Religion and the Limits of Limited Government

Abstract

A reflection on the meaning of limited government illuminates both its theoretical limits or boundaries and its practical limitations. The full rationality of the Lockean argument for narrowing the scope of politics to bodily self-interest may be questioned from two apparently opposite standpoints: because of its aggressive materialism or because it seems to rest upon a distinctly Christian dichotomy between spiritual and secular concerns. This paradox is further represented in the religious liberalism of the American Revolution, and a consideration of Calvin's theology suggests that this spiritual secularism is not simply an eighteenth-century confusion, but may derive from a radicalization of the Christian idea of transcendence. Thus both religious and secular sources of the ideal of limited government rest on unlimited claims for the unity of private self-preservation and universal Truth. This faith does not, however, exhaust the meaning of the Founding.