Ophelia Benson has a "fit" (her word) about this passage from a piece by Stephen Beer in yesterday's Guardian:
Western liberal democracy owes much to the Christian view that all have equal worth before God, which in our political system reads as democracy and equality before the law; and those ideals have often been applied because of religious faith, not in spite of it.
Ophelia comments:
No it doesn't. Or at least no one knows if it does or not. That's just that confusion of correlation with causation again. The 'Christian' (and not exclusively Christian, and not thoroughly Christian either, given how many exceptions Xianity always managed to find to its supposed 'view' over the years) view that all have equal worth before God, and the idea of democracy and equality, just happened to be around in the same part of the world now and then. That doesn't mean Xianity caused it. And really, is it likely? Has Xianity really been all that egalitarian all this time? Hardly.
I wonder, has Ophelia ever read Locke? Locke, for whom the state of nature into which men are born is a state not only of "perfect freedom" but also of
equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. (Second Treatise, ch. II)
As Jeremy Waldron makes clear in his remarkable book God, Locke, and Equality, the principle of human equality articulated in the Second Treatise, which he says with good reason is just about the best worked-out "theory of basic equality ... we have in the canon of political philosophy", is an axiom of theology. It is, says Waldron, "the most important truth about God's way with the world in regard to the social and political implications of His creation of the human person". (Nietzsche thought the same, incidentally, which is why he was sceptical of the principle of equality, and of the related notions of pity and compassion.)
Now, of course, the challenge that Locke and Waldron set us is whether secular sense can be made of the principle of equality and of the idea that each human life is inalienably precious. Ophelia and I agree that this is a challenge that can be met. But it is simply ahistorical to deny that our (liberal) conceptions of equality and human dignity have Christian antecedents.