“I’m afraid that some of our Democratic Party friends don’t have that vision like we do,” Romney said. “They look beyond the early days of America to the days of Europe of the past and think of big government and big brother and big spending and big taxation.” ~Iowa Independent

Well, the great Transformer needs to make up his mind–is Clinton harking back to the Europe of the past, or does she represent the hated French of the present?  Does he actually know anything about Europe? 

If the latter, this would be a French electorate that just elected a President who is in many respects to the left of Clinton, or at least barely to her right when it comes to the question of the state’s involvement in the economy.  If the former, then this means that Clinton is in favour of a much-reduced state that deferred to local councils and parlements and recognised all manner of “feudal” rights–that is the Europe of “the past” that existed “before days of early America” that Romney confuses so readily with the social democratic state of the 20th and 21st centuries.  The size of government under absolutist governments was amazingly small.  Taxation was on the whole lower than it has been in this country for eighty years.  Absolutist rulers could run a “big brother” operation only in their wildest dreams.  For Romney, though, anything European is fair game, no matter how stupid it makes him look to criticise it.

Undettered by anything resembling common sense, Romney continued:

Specifically, he attacked Clinton for seeking to move the nation toward what Romney called a “shared-responsibility, we’re-all-in it-together society.”

Apparently, Romney believes is a no-responsibility, dog-eat-dog society in which we owe nothing to anyone.  That is what you get from that particular “person of faith.”

The Economist reports on Ron Paul’s campaign.  There’s a sentence I never thought I would write.  The article offers a reasonably fair treatment of Dr. Paul and the campaign so far.

The article reminds those who did not already know that Dr. Paul represents Brazoria County, of which I was once briefly a resident for a couple years in my childhood.

Harry Potter, in fact, functions something like a Rorschach Blot: In countries around the world, it captures various national anxieties about contemporary culture and international affairs. French intellectuals, for example, debate whether or not Harry Potter indoctrinates youngsters into the orthodoxy of unfettered market capitalism [!]. Some Swedish commentators decry what they perceive as Harry Potter‘s Anglo-American vision of bourgeoisie conformity and its affirmation of class and gender inequality. In Turkey, we find a significant discussion of Harry Potter that pivots around issues of Turkish civilizational identity: whether Turkey is part of the West, the East, or a bridge between the two. A few Turkish writers have even asserted that controversies over Harry Potter in the United States demonstrate how Turks are more “Western” than Americans. And in Russia, a country whose concern over international status and prestige becomes more apparent each day, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta created a minor firestorm when it claimed that the film visage of Dobby the House-Elf was a deliberate insult to President Vladimir Putin [bold mine-DL]. ~Daniel Nexon

What is the strange obsession that people have with imputing grandiose cultural significance to the Harry Potter books and films or the popularity of Harry Potter?  Why must everyone constantly be looking for clues as to its political message, or seeking some lesson of political morality from a tale of battling wizards? 

If you look very closely, and really try to see the resemblance, I suppose you can see one, but then you would have to be extremely anxious to find negative portrayals of Putin in a story about adolescent wizards.  What does it say of your own view of the Russian President that you see a similarity between him and an imbecilic, droopy-eyed elf? 

Does it actually make any sense to be offended by this?  Granted, the character in question is a slave and not terribly bright, but he does come across as genuinely good and as someone interested in helping the hero with various (admittedly dimwitted) stunts.  To put it mildly, this is not how Putin’s critics view the man.  On the contrary, his critics concede that he is smart, shrewd and ruthless, but they also regard him as utterly villainous–more Draco than Dobby, to say the least.  For Putin to resemble a character who hates his Death-Eating master is actually a kind of compliment to Putin (the realisation of which will probably lead to a flurry of anti-Potter articles as subtle pro-Putin propaganda).  At the rate these ridiculously politicised readings of Potter are going, we will shortly hear from the Kremlin’s answer to Michael Gerson, Vladislav Surkov, who will assure us that the Order of the Phoenix is actually just a proxy for Boris Berezovsky’s seditious efforts against the Russian government and the depiction of the Ministry of Magic is designed to make Russians lose faith in their government as part of Britain’s grand conspiracy to subvert Russia from within by way of the Potter movie franchise.  Enough is enough.

