Political Philosophy

“When trust fails, the virtuous circle turns vicious, and then the state has to find other ways to encourage or compel cooperation in order to function….

“He ought to know that he is playing with fire. When he demands we rechristianize the civil laws, he owes us an account of why our Christian ancestors were wrong for almost a thousand years as they built Western civilization on a natural law tradition that culminated, and logically must culminate, in political liberalism.” - Law & Liberty

“That’s coming from the Left. But prominent figures from the Right have been saying something similar. …Some conservatives are saying that our ideology of freedom has led to the destruction of the morality that is necessary for any society….Some conservative intellectuals have gone so far as to advocate a non-democratic authoritarian government.” - Gene Veith

“The second fallacy is that before the state takes charge of our morals, it must be morally superior to us, and there’s no evidence it is. Quite the contrary: the record shows that when government takes command of personal morality, both the people and the state end up less moral, not more.” - Timothy Sandefur

“…the questions of politics must focus on how much liberty a society can tolerate before it starts to break down. This is a very old debate, of course. But it’s not a conversation that many critics of ‘liberalism’ seem very interested in having.” - John Ehrett

“Why must Christians agree to disagree over jagged-line political issues? After explaining straight-line vs. jagged-line political issues, we give two reasons: (a) Christians must respect fellow Christians who have differently calibrated consciences on jagged-line issues, and (b) insisting that Christians agree on jagged-line issues misrepresents Christ to non-Christians.” - Themelios

“I know that for now I’ve lost the character argument. It’s well-established that a great number of white Evangelicals didn’t truly believe the words they wrote, endorsed, and argued in 1998 and for 18 years until the 2016 election.

“Regardless of his theocratic aspirations, Vermeule’s constitutional philosophy itself is nonsensical, given that it openly advocates the dissolution of the very constraints that characterize a constitutional order.

“…there is nothing in Professor Vermeule’s essay to suggest that it is the only reasonable approach to securing the common good. More importantly, there are sound reasons to believe that the United States, through its written Constitution, chose a different—also reasonable—approach” - Law & Liberty

“[Vermeule argues that] the Constitution’s most abstract language should be interpreted as affording the government almost entirely unconstrained power over its citizens, a sort of blank check for the exercise of political authority as the sovereign sees fit. But can that practice of interpretation be justified on theological grounds?” - John Ehrett