavery.
What changed in the modern era was not that everyone around the world suddenly saw slavery as morally wrong. What changed was that one civilization—the West—was so moved by the words of Thomas Jefferson—that “all men are created equal”—to be moved to end slavery. Also, the Industrial Revolution—the age of steam and machinery—revealed that having inanimate objects do the most strenuous of work was much more profitable and efficient than keeping armies of strong, dangerous men in terrible conditions and with no reward for their labor. England, in particular, ended slavery. First England ended it throughout its empire, and then it used its vast empire to stomp out slavery around the world.
If we are honest about human nature, it is not about freedom so much as control. We all want to be in control of ourselves, but we also want control over other people.
Black slaves in the Americas were not the last people freed from bondage; they were among the first. Arab and Ottoman slave trading continued long after the trans-Atlantic trade ended, and it included both black Africans and white Europeans. The Barbary corsairs alone captured and enslaved an estimated 1 to 1.25 million Europeans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, raiding as far as Iceland and the coasts of Ireland. We treat slavery as something that separates us but we all have slaves in our ancestry. We differ only in how far back we have to go to find them.
Islam is a religion, but it is also a political and legal system, with the Qur’an as a kind of theocratic constitution. Its core texts contain explicit commands both to submit personally to Allah through Sharia, and to bring others under that submission, by persuasion where possible and by force where necessary.
A faith that asks its followers to wear a burka can coexist with liberty, but a faith that commands its followers to ensure that others wear the burka cannot coexist. The Islamic parallel to ordered liberty is to live according to Sharia, and to force others to do the same.
The Qur’an contains verses such as 9:29, which directs believers to fight those who have received the Scripture yet do not believe in the full truth of Islam “until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.” Historical practice codified this into the dhimmi system: non-Muslims could retain limited rights to life, property, and private worship in exchange for a special poll tax, restrictions on bearing arms, limits on building or repairing houses of worship, distinctive clothing or markings, and prohibitions against criticizing Islam.
The Barbary slave trade was part of a much larger system that persisted in parts of the Muslim world well into the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery in 1962—at the behest of the Kennedy administration. Mauritania banned it in 1961—then 1980 and 1981, then criminalized it in 2007, and again in 2015 (after the French banned it in 1901, and then again in 1905). Slavery is now making a comeback under Islam, with active slave trading everywhere ISIS has ruled, including Libya today.
As with all faiths, true believers are apt to read the religious doctrine and to act it out in their daily lives. A national leader who says “Don’t do that” is to the true adherents of Islam an apostate, the penalty for which is death. Groups like ISIS and al-Qa‘idah are not extreme because they move away from Islamic doctrine into something else, but because they are the most pure examples of Islam currently in practice.
In many Muslim-majority countries, apostasy remains punishable by death or imprisonment. Blasphemy laws are enforced. In Europe, many Muslims have formed no-go zones where the police only go in force, causing riots. Such behavior flows from a theology that treats the separation of mosque and state as a temporary concession rather than a permanent principle, and that views classical liberalism as a weakness to be exploited until conquest is possible.
Islam is a religion, but it is also a political and legal system, with the Qur’an as a kind of theocratic constitution. Its core texts contain explicit commands both to submit personally to Allah through Sharia, and to bring others under that submission, by persuasion where possible and by force where necessary.
Personal freedom is incompatible with a religion based on forced submission, and though millions and millions of Muslims worldwide practice Islam as a personal set of beliefs, they have to ignore much of their central doctrine to do so. They are also apostates to the true adherent. Apostasy being a crime punishable by death in Islam, this is a religion that bends toward—not away from—extremism.
Islam can, in fact, be more extreme in the West than in traditional Islamic lands. Saudi Arabia had to ban British Muslims from traveling to Saudi Arabia out of the fear that British Muslims would radicalize the Saudi people towards the Muslim Brotherhood, which believes the decadent, U.S.-aligned Saudi monarchy insufficiently Islamic.
Western societies cannot survive if they refuse to apply their own founding principles to Islam. A liberty framework that tolerates every private belief but draws the line at beliefs that require the coercion of others is not bigotry; it is the minimal condition of ordered freedom.
The problem the West has is not really Islam. It is that we cannot enforce the liberty principle on others if we will not enforce it on ourselves. The West increasingly treats liberty as permission granted by institutions rather than as the natural condition of the individual. People are still told they are free, but that freedom is narrowed by administrative rules, speech codes, licensing regimes, mandates, surveillance, and an expanding belief that government has a legitimate role in managing private choices for the sake of collective outcomes.
The old principle was that adults should be free to live as they choose so long as they do not violate the equal rights of others. The emerging principle is that people may live as they choose only so long as their choices conform to priorities established by political, bureaucratic, corporate, and cultural authorities, and a free people which does not believe in freedom is ripe for capture by any people with a coherent belief system. Islam has one; it might not be the one we want, but it does exist.
Restoring ordered liberty means rejecting the notion that any group’s religious or cultural demands entitle it to exemptions from the non-aggression rule. It also means treating jihadist ideology and Sharia supremacism as the civilizational threats they are, not as protected cultural expressions.
It also means recognizing that the same human impulse that once justified chattel slavery—the desire to control others—has found new language and new justifications in the contemporary world of the West. We must learn once again to reject those impulses in ourselves, so that we can also reject them in other people.
Technology has changed what modern societies look like, letting us live with material abundance and capabilities that would have seemed miraculous even 50 years ago. That abundance did not come from reducing liberty, or from pretending that all moral systems are the same. Gratitude for our relative abundance means defending the conditions that produced it. Those conditions include refusing to accommodate any ideology, religious or otherwise, that treats the right to live free as something to destroy.
The American founding was imperfect, as every founding is. Our central idea that each person should be free to live their life however they see fit as long as they let others do the same remains the only workable basis for a free and plural society, and Islam rejects ordered liberty at its root. A nation with religious freedom cannot ban Islam, but it can ban the things Islam does whenever those things violate the rights of others, and it can enforce those laws with zeal.
Mankind cannot change, but people can, both individually, and collectively. What we cannot do is to change generationally unless each subsequent generation teaches the one that comes after, and if the West is going to survive, it needs to give its children a crash-course on classical liberalism and ordered liberty today.
We were founded as a nation of Christians. We do not have to remain one, but we do have to keep the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the Western world. The alternative is tyranny. The question is whether that be a tyranny of the hijab, or one protecting us from it.