Great countries don’t lose wars, and great countries aren’t hated with such venom from some around the world. ~Chuck Todd

Unless this is a tautology in which you have already defined great as “undefeated” and “universally loved,” this is not a true statement, and it is obviously not a true statement.  If the Iraq war troubles us because we fear we will cease to be “great,” then “we” have misunderstood what makes this country great and also what makes its government powerful. 

France was one of the greatest countries in the modern era and it lost several wars.  What this statement might imply is that “great countries” don’t lose wars to insurgents in no-account backwaters, but that also isn’t true–again, Britain and France stand out as powers that have suffered such reverses and managed to carry on as major powers.  The French even lost to Mexican rebels, for goodness’ sake.  Spain’s empire was dismembered from within by bands of rebels; the Spanish Monarchy, the superpower of its time, was brought to stalemate by the Dutch and humiliated by the English.  The presumably mightier People’s Republic of China was thrown back by the Vietnamese.  None of these powers necessarily ceased to be “great” in terms of political and military power, and when they eventually have ceased to be “great” there have usually been causes unrelated to defeats in wars. 

Hatred goes with greatness.  If you would not be hated, don’t seek hegemony and world power.  It matters less how you seek such power, as it is the seeking itself that conjures up resentment.  If Americans want to have the dominant nation in the world, be able to fight every war to a successful conclusion and not be hated by some sizeable number of people, then we as a people have lost all touch with reality.  Invincibility and domination would provoke hatred, and virtually universal good feeling is never going to be directed towards America so long as either one of the other two conditions applies.

The competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of the world increasingly lining up, as in the past, along ideological lines. ~Robert Kagan

Part of that “lining up” along ideological lines would include our support for the dictators of Ethiopia and Egypt, the kings of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar, the emirs of the UAE and Kuwait, and the military strongman in Pakistan, while states such as Iran ally themselves with the very demagogic but also quite democratic Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.  In many cases, you, the head of government, make use of the allies that are available to you.  You exploit regional divisions to your advantage, and you make the most out of ideological differences between your foe and your would-be ally while minimising them between yourself and your would-be ally. 

Thus we pretend that Yemen, for example, is not for all intents and purposes a one-party military government (which goes through the niceties of a parliament and elections, etc.), or rather we ignore that it is this, because Yemen may be a useful place for interdicting Red Sea traffic we want stopped or for countering jihadi recruiting in the hinterland.  Yemen was once a staunch ally of Saddam Hussein and Iraq, based on strategic ties to Baghdad going back decades to counterbalance the Saudis and, since 1962, because of an ideological affinity for anti-monarchist, anti-Islamist Arab nationalist republicanism.  Ideological alignment matched national interest in those days, until certain harsh economic realities imposed by the Saudi expulsion of their workers made them appreciate the finer points of cooperation.  Now the military ruler of Sana’a is on our side–for now. 

Imagining that our allies are somehow our ideological kindred spirits is very misleading, since it makes us assume that they will agree with courses of action with which they may want nothing to do.  This sort of confused thinking was probably part of the reason why there was so much whining about French non-participation in the invasion of Iraq.  It was inconceivable that they, democratic republic that they were, would not want to fight on our side!  Except that French national interests–and common sense–dictated otherwise.  

Kagan started out by making sense, stressing the conflicts and competition between nations, which should have led him to understand that these ideological lines will, must, be crossed when national interest requires it.

AMID ALL THE frenetic early maneuvering in the 2008 GOP presidential race, Republicans may be missing the elephant in the room: namely that the head of the herd is bleeding to death on the carpet. ~Ron Brownstein

As Yglesias has already cited:

Democrats lost the White House in 1952 and 1968 after Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson saw their approval ratings plummet below 50%. Likewise, in the era before polling, the opposition party won the White House when deeply embattled presidents left office after the elections of 1920 (Woodrow Wilson), 1896 (Grover Cleveland), 1860 (James Buchanan) and 1852 (Millard Fillmore). The White House also changed partisan control when weakened presidents stepped down in 1844 and 1884. Only in 1856 and 1876 did this pattern bend, when the parties of troubled presidents Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant held the White House upon their departure.

