Jason Braaten

I don't have a problem with people pushing back against Enlightenment liberalism. There are, I think, good reasons for doing so in several areas. What I do have a problem with, however, is attempts to selectively critique liberalism, or selectively use older sources, to defend some particular prejudice you have in the current cultural political climate, without clear methodological consistency. If you want to try to justify slavery or some other social hierarchical ordering by citing the Enlightenment privileging of "equality" (a term which must be defined because there are all sorts of different kinds of equality), then you must also get rid of all of the other political developments that arise from such a notion of equality. This would include gun rights and individual liberty over things like getting a vaccination or wearing a face mask when the government tells you to. The point is that the same people who constantly claim that they are just rejecting Enlightenment secularism to justify their racial animosity or whatever it might be also rely so heavily on the presuppositions of liberalism that they do not even recognize them. As I have pointed out several times, Luther preaches explicitly to his congregation that they are to submit to their authorities on every single earthly matter. According to Luther, the government can tell you what to do with your bodily life, and the magistrate owns your property. No one adopts this view today (ok, maybe some Marxists do, but in a different context). Of course, people who do this don't actually want to implement Luther's entire political and social theory (and even where they claim to, they don't). They just want to adopt whatever elements of it that they think are politically expedient for their own purposes. Complain about political liberalism all you want, but every Western person lives within it and, to some extent, adopts its ideas. A fish can deny the existence of the water it's swimming in, but it doesn't make the reality any less true. If you *really* just believe that slavery is fine and just because "slavery is in the Bible," then you must also be ok acknowledging that the government has the right to declare your own children to become slaves, right? Because spiritual equality is not the same as civic equality, the government could justly make your children slaves to spend the rest of their lives to some other family. The left hand realm has the ability to do this, right? It would only be the Enlightenment presuppositions of civic equality that could *possibly* make a parent object to such a scenario, right? Slavery isn't, as you say, inherently wrong, right? I have a hard time believing that those who preached sermons against government overreach for telling people to wear cloth over their face would be willing to surrender the individual freedom of their children for the sake of social order. (And since people will bring it up, I am not defending the mandates of the COVID era. I am merely using this as an example of ideological inconsistency.) It couldn't *possibly* be the case that there's something else going on here, and that it's just the enslavement of *Africans* that is being defended.