I returned to the book to find out what led today’s UK into such a crazy morass of decline. This country was the paragon of freedom at one point, but now you cannot escape confiscatory taxes and you get jailed for making edgy posts on social media. Major influencers are now urging anyone who can get out to do so now, with the expectation that matters can only get worse.
Chesterton’s book is a defense of moral principle as a governing philosophy in private and public life. What he saw in his times was the elevation of pragmatism and science over principle. He traced the problem to the education elites, whom he said had abandoned England’s religious heritage. Provocative thesis.
Two sentences jumped out at me.
“If some form of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized,” he wrote. “The aristocracy will be as ready to ‘administer’ Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism.”
Ouch. A quick explanation.
Puritanism in England came about as part of the fallout from the Reformation and the fence-sitting theology that prevailed under the reign of Elizabeth I. Her successors trended ever more in the direction of purging society of all signs of sin, which they identified with the French and with the Catholics. That led to stockades, heretic burnings, and every manner of nuttiness.
That was followed later by what was called Manchesterism, which amounted to a policy of commercial freedom, industrial celebration, and free trade. This was the period of Adam Smith and the repeal of the Corn Laws, a time that the Americans have tended to celebrate as the best that the UK had to offer the world.
Chesterton’s point centered on his doubts that these twists and turns were really matters of principle. They were policies of expediency that mutated and migrated according to the fashion among the educated political class. They followed intellectual trends, not rooted principles. In his view, English political economy had no principles. It specialized only in being malleable.
America seems to have avoided the worst of what’s happening in the UK, at least for now. One wonders why this is. Here is a broad theory of why liberty is safer in the United States than in the UK. It traces to 1) heritage, 2) individual rights, and 3) the sustaining power of religious conviction. Let’s look at each.
Concerning American heritage, we celebrate our 250th anniversary in 2026. We marked July 4, 1776, as our birthday. It’s not like we are ignoring our colonial history. After all, our favorite and distinct holiday of Thanksgiving traces its origin to colonial times. We revere the pilgrims, still tell stories of Plymouth Plantation, and codify many features of this time in national memory.
July 4 is still the birthday. This is because of the Declaration of Independence, a document that stated the intention to throw off our colonial masters and dispense with the industrial monopolies backed by the British king. It was a bold stance of principle. It was not a declaration of war. The colonists did not want a war, but they were willing to risk one if that is what it took to elevate principles above the expediency of colonial rule.
It’s quite remarkable that after all this time, we still name this as the nation’s birthday. Years back, The New York Times embarked on a campaign to change that. It stated that the proper date should be 1619, when the first slaves came over. The effort failed, and not only because of the poor scholarship behind the claim. Americans are deeply attached to their civic liturgy. That’s a wonderful thing.
As a consequence of their heritage, Americans believe that freedom is more than a good idea. It is our birthright, something baked into the national DNA. That gives freedom a staying power here that it does not have elsewhere.
Second, we strongly believe in individual rights. The Declaration states that God created every man equally deserving of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After the war was won, Americans got busy practicing those principles. They embraced the frontier. They settled the land. They started families and businesses. They established great lineages.
Eventually, the blight of slavery—always inconsistent with American principles—was abolished.
They even started new twists on traditional religion because they had religious freedom, the first country to try such a wild experiment.
As part of this, an ethos developed surrounding rugged individualism as a cultural trope against collectivism of all sorts. Every person would be responsible for his own lot in life, without depending on the collective or the government. This idea is still an essential part of American culture. It’s why people come here. Every generation is raised with the idea.
We often forget just how unique this idea is in history and around the world.
Third, America is a country with deep religious attachments. From the founding period, the culture has been deeply rooted in faith and still is today. I recall driving from secularized Massachusetts to Texas four years ago and marveling at the growing numbers of religious stations on the radio dial. This was backed by the number of new churches I could see everywhere.
The key point about religious faith is that it is a meta layer of consciousness that occupies a higher place than government. Once the conviction comes to animate the human spirit, everything else becomes secondary. All the pronouncements of secular elites come to be evaluated according to a different standard of right and wrong.
Another feature of the religious impulse is to become aware of an eternity that is the destiny of every human person. Not only does this belief reduce the fear of death—and diminish the power of fear generally—but it also creates an ideal to achieve in this life that is beyond the control of any earthly institution, including media and government.
This habit of mind and spirit is the bulwark of mental independence. It makes Americans more resistant to tyranny. A secularized world, as it turns out, is more susceptible to suggestion from elite forces and experts claiming to know what’s what. Those with an independent source of truth follow their own North Star instead.
So there we have it. Americans have enough remaining within the cultural firmament to resist the despotic trends of our time. This is why America is, in many ways, the outlier in world tyranny, a place where freedom has hope to live another day.
Chesterton’s book has a theme: Those who are unloosed from firm moral principles drift with the political winds, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. We thank our heritage, our confidence in individual rights and efforts, and our religious convictions for why we haven’t yet gone the way of so many others.
