Locke is a convenient target for many post liberals looking for a founding demon to explain today’s misfortunes, such as drag queen story hour. But that demonization often requires removing him from his actual historical context, alongside Shaftesbury and the struggle against royalist autocracy in the late 1600s. Do Locke’s critics wish his ideas had been defeated, with royalism both civil and ecclesiastical prevailing, amid rights and liberties smothered by an all-powerful crown? If so, they should say so. Sometimes Pharaoh’s Egypt, however cruel, seems safer than any promised land.

— Mark Tooley, “John Locke, Shaftesbury & Drag Queens,” Providence, July 23, 2023

— William Bradford, preface to his Hebrew study manuscript and the famous “Triangle Text”

— Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, pp.116-17

— Mark A. Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911, quoted in Yisroel Ben-Porat’s review at Tradition.

— Letter of John Quincy Adams to his son, George Washington Adams, Sep. 1, 1811

Repeatedly, ... the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a universal import.

— Tom Holland, Dominion (2019), ch. 20, p.505.

The World State 
by G. K. Chesterton 

Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!

The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that's nearest.

This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens—

The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.

That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic—no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think—was the book of Genesis.

The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation.

— Tom Holland, Dominion (2019), ch. 16, p.400 (emphasis added).