Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…I’d like to start with something quite esoteric. Now, to prepare for you, I was reading the Calvinist theologian Rushdoony. And he argues the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD actually enabled liberty through its Christology. The notion that you embed in Christianity — salvation through grace, rather than through self-deification — and this ends up meaning the state is not the savior, and the church and state thus eventually end up as opposing principles. And this is a kind of foundation for later individual liberty. Now, as someone who’s both Catholic and who has an interest in conservative and liberty-related ideas, what is your take on that account? Sometimes I’m persuaded by a version of it, and sometimes I’m not. I think that there is a very natural story to tell about Western civilization, in which particular Christian ideas about the individual, the individual’s relationship to God, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and so on — that these sort of embedded ideas eventually develop into the constituent forms of modern liberal democracy. And, in that story, you could argue either that liberal democracy is a kind of happy development out of original Christian ideas and Christian thoughts, or that it is a kind of rebellious stepchild who has sort of taken over the house and banished the parent to the attic. And I guess those are views that I toggle back and forth between, depending on what seems like the state of Western liberalism at any particular moment. So, as a Catholic, you have a kind of intermediate view on how important works are for grace. So you would reject the views of Calvin and Luther . . .…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.