Liberalism, Equality, and Prudence

By John McGowan's definition, I am not a full liberal. He says of the founders:

“By calling the founders ‘liberal,’ I mean to direct attention to their suspicion of concentrated governmental power, their fierce attachment to liberty, and their emergent commitment to equality. Their ‘republicanism’ was both antidemocratic and not yet full liberalism to the extent that they resisted full social, political, and economic equality and that they focused on the ‘general welfare’ and not the prosperity of isolated individuals as government's responsibility.”

-John McGowan. American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.

The first reason to be suspicious of equality is prudentially conservative. Not all change is good, and plans can go awry in unexpected ways. But this is to say nothing insightful: all endeavors need both dreamers and planners. It is not difficult to combine this prudential conservatism with a commitment to the liberal democratic project: Amitai Etzioni's communitarianism seems to me to do just that, in that it cares deeply for the integrity both of communities and of the individuals that compose them.

But McGowan sees conservatism not as a tactical disagreement over how to safely move towards egalitarianism, but as an elevation of other ends over equality. And looking back over the conservative movement even in my lifetime, I would be foolish to deny that some very illiberal views have worn the guise of prudential conservatism while in the public square. Contemporary movement conservatism should always remember and be ashamed of its affinity for segregation; to their credit, major figures such as Buckley and Falwell were deeply repentant later in life.

But is inclusion perhaps a better paradigm than equality? There is a type of social conservatism espoused by Richard John Neuhaus which argues that the greatest achievements of liberalism involved expanding the circle of inclusion: these expansions usually did tend increase equality, but they are also capable of embracing those who are irreducible different: the mentally handicapped, the very old, the unborn. (Neuhaus's opponents might see the inclusion argument as a veil drawn over real oppression.)

And now I speak as a Christian: over the last two thousand years, Christians have slowly—sometimes very slowly—unfolded the logic of Genesis 1:27 (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”), Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you all one in Christ Jesus”), and other verses. Now, I am no theologian, but it seems to me that the American experiment showed the world new things about the imago dei and human equality. Of course, it was an notably flawed demonstration, considering the evils of slavery and the racism that has persisted far too long after it and the shamefully dishonest and violent treatment of so many groups of Native American, but we can be glad that the United States was at least in some ways pressed to deliver what it had promised.

So Christians can affirm equality, but only insofar as it reflects this expanding logic of the image of God stamped on human beings. We cannot make ourselves into something that we are not.

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This attempt at a longer series on a single theme is new to me. How do you think it is going so far?