Those deeply embattled Presidents also usually had large domestic problems that had helped drive the their administrations into the ground: secession, depression and recession formed the backdrops to the ’60, ’96 and ’20 elections respectively.  The 1876 result is also misleading and gives Republicans more hope than they should have, since Tilden the Democrat would have been President, had it not been for the Reconstruction-ending bargain that gave the election to Hayes.  A future GOP nominee could, of course, promise to end the occupation of Iraq and imitate Hayes in that way, but unfortunately for him Iraq does not (as of yet) have any votes in the Electoral College, so it could not change the outcome in the same way.

The parallels with 1952 are certainly real and a little eerie, as I have discussed before, but where 2008 differs from all of these other albatross elections is that it is an entirely open (i.e., no incumbents on either side) election during wartime after a full two-term Presidency.  1952 was entirely open, but only because Truman knew he had no chance and therefore followed only about 1.75 terms of the Truman Presidency.  Obviously, Johnson bowed out after winning only one election in his own right.  1920 followed a two-term Presidency and was entirely open, but the war had already been concluded.  Presidents who oversee the beginnings of American involvement in major foreign wars are either personally re-elected or, if the war is going poorly, retire from politics prematurely.  If the President is re-elected, the war typically ends during the second term.  You do have the odd exception of FDR, but repetition of this is now unconstitutional.

In the case of the war in Iraq, Iran is China, and the first component of a strategy to win in Iraq is to establish a rapprochement with Iran. That is, a general settlement of differences. The Iranians have offered us such a settlement—including a compromise on the nuclear issue—on generous terms. But the Bush administration, true to its hubris, refused to consider it, going so far as to upbraid the Swiss for daring to forward the overture to us. It seems, however, to remain on the table.

The reason a strategy to win in Iraq must begin with a rapprochement with Iran is that any real Iraqi state is likely to be allied to Iran. Even the quisling al-Maliki government cowering in the Green Zone is close to Iran. A legitimate Iraqi government, which is virtually certain to be dominated by Iraq’s Shi’ites, will probably be much closer.

A restored Iraqi state that is allied with Iran will quickly roll up al-Qaeda and other non-state forces in Iraq, which is the victory we most require. But the world’s perception will still be that the United States was defeated because its main regional rival, Iran, will emerge much strengthened. If Iran and America are no longer enemies, that issue becomes moot. ~William Lind, The American Conservative

This is an excellent proposal.  I have been convinced for some time that rapprochement with Iran is the logical move and one of the most important things that Washington can do to contain the damage done by the war.  It may be possible to turn what is presently a disaster into a more balanced and respectable outcome.  Were he to pursue this course (and Mr. Lind is absolutely right that he will never do so), Mr. Bush might even score a late success in his otherwise rather bad foreign policy record.  In any case, this is the wise course that a future administration ought to take.  It remains to be seen whether the Washington establishment would rather suffer massive humiliation or engage a state with which we have no necessary and inevitable conflicts. 

But the proposition that our rights are a gift from God is neither un-conservative nor un-Christian; it is a commonplace observation in the context of American political history. ~Ramesh Ponnuru

Ponnuru’s first sentence is more debatable, since it depends very much upon what one means by conservatism and what one thinks Christianity teaches.  Of course, one actually looks high and low in vain in the Fathers for talk of anything resembling rights, which is a notion very closely attached to an entirely different conception of human nature and human society.  It is fair to say that the mythology of Whigs and liberals is antithetical to Christian revelation, and it teaches radically different things about human nature.  Christian orthodoxy holds that man was created without sin, but has since entered into corruption and his genuine freedom has since been limited and reduced.  In this sense, possessing our rightful, natural freedom is possible only for those who have been fully sanctified.  In the fallen world, liberty is not to be had without Christ, and the liberty in question has little, if anything, to do with the state or society as a whole. 

Only a very particular sort of conservatism accepts the Whig mythology not simply as part of a cultural tradition and therefore in some sense unavoidably “ours” and worthy of some respect.  This particular kind of conservatism would instead see the mythology as an actually true statement about the origin of government, the nature of man and the existence of rights.  The other sort of conservative–the one who is willing to show respect to the liberal tradition as one would show to elders, even if they are doddering and confused–has the more tenable position as a conservative.  The one who endorses Whig mythology has plenty of company in American history, but he is really just the latest version of a Whig.  For some people, that is quite all right and even a compliment.  I would stress, however, that it is not really part of conservatism to endorse this mythology.  Even some American conservatives who might have well preferred the label “Old Whig” did not actually embrace these fanciful stories as if they were true.  Many who bear the name of conservative may not want to go so far as to repudiate all these myths, but there is certainly a good case to be made that they have nothing to do with conservatism or orthodox Christianity.  

