Capturing the moral initiative.

SIR, A WOMAN preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The observation by Dr. Johnson has been much lamented by the enlightened. But now there are second thoughts. British churchmen of advanced views are united in their derision of a woman who has taken to instructing them on a different understanding of Christianity and social justice. Earlier this year Margaret Thatcher addressed the Assembly of the Church of Scotland. She seemed so to enjoy the consternation she caused that she has been honing her homiletical skills in a string of similar addresses. Have text, will travel.

Mrs. Thatcher's text is a Biblical amalgam that, in her exegesis, supports democratic governance and its necessary correlate, a free economy. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25) does heavy duty, and she repeatedly makes the point that the Good Samaritan had first to earn the means to be generous. The chief sinners in her sermon are morally fraudulent Labourites who are marvelously compassionