This essay argues that deontological liberalism, the ethical foundation of the American Republic, rests on principles derived from Christian ethics, yet it can be coherently embraced without religious commitment. While contemporary debates often treat morality and politics as matters of ideological allegiance, preference, or utility, I contend that a reflective epistemic foundation—one in which moral truths exist independently of human opinion—is essential for any society that seeks to protect human dignity, individual rights, and the rule of law. I conclude by showing that committed atheists and humanists can operate from this ethical framework. Their moral reasoning, particularly in resisting authoritarianism and defending human dignity, illustrates a secular deontological liberalism grounded in the universal moral insights of Christian ethical thought, which prioritizes the inviolability of the individual and the limits of political power. Put another way, one need not be conservative nor Christian to embrace a valid moral ontology.
A little more than a year ago, on December 23, 2024, I published an essay, Rise of the Domestic Clerical Fascist and the Specter of Christian Nationalism, in which I argued that one of the rights government is compelled to defend is religious liberty, which necessarily requires freedom from religion as well as freedom of religion, since a person cannot be free to practice their faith (or no faith at all) if they are not free from the demands of the faith of others. This is why, I argued, Islam is incompatible with freedom: Muslims believe juridical and political authority comes from Allah and must be administered by religious clerics. I warned that Christian nationalism risks the same problem, and that the United States must remain a secular republic tolerant of the rights of believers and disbelievers alike.
America is founded on an entirely different premise than that of the Islamic clerisy. So central is secularism to the US Republic that the Constitution explicitly states that no officeholder can be required to swear allegiance to any god (John Quincy Adams took the oath of President on a book of secular law). Article VI states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The First Amendment guarantees citizens freedom of conscience. The Constitution is the supreme law of the country. It is a secular constitution for a secular nation.
At the same time, the deontological liberalism that underpins the logic of the American Republic emerges from the ethical system that grew out of Christian civilization, especially following the dissolution of Catholic hegemony with the Protestant Reformation, which allowed Christianity to arrive in its fully developed form as a doctrine of individualism and human dignity. From this moment, the Enlightenment was born, and the American Republic became a possibility. The patriots, most of them Protestants, who overthrew the English monarchy and established what is now the world’s oldest constitutional republic, seized that moment in history. We owe them a profound debt of gratitude for their bravery and wisdom.
Although I am critical of Christian nationalism, it is a fact that America’s founding was a product of a secularized form of Christian ethics, in which moral ideas shaped by Christianity were translated into political principles without requiring theological assent. The founders drew on Christian moral assumptions—the inherent dignity and moral equality of persons, the duty to restrain power, the importance of conscience, and concern for justice—while grounding them in natural law, reason, and self-evident truths rather than explicit revelation. Concepts such as human rights, limited government, and the rule of law reflect Christian ethical roots reframed through Enlightenment thought. Here, sin is reinterpreted as human fallibility requiring checks and balances, and love of neighbor is expressed institutionally through ordered liberty and the protection of individual rights. Thus, America’s founding embodies a secular Christian ethics: morally indebted to Christianity, but politically articulated in universal, non-sectarian terms.
In this essay, I present the epistemic foundation that has guided my thinking throughout my life, admitting that at times I fell under the spell of progressive ideas antithetical to that foundation. I am moved to write this essay because of Andrew Wilson. Wilson is an American commentator and host of The Crucible, a long-form debate-style podcast and livestream focusing on culture, gender, politics, and religion. He debates others far and wide and often asks his interlocutors to detail the epistemic foundation upon which they erect their arguments.
In a recent interview with Patrick Bet-David (the PBD Podcast), Wilson contends that most people do not know why they believe what they do. Instead, they repeat talking points provided for them by their tribe. As such, their arguments do not stem from an epistemic that organizes ontological truth. They routinely fail to establish a stance-independent foundation, where truth and validity do not depend on attitudes, beliefs, perspectives, or preferences, but rather systematically determine these. What is required for reason, he argues, is an epistemic that holds regardless of what anyone thinks about it. In other words, individuals do not have their “own truths.” There is a truth, and we all live in that truth regardless of ideology or politics—whether we know it or not.