Ponnuru is correct about the last point–you can certainly find statements declaring fundamental rights to be from God scattered throughout American history.  This is a claim with a short but notable pedigree in Anglo-American thought.  Whig theorists regularly stated that rights came from God, just as they described popular sovereignty as His bestowal of His own sovereignty on the people.  Certain Presbyterian Covenanters saw natural parallels between their conception of proper church government and the appropriate ordering of the state.  Natural rights theorists often traced the origin of rights back to the Creator.  They also seem to have been most abundant in the wake of acts of treason and rebellion, since they were compelled to find some justification besides the legal (which they knew they didn’t have) for what they or their confreres had done.  There are some obvious objections: what rights that do exist arise from a constitutional and legal evolution that can actually be traced and explained, and they neither pre-exist human society nor do they inhere in all people, because there is no such thing as inherent rights.  You can be quite devoted to the legacy of 1688, for instance, and the constitutional inheritance it represents and still not believe any of this talk about rights and God.  When we talk about rights, in practice we mean legal and constitutional rights, rights that we possess as citizens and heirs of a particular constitutional tradition.  This makes the rights we have rather difficult to universalise and introduce to every corner of the globe, since they require an entire history and constitutional edifice that many peoples have lacked. 

Mythical rights whose origin is supposedly divine are far more flexible–they can be said to exist when there is no evidence for them, and their very intangibility and invisibility might seem to confirm their divine source.  They can be discerned in everyone, because they are actually just figments of fecund imaginations.  They can be declared “natural,” yet they are often entirely out of the ordinary in the present state of human existence.  While I understand the desire to link mythical “rights” to something transcendent and eternal, and thus have the ability to say that they are not subject to the accidents of history, I have to say that I don’t find it very convincing.

Ponnuru concludes:

Most of the time, however, when people say that our rights come from God what they are most concerned about affirming is that those rights are not created by human beings. That, it seems to me, is true, or else there are no human rights at all.

I understand this position quite well, since at one time I accepted it.  Of course, rights, taken as existing things that each person possesses inherently by nature, had to come from God, or else they do not really exist!  If human rights come from human nature, they must ultimately come from the Creator of that nature.  All of this hinges on the first part of that conditional, and should there not actually be any such things it is idle to debate where they come from. 

Without a divine origin, they would just be the product of this or that legal arrangement–which is, of course, exactly what they are.  This is a problem for those who are of the opinion that a thing constructed or arranged by men is not worthy of respect or admiration.  (Of course, it is entirely reasonable to say that those who conceived of and preserved constitutional liberties derived at least part of their understanding of justice and human dignity from the revealed religion in which they were raised, but that is to put such rights at a remove from any divine origin and make them frighteningly contingent on…people!)  Acknowledging this does not make a person less concerned to shore up those legal protections, nor does it mean that he is more inclined to run roughshod over constitutional liberties.  On the contrary, recognising the contingency, historical evolution and fragility of constitutional and legal rights seems crucial to defending them against those who, convinced that rights exist as elements of our natures, seem less disturbed by trampling on actual rights in the here and now (always in the name of defending liberty, of course, and bringing its fruits to other lands).  If enough bad, anti-constitutional, liberty-killing precedents are established, liberty will not regenerate and spring forth anew because God has willed it so–liberty can be crushed or voted away.  

In a way, I still accept the logic of the view outlined by Ponnuru, but I no longer think that rights as some sort of essential aspect of human nature exist.  If they existed, finding their origin in God might make some sense, but then I suppose I would also acknowledge that God was responsible for creating unicorns–if there were any unicorns.

It occurs to me that I should probably be doing something else right now other than blogging (a class syllabus doesn’t write itself), but my recent criticism of Bush’s liberation theology, which joined a chorus of negative responses from Ross, Rod, David Kuo, and Sullivan, has met with some skepticism from a blogger who issues the inevitable challenge:

There’s a common theme in all these, that because the religious is much more important than the political and worldly, that the political and worldly essentially doesn’t matter and that the religious shouldn’t influence the political and worldly. I strongly disagree with this.

Taken in isolation, the quotes from Ross, David Kuo and myself might seem to match this description, but this would be to misunderstand a great deal about how we think religion and politics should intersect.   

