The Immorality of Contemporary Liberality

The Immorality of Contemporary Liberality

In the aftermath of the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Archbishop of Selsey declared: “It betrays the immorality of contemporary liberality.” His words exposed not only the depravity of celebrating a young father’s murder, but the deeper malaise of an ideology that parades itself as tolerant and compassionate while practising cruelty, hypocrisy, and corruption.

The hypocrisy of political liberalism
The duplicity of liberal politics is visible across the West. In the United Kingdom, Parliament’s July 2025 decision to strip the unborn of all legal personhood was hailed as a victory for “choice,” yet it marked the most radical denial of human rights in British history.¹ Scottish ministers, quick to brand Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality as “harmful,” have themselves been implicated in financial mismanagement, such as the collapse of the publicly backed ferries project which squandered hundreds of millions of pounds.² At Westminster, the Greensill lobbying scandal revealed senior politicians exploiting ministerial access for private financial gain, while more recent investigations have shown MPs funnelling taxpayer-funded staff budgets to family members.³

In the United States, legislators who posture as champions of democracy are embroiled in insider trading scandals, with members of Congress profiting from stock trades timed around confidential briefings.⁴ President Biden’s family dealings in Ukraine and China have long been dogged by allegations of influence-peddling, while the revolving door between Capitol Hill and corporate lobbying firms has become an entrenched feature of Washington life.⁵ In the European Union, the so-called “Qatargate” scandal exposed MEPs accepting bribes from foreign governments in exchange for softening human rights criticisms—this from an institution that preaches international transparency.⁶

Such cases are not outliers but symptoms of a broader disease. Liberal leaders condemn corruption when it suits them, but excuse or ignore it when the perpetrators belong to their own camp. They speak of equality before the law, yet practice a double standard of justice. They denounce violence when it strikes their allies, yet tolerate it against their opponents.

Theological roots of liberal corruption
The rot, however, runs deeper than politics. By cutting itself off from God, liberalism has turned liberty into license and truth into relativism. Pope Leo XIII warned that when society severs itself from divine law, “the State, having no fixed principles to guide it… will be driven about at the will of the multitude.”⁷

St Augustine had already diagnosed this collapse in the City of God. A society that rejects the justice of God, he argued, is not a true commonwealth but “a band of robbers” united by self-interest.⁸ For Augustine, true liberty is not the ability to indulge every passion, but the freedom to serve God: “The will is truly free when it is not the slave of vices and sins.”⁹ By that measure, liberal society is not free at all, but enslaved—enslaved to ideology, greed, and corruption.

Alasdair MacIntyre echoed this Augustinian insight when he argued that modern liberalism, having abandoned the teleology of the human person, leaves only “emotivism”—morality reduced to personal feeling.¹⁰ In such a framework, the strong impose their will under the guise of rights, while the weak—the unborn, the elderly, the politically unfashionable—are sacrificed to the idols of autonomy and progress.

This explains why the murder of Charlie Kirk could be greeted with laughter, and why the cries of widows and orphans are met with derision: when freedom is detached from truth, human dignity is no longer intrinsic but conditional on political usefulness.

From false freedom to death
The fruit of liberalism is visible everywhere: abortion paraded as healthcare, euthanasia sold as dignity, the family dismantled in the name of equality, and the Church reduced to an NGO. What Pope John Paul II described as a “culture of death”¹¹ is not an unfortunate excess of liberalism, but its logical outcome once freedom is severed from responsibility and morality from truth.

The path to restoration
The Archbishop’s indictment is thus both accurate and prophetic. Liberalism in its contemporary form is not a guarantor of dignity but its betrayer. It has corrupted politics through scandal, eroded culture through relativism, and desacralised society through the rejection of God.

The only cure lies not in attempting to revive an imagined “classical liberalism,” but in restoring the moral order rooted in natural law and the Kingship of Christ. Pope Pius XI reminded the world that “when once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”¹² Only by recovering such a vision can the West be saved from the hypocrisy and immorality that now consume it.

The City of God and the earthly city
St Augustine’s great vision reminds us that history is the unfolding conflict between two cities: the earthly city, built on self-love “to the contempt of God,” and the City of God, built on the love of God “to the contempt of self.”¹³ Contemporary liberalism has aligned itself with the earthly city, seeking to construct a civilisation on self-will, autonomy, and corruption. But such a city cannot stand, for it rests on sand, not on the Rock.

The Church, in contrast, bears witness to the City of God, reminding men that their true citizenship is in heaven. It calls rulers to justice, peoples to repentance, and societies to order themselves under Christ the King. Only by reorienting the earthly city towards the heavenly can politics be purified and liberty redeemed.

Until that day, the Archbishop’s words remain both a lament for what has been lost and a prophetic warning of what is to come: “It betrays the immorality of contemporary liberality.”

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Footnotes

1. UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 8 July 2025.
2. Audit Scotland, New Vessels for the Clyde and Hebrides: Progress Update (2023).
3. UK Committee on Standards, Report on Members’ Interests and Family Appointments (2022).
4. Business Insider, “Members of Congress Beat the Stock Market,” Dec. 2021.
5. Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption (HarperCollins, 2020), pp. 34–58.
6. European Parliament, “Qatargate Corruption Allegations: Committee of Inquiry,” Feb. 2023.
7. Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1885), §32.
8. St Augustine, City of God, Book IV, ch. 4.
9. St Augustine, On Free Will (De libero arbitrio), II.13.
10. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (3rd ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 23.
11. Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (1995), §12.
12. Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925), §19.
13. St Augustine, City of God, Book XIV, ch. 28.