One of those truths is the fallibility of man. This applies to me as much as anybody else. It is because I recognize my own fallibility that I have changed my opinions over time—and it was in moments when I allowed the tribe to determine those opinions for me that I strayed from the epistemic that guided me from early childhood.
For example, there was a period in my life when I accepted the premise that communism was, in principle, a good thing, since capitalism is an exploitative system (exploiting man and nature). I defended things that communists did that improved the lives of people. To be sure, the Soviet Union accomplished some amazing things, which I document in publications over the years (see, e.g., my 2003 article The Soviet Union: State Capitalist or Siege Socialist? published in Nature, Society, and Thought). However, in defending communism, I had to upplay the accomplishments and downplay the terrible things the communists did to achieve those advances, obscuring the fact that the accomplishments came at the cost of tens of millions of lives. And, moreover, that similar achievements were possible without communism—indeed, greater achievements than communism could muster under the best conditions.
I was awakened to this by a deep dive into the work of George Orwell, whom I have featured in several essays on this platform. I learned from Orwell’s biographer, Christopher Hitchens (who also wrote biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine), that Orwell was often asked why he did not dwell on the problems of fascism, instead focusing his high-powered perception on the tragedy of communism. Of course, Orwell did have things to say about fascism (he took a bullet during the Spanish Civil War). But he focused on the horrors of communism. Why? Because Hitchens explains, Orwell was surrounded by intelligent people—academics and scholars—who could, on the one hand, see the horrors of fascism, yet, on the other, ignore them in communism. Orwell could see people rationalize the double standard. Readers of this platform have likely heard others say, “Communism has never been executed properly, but the ideas are good and worthy of consideration,” never stopping to consider that faithfully following those ideas to their logical conclusion is what led to atrocities they themselves, reluctantly and dismissively, admit.
When I returned to the liberal foundations of my thinking after having been pulled into orbit around leftist ideology during graduate school and my early years as a college professor, I re-examined my beliefs and found that I was inconsistent. I realized that if I did not work from principle every time—judging every event, trend, and thought in terms of those principles—I would reach bad conclusions. I was working from a double standard. I knew double standards were irrational, but I had allowed myself to work from them nonetheless.
For example, I fell under the mistaken belief that only white people could be racist, in the sense that, since whites controlled society, their ideas of racial hierarchy had an effect, whereas the ideas of racial hierarchy among black racialists, in their powerlessness, could not. To borrow the language of philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, I erected around me a protective belt (a system of positive heuristics) to defend the hard core (the negative heuristic) of my research program. Under self-interrogation, I realized that I was committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, treating abstractions as if they were real things, which pushed my liberal commitments to individualism to the margins. I had to bracket enlightened thinking to sustain an ideological worldview that had no rational grounding. I was an atheist working from heavenly and idealist ideas rather than earthly materialist ones.
It was in self-interrogation that I came to understand that liberal Enlightenment carries an epistemic foundation, and that foundation lies in Christian ethics. Andrew Wilson’s observations put what I have been working on over the last several years into perspective. Even though I do not subscribe to Christian theology, I recognized that the ethics emerging from the Reformation—the recognition, within a religious tradition of individualism, of the objective reality of human existence, which includes the anthropological and sociological truth that we are social beings who must live collectively—demonstrate the validity of limited government.
This religious tradition forms the basis of republican government, and the liberalism that gives rise to it is not utilitarian, which Wilson criticizes in a recent seven hour debate with Mark Reid, standing Christianity to secular humanism, where ends reduce the means to amoral and instrumental actions, but deontological, where the means must have moral justification. Indeed, some ends are not to be achieved because there are no ethical means to achieve them. This system makes civil and human rights possible—and necessary. In a real sense, the means are ends in themselves.
Restraint of government is deontological in the sense that it imposes moral limits on permissible means, regardless of how desirable the ends may be. In the American founding tradition, government may not violate certain rights (life, liberty, conscience, due process) even to achieve desired outcomes such as prosperity, security, or substantive equality. These limits function as moral prohibitions, not merely prudential calculations. It is also liberal because it centers the moral status of the individual over collective goals, treating persons as ends in themselves rather than instruments of state purposes.