To apply this charge against Ross and myself would have to strike anyone familiar with our published statements on religion and politics as fairly bizarre.  Where Ross and I may differ on policy prescriptions or on the degree to which religion, more specifically a traditional Christianity (Catholicism for him, Orthodoxy for me), ought to influence politics, we are essentially on the same page in believing that religion not only should have an influence but that this influence is absolutely inevitable in any society that has a large number of religious people in it.  Particularly in a regime that is supposed to be democratic, religion and religious questions will play a role in political debate, and I think Ross and I would again be in agreement that they should probably play a larger role than they do and should do so in more explicitly religious language.  Besides the theological confusion in the idea, there are three things that bother me about Bush’s liberation theology.  First, it takes an ideology and then claims that this ideology has theological roots–you cannot disagree with the assumptions of the ideology, lest you declare yourself against the promises of God!  This is clever enough, but fairly transparent.  A second, related matter is that it takes what is otherwise unremarkable liberal revolutionary dogmatism and seeks to baptise it with invocations of the Deity.  Far from having “religion” influencing politics, it subordinates religion to the role of providing justification and being a sort of moral escape hatch when things go awry.  Mr. Bush’s use of this religious language, however sincere and deeply felt it might be, manages at once to enlist the name of God in a purely secular and, as it happens, rather bad cause, and to fulfill the worst stereotype about the political danger of religion in politics (as I have said, the Iraq war is a prime exhibit not of excessive religiosity in government, but rather a decided lack of it).  It has the ring of cynicism, even if it is not intended as cynical, while somehow also giving off the whiff of zealotry, though nothing could be further from the truth than to see in Mr. Bush the religious fanatic.  There may be some fanaticism there, but it is not actually religious.  Finally, nothing could be worse for a properly robust role for religion in public life than taking Mr. Bush’s badly disordered version of it as an expression of religious influence on politics.  This liberation theology, not unlike Marxist liberation theology before it, is a perfect example of how Christians twist and distort the Faith to suit the supposed political needs of the moment.   

My impression has been that Mr. Kuo does not believe that religion, specifically Christianity, should not influence politics, but that Christians should not make political success a greater priority than the calling of the Faith (as he believed was happening with conservative Christians, the modern GOP and the current administration).  You can dispute whether or not Mr. Kuo is right about this confusion of priorities in our own time (to my mind, he is more right than not), but you should not mistake this for a desire to separate religion and politics.  Rather, the goal for him would seem to be that Christians work as a leaven in the body politic, but that they do not allow themselves to be consumed by causes that are more partisan, narrow and limited and instead retain a more balanced sense of the lines between advancing and applying Christian witness in the realm of public policy and becoming servants of the political operation through which that witness is to be carried out.  It is not an appeal to quietism and indifference to political action as such–it is, as Mr. Kuo has said many times, a call for a “fast” from politics.

Then there is this business about whether God “cares” about the state of affairs on earth.  This sets things up nicely for the defenders of elements of the liberation theology, since it implies that anyone who would reject the gnostic and chiliastic deviations of liberation theology thinks that God is indifferent to the organisation of human society and human suffering.  This is not correct.  On the contrary, the charge might readily be made that Ross and I take the claim of a God Who “cares” about such things too far and that we think He “cares” about all manner of behaviour that has been deemed off limits to scrutiny by worshipers of privacy and money and, yes, liberty.  No one has ever exactly confused either one of us for great enthusiasts for a really severe application of the “wall of separation”!  That said, it does not mean that we are going to believe fairy tales that God wants everyone to become good liberal democrats, which is the ultimate conclusion of Mr. Bush’s sort of thinking. 

There is no evidence in Scripture or tradition that this is true.  No relevant religious authority teaches such a thing.  It is an odd view indeed that identifies the longings of fallen man with divine will.  Suppose, despite evidence to the contrary, that all men do long for political freedom–do Christians normally credit every desire of fallen humanity with such a high and noble origin as the Creator Himself?  Most people in different ways desire many things they ought not to desire, at least according to the teachings of Scripture, and they do this in defiance of God’s will–we do not attribute lusts of the heart or the pride of knowledge to some “heavenly plan.”  We recognise them as excesses and flaws.  It is at least possible that a desire for political liberty may contain the seeds of similar spiritual disorders.  Even if every man declared that he wanted political liberty, it is still conceivable that this desire derives not from inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but from another spirit entirely. 

