Dr. Paul Gottfried responds to Dr. Fleming and Matthew Roberts: Christian Heresies.

What is the relationship between Christianity and liberalism/the Enlightenment. Is liberalism a Christian heresy? Dr. Gottfried isn't the only one to advance this claim, but is Dr. Fleming merely saying that "the Enlightenment and Christianity are clean different things"? Or is it more nuanced than that? Are the two writers really that opposed?

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have never held the view that is ascribed to me. Two of my books, one on multiculturalism and the other on the post-Marxist Left, should make this clear. My writings present my perspective on the relation between Christianity and the Enlightenment and between both of these and our current neoconservative and multicultural afflictions. What I do not deny in my work is the obvious. There is, indeed, an egalitarian, universalist side to Christianity, unlike Judaism or Hinduism, and it can be found in the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. This remains the case, however much Fleming’s confession incorporated Roman hierarchical structures and distinctions and however much the Protestant Reformation became identified with European nationalist movements. Nor does the recognition of these anti-elitist elements signify the belief that Christianity is reducible to them. A specific divine revelation and the very unprogressive doctrine of Original Sin most emphatically distinguish Christianity from modern political dogmas, although here attention must be paid to the usability of the belief in inborn sinfulness in its transformed version as the doctrine of inherited social guilt. It is this transformed sense of individual and collective culpability that characterizes most current forms of Political Correctness.

But egalitarianism is not the same as universal love, which, in turn, is not the same as tolerance. How are human beings equal, according to Christianity? They are equal with respect to their nature, origin, and end, but not with respect to their endowments or the graces that they receive from God. Does Christianity require that rulers provide for equality of opportunity or condition, or of results? Not really. How much of the "egalitarianism" that is promoted by liberalism reducible to basic notions of justice and benevolence, as can be understood through the Natural Law? (And similarly, notions of hierarchy and distinction of respect?)

Dr. Gottfried writes:

But what seems to me undeniable is that some degree of connection does exist between Protestantism in its purest form and its current American liberal manifestations and between Christianity in general and the Enlightenment. Muslims or Jainists did not develop Enlightened or democratic ideas, except to the extent that they borrowed them from Western Christian cultures.

But what sort of egalitarianism is being borrowed, and from what source? Is egalitarianism just an empty slogan used by demogogic democrats to stir up the masses and give them support? How much of liberalism finds its source in debased republicanism and opposition to Christianity, rather than in debased teachings of Christianity?