This reflects a secularized Christian moral inheritance: the Christian idea of the inviolable person translated into the Enlightenment language of natural rights. Crucially, restraint of government is not only about means to an end, but also about what ends are morally admissible at all. Some ends—such as coerced virtue or enforced moral perfection—are ruled out in principle. Thus, American liberalism embeds a deontological ethics that governs both how government may act and what it may rightly aim to do.
Both forms of liberalism existed at the time of America’s founding. Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and Jeremy Bentham, a proponent of utilitarianism, both liberals, were acquainted and mutually respectful, but they represent two different moral foundations for organizing the Western world. They thus usefully serve as personifications of the two positions, both of which continue to shape governance and lawmaking in Western democratic societies.
Jefferson’s liberalism is essentially deontological and rights-based, grounded in natural law and the moral inviolability of the person. Rights exist before government and place firm limits on what the state may do, regardless of consequences. This aligns with the American founders’ emphasis on inherent rights, restraint of power, and constitutional limits. Bentham, by contrast, rejects natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts” (see his critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in his essay Anarchical Fallacies, c. 1796). He argues that the legitimacy of laws and institutions depends entirely on their tendency to maximize overall happiness. In Bentham’s framework, rights are not moral constraints but useful constructs—rules justified only insofar as they produce good outcomes. This allows, in principle, for rights to be overridden if doing so increases aggregate utility. Jefferson famously argues for happiness as well, but he does so within the framework of natural rights.
The split matters because it produces two distinct liberal traditions: an American constitutional liberalism focused on limits and rights, and a British reformist liberalism more comfortable with technocratic governance and policy experimentation. Jefferson and Bentham illustrate how liberalism can agree on freedom as a goal while sharply disagreeing on the moral rules that govern how freedom may be pursued.
In this essay, I explore the epistemic foundation that underpins the American Republic, namely, Christian ethics, and praise the founders for separating those ethics from the theology that gave rise to them. The danger of Christian nationalism is that it seeks to rejoin Christian ethics and theology to re-Christianize the country. I argue that this is not in keeping with the founders’ vision for America. Moreover, as I have suggested in several essays on Freedom and Reason, utilitarianism inheres in the logic of progressivism, which is an expression of corporate statism, where instrumental reason trumps republican virtue, leading to a decadent society and civilizational decay. While America is not a Christian nation, I have come around to the position that America needs a Christian majority to uphold republican virtue (which is one of the reasons I am highly critical of mass immigration from Muslim-majority countries).
Contemporary moral and political disagreements often appear to concern particular policies or ethical conclusions. Yet beneath these surface disputes lies a deeper conflict—one not primarily about what we believe, but about how we claim to know what we believe, and what ultimately justifies those claims. This is the sense in which Christian apologists like Wilson argue that most people “do not work from an epistemic standpoint.” What Wilson means is not simply that people lack information, but that they lack a reflective account of the foundations of their knowledge, especially moral knowledge. They can repeat conclusions but cannot explain why those conclusions should bind anyone, including themselves. This dispute becomes especially clear when comparing different traditions within liberal political thought, particularly deontological liberalism and utilitarianism, and when asking how liberal societies ground claims about dignity, justice, and rights.
In this context, epistemic refers to a theory of knowledge: an account of how beliefs are justified, what makes them true or false, and what ultimately grounds their authority. To “work from an epistemic” is to be able to answer questions such as: What counts as knowledge? Why should reason be trusted? Why do logic, morality, and truth have binding force? What distinguishes objective moral claims from mere preference or social convention?
Christian ethicists often argue that many modern moral and political claims are epistemically shallow. People assert moral conclusions without being able to explain why those claims are objectively valid rather than contingent on consensus, power, or utility. The critique is not that such people are necessarily insincere (although many are), but that they rely on unexamined assumptions inherited from culture, education, media, or party rather than from a coherent epistemological framework. This is why debates about ethics often collapse into assertion or outrage: the disagreement is not merely moral, but epistemic. The parties lack shared criteria for justification.