There are circumstances in which faithful Christians can, indeed, must resist unjust, tyrannical government, as Christians are meant to defer to legitimate authority and not simply lawless power.  That is a vital distinction.  The Anglo-American idea of the right to rebel has certain medieval precedents and theological defenses.  Even so, this means that God wills that every society and government be well-ordered according to prudence, justice, charity, moderation.  To the extent that a liberal democratic government can realise these virtues or allows people to realise them, we can say that it does not stand in opposition to what God wills.  It might even be argued (though I would not necessarily argue this) that this is the regime best suited for cultivating such virtues.  Even so, it remains only one means, an instrument, to the true end that God wills, which is man’s perfection in the virtues and the cultivation of God’s likeness unto full sanctification.  However, in certain ways, such a regime can be antithetical to these virtues and stands in need of reform.  Declaring that a particular political order is ordained by God for the entire world opens the door to abuse at home (since questioning the assumptions and goals of the regime could then be taken as resistance to God’s will) and aggression abroad (since the faithful must not tolerate the thwarting of God’s will in the form of different political regimes).  As it happens, this is exactly what has issued forth from the administration for which this idea has been a motivating force. 

When Mr. Bush says that “freedom is God’s gift to mankind,” he isn’t simply praising God for a providential order in which such things as political liberty are possible (which has rather more decent precedents that do not involve Woodrow Wilson or The Battle Hymn of the Republic), but he is saying quite clearly that the development of political liberty is itself integral to God’s providential plan and that God wills that all of the world be brought into a certain political state.  Against this, there is the weight of at least 1,700-odd years of Christian theologians who rarely, if ever, ventured the view that there was any particular regime, political principle or political arrangement that was absolutely favoured by God (and in the last three hundred years, Catholics and Orthodox are still taught to believe that no single form of government has any special endorsement from on high, and that all legitimate government must be obeyed).  Those who gave it much thought routinely came down, of course, in favour of monarchy, and one could be as theologically libertarian (that is, a proponent of man’s free will) as one wished without reaching any similar conclusion that there should be guarantees against arbitrary government written into law.  The thing that may trouble any small-government Theonomists among us is the recognition that political liberty was a primarily secular accomplishment resulting from contestation between different centers of power; strong arguments can be made that it required a Christian culture for the right conceptions of person and human dignity to command broad acceptance, and that Christianity with its recognition of two kinds of authority made political liberty possible in a way that it was not in other religions, but that is a very different kind of argument. 

Within Christendom, early English and Dutch liberal ideas were aberrations and happened to coincide with what most of the Christian world would have then and still does regard as heresy.  European liberalism elsewhere largely came into existence in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church, not least because the liberals sought to attack and undermine the authority of the Catholic Church.  These are significant stumblingblocks for any belief in a liberation theology of the kind Mr. Bush espouses.  If God wills political liberation, this means two things.  First, it means that most centuries in the history of Christendom were almost entirely filled with Christians who did not know this part of the will of God and egregiously failed to obey Him (which conveniently elevates the modern liberal Christian to a much higher status in the divine economy–this is just a coincidence, I’m sure).  The other thing that it means is that God’s will was effectively frustrated for almost the entirety of human history, and it has only been in the last two to three hundred years that His plan has made any headway at all.  God is shown to be strangely diffident about His own supposed high purposes, or else most of His servants, including almost all of those whom Catholics and Orthodox today venerate as saints, were engaged in persistent rebellion against God’s will.  Both thoughts are impious and unacceptable.  Very simply, either Mr. Bush’s understanding of divine providence is correct and the broad sweep of Christian tradition has missed something vitally important about God’s will, or Mr. Bush is wrong and the tradition right. 

In the Orthodox world, of course, not only is there virtually no tradition of thinking as Mr. Bush does, but most instances where Orthodox theologians and philosophers have started speaking in terms of freedom have come after intense periods of post-1789 Westernisation.  It is in the very modernity and newness of such talk that distinguishes it from the overwhelming witness of Christian tradition.  Against the sweep of that tradition, the liberation theologians have on their side the Declaration of Independence and the occasional passage from Algernon Sydney.  How could it be that I remain convinced that liberation theology is bunk?