Deontological liberalism begins from axioms or postulates about human beings and moral reality. It holds that individuals possess intrinsic worth and therefore certain rights that are not contingent on outcomes, preferences, or social approval. These rights exist before and independent of the state, and the legitimacy of law depends on its conformity to them. Historically, this tradition draws on natural law, natural rights theory, and Enlightenment moral realism.
The American Declaration of Independence is the canonical expression of this view. When it appeals to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” and declares certain rights “unalienable,” it asserts that moral truths exist objectively, that human reason can apprehend them, and that political authority is constrained by them. Rights are not created by law; they are recognized by it. They are good because they are true. (See Denying Natural Rights at the Heart of Authoritarian Desire.)
Utilitarianism, by contrast, grounds morality in consequences. What is right is what maximizes happiness, preference satisfaction, and well-being. In a world where such things are defined by powerful corporations and their functionaries and propagandists, who determines these desired outcomes is a central question. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the supposed well-being of the population required the coercive suppression of fundamental civil and human rights.
In the utilitarian view, moral rules are instrumental rather than intrinsic, and rights are justified insofar as they promote desirable outcomes. This framework is superficially attractive because it appears empirical, flexible, and secular. Yet it weakens the claim that any right is inviolable. If moral validity depends on outcomes, then rights may be revised, overridden, or redefined when doing so seems to improve aggregate welfare.
We saw this in Virginia Senator Tim Kaine’s condemnation of natural rights, arguing instead that rights come from government (see Tim Kaine and the Enemies of Liberty and Rights; Natural Rights, Government, and the Foundations of Human Freedom). Thus, utilitarian liberalism introduces a form of relativism—not that “anything goes,” but that nothing is ultimately fixed. Moral claims lack permanence because they lack grounding in a reality independent of human calculation.
At bottom, this is not a moral disagreement but a dispute about knowledge and reality. Indeed, only one side is moral, and it is not the utilitarian side. This is why secular humanism, working from a utilitarian standpoint, cannot validly claim to work from morality; to claim that rights are unalienable is to assert that they exist, that they are knowable, and that their authority does not depend on human agreement. That requires both an epistemology (how we know moral truths) and an ontology (what kind of things moral truths are).
Utilitarianism, what we recognize today as progressivism, eschews virtue for instrumental reason. This is how we find ourselves in a world where children are drugged and mutilated, marketed as “gender-affirming care,” because they seek the remedy of their dissatisfaction with their bodies in trans joy, a happiness that requires the manufacture of simulated sexual identities—from which the medical industry profits handsomely. The Nuremberg Code, which rests on deontological commitments, is easily suspended when human rights give way to instrumental reason shorn of ethical demands.
Deontological liberalism, therefore, necessarily carries metaphysical commitments. It presupposes a moral order that constrains political power and human will. Utilitarianism, by contrast, minimizes ontological commitments, treating moral knowledge as empirical, pragmatic, or provisional, which subjects it to ideological corruption and political manipulation.
This difference explains why Christian apologists argue that modern secular moral discourse “borrows” moral conclusions while denying the metaphysical foundations that once supported them. Yet it does not follow that moral realism requires commitment to Christian theology. A coherent alternative exists—one deeply rooted in Enlightenment thought and visible in the American founding itself: grounding moral law in nature or natural history rather than in a personal divine lawgiver.
I have already said as much in getting to this point, but it bears elaborating. In deontological liberalism, nature is not morally neutral chaos, but rather an ordered reality governed by universal and intelligible laws. These include not only physical laws, but emergent biological realities, psychological capacities, and the social structures that shape them. Human beings are a certain kind of mammal, with characteristic capacities, needs, and vulnerabilities. From these facts arise norms—not invented arbitrarily but discovered through reflection on what human flourishing requires (I endeavored to explain these in my recent essay praising Samantha Fulnecky’s essay, moving her argument concerning gender roles from theological grounds to the foundation of natural history).
For the deontological liberal, language, reason, and social practices do not create moral law; they allow us to articulate and apply it (which is why the reclamation of accurate and precise language is so imperative). Moral truths are self-evident not because they are obvious in a trivial sense, but because they are accessible to rational agents without appeal to revelation or authority. In Enlightenment usage, “self-evident” means epistemically basic: known directly through reason and observation of the world, rather than inferred from theology (Fulnecky’s error, even if I praise her for providing an epistemic foundation).
This is precisely how Jefferson frames his argument in the Declaration. The Declaration does not present its claims as speculative metaphysics or sectarian doctrine, but as truths available to any rational person. Rights are grounded in human nature itself, not in the decrees of a church or the will of a ruler.
This position reflects a deliberate distinction between metaphysics and theology. The American founders retained key elements of Christian-influenced moral metaphysics—intrinsic human dignity, limits on political authority, objective moral order—while bracketing revealed theology. They rejected the necessity of Christological doctrine, divine revelation, and ecclesiastical authority as sources of political legitimacy. This produced a form of secularism that was not relativist or value-neutral; rather, it was natural-law secularism: a framework that allowed moral objectivity without theological coercion.
Enlightenment values did indeed emerge from Christian civilization, particularly through the Reformation and its emphasis on conscience and moral agency. But acknowledging that historical genealogy does not require accepting theological premises as politically binding. This distinction was essential for pluralism. A republic intended to include citizens with diverse religious commitments—or none at all—could not ground rights in contested theology. By locating moral authority in nature and reason, the founders created a framework in which equal rights did not depend on shared beliefs about God.
Christian critics rightly observe that this framework inherits much from Christian moral thought, and they argue that nature alone cannot generate normativity—that descriptive facts cannot produce binding “oughts.” Whether that critique succeeds remains a live philosophical question. But it is a mistake to assume that secular natural law is incoherent or merely parasitic; it represents a serious attempt to preserve moral objectivity, political legitimacy, and pluralism simultaneously.
The deeper issue, then, is not whether liberal societies can function without theology, but whether they can retain deontological commitments without drifting into Christian nationalism or utilitarian revisionism. When rights become subject to Christian (or any other) theology, society risks sliding into clericalism—or rule by the religious judge—a form of totalitarianism. At the same time, when rights are no longer understood as truths about human beings but as instruments for producing outcomes, their authority becomes authoritarian. Under utilitarianism, democracy is subordinated to technocracy. This is why I reject progressivism.
What this debate ultimately reveals is that political disagreement is inseparable from epistemology. To argue about justice, liberty, or rights without asking how moral knowledge is grounded is to argue at the level of conclusions while ignoring foundations. Deontological liberalism, whether articulated naturalistically or theistically (as an atheist, I obviously prefer—indeed, insist on—the former), entails an explicit epistemic and ontological commitment: that moral truths exist independently of power and preference, and that reason can apprehend them. That commitment is not a relic of theology but a prerequisite for any liberal order that wishes to treat rights as more than temporary conveniences.
Secular humanism need not be utilitarian. Indeed, if it is not to devolve into progressivism or the horrors of communism, it must reject utilitarianism in favor of deontological liberalism. Moreover, any democratic socialism worthy of consideration must be grounded on the same ethical basis. Orwell exemplified this approach: he opposed authoritarian and totalitarian systems, yet remained a democratic socialist throughout his life. His standpoint exemplifies deontological liberalism rooted in Christian ethics.
In recounting a sketch by Italian writer Ignazio Silone, Irving Howe, in an essay in the Fall 1981 edition of Dissent (“On the Moral Basis of Socialism”), leverages the power of Silone’s anti-totalitarian commitments (see also Silone’s “The Choice of Comrades,” published in the Winter 1955 issue of Dissent). As a boy, Silone watched a ragged man being taken away by the police and laughed. His father rebuked him: one should never laugh at a man being taken by the police. When the child asked why, the father offered two reasons. First, one does not know what the man has done—an intuition that anticipates the liberal principle of restraint and the presumption against easy moral certainty: innocent until proven guilty. Second, and more importantly, the man is unhappy.
At first glance, this second reason might sound utilitarian, as though the wrongness of mockery lies in the fact that it increases suffering. But Silone was not a utilitarian thinker. Although he began his political life within communism, he broke decisively with any doctrine that justified cruelty, humiliation, or repression in the name of the collective good or historical necessity. His mature moral vision was grounded in human dignity and the conviction that political action does not suspend ordinary moral obligations. The unhappiness of the man being arrested is not morally salient because it adds to some aggregate of pain, but because it marks a moment of extreme vulnerability. When the state exercises coercive power over an individual, that individual’s dignity does not disappear, even if he is guilty of a crime. To laugh at such a person is not merely unkind; it is a failure to recognize the moral limits that ought to govern both citizens and institutions.
Seen this way, Silone’s anecdote aligns naturally with a deontological liberal tradition rather than a utilitarian one. The prohibition against mockery does not depend on calculations or outcomes. It rests on sympathy for the person as a person, even when one condemns the act that may have led to his arrest. This distinction matters. A utilitarian framework can justify punishment, suffering, and even humiliation if they serve a greater social good. A deontological liberal framework, by contrast, insists that certain forms of treatment are wrong regardless of their utility, because they erode the moral foundations of individualism and human dignity.
Silone’s story is not about sentimental pity or the efficient reduction of suffering; it is about the kind of moral character a free society requires. If citizens lose the capacity for compassion toward those at the mercy of state power—even those who may deserve punishment—then the moral restraint necessary for republican virtue dissolves. Silone’s lesson, properly understood, is not a utilitarian appeal to minimize unhappiness, but a liberal warning: once we permit ourselves to laugh at the humiliated, we have already begun to undermine the ethical conditions that make a free and democratic society possible. Crucially, the epistemic foundation of Silone’s sentiment is rooted in Christian ethics.
Howe himself was a lifelong advocate of democratic socialism, co-founding Dissent magazine in 1954 to provide a platform for anti-Stalinist leftist thought that combined a commitment to social justice with a critique of authoritarianism. Over his life, he watched many comrades (e.g., Irving Kristol) drift into neoconservatism. Howe highlights Silone’s childhood anecdote of witnessing a ragged man being taken by the police and learning a moral lesson about empathy and justice to illustrate the ethical foundation he believed should underlie socialist politics.
In his advocacy, Howe consistently emphasized the importance of humanistic values, individual responsibility, and moral conscience within socialism, distinguishing his socialism from both Stalinism and unprincipled leftist radicalism (which is now rampant in the West). For this reason, Howe admired Orwell, particularly for Orwell’s clear-eyed critique of totalitarianism and moral seriousness; he saw Orwell as a kindred spirit in defending democratic principles against the abuses of power, aligning well with Howe’s vision of an ethical, human-centered socialism.
In concluding this essay, I want to make it clear that I am neither a Christian nor a conservative (see Am I Right-Wing? Not Even Close). One need not be either to ground moral claims in an epistemic framework fashioned by Christian ethics. The American founders demonstrate that moral truths derived from Christian-informed conceptions of human dignity and conscience can be translated into secular, universal terms, producing a liberal framework that protects rights independently of theological belief.
Am I a democratic socialist? I have written essays over the last few years distancing myself from socialism (see Why I am not a socialist; Marxist but not Socialist, although I am no longer Marxist politically). However, like Orwell, I am sympathetic to democratic socialist ideals, and today’s society could benefit from considering them. At the same time, I know which party will take them up, because they already use the language, and I don’t trust that party with power.
Whatever I think of socialism today, Silone and Howe—both atheists, humanists, and democratic socialists—illustrate that commitment to human dignity, moral responsibility, and opposition to authoritarianism can fully operate within these frameworks. Their reasoning shows that deontological liberalism can be defended based on human nature and moral order, not religious authority, allowing secular, pluralistic societies to uphold ethical and political principles that ultimately stem from a Christian moral heritage.
Both conservatives and democratic socialists alike, eschewing utilitarianism, rest their moral arguments upon the epistemic foundation of Christian ethics.
freedom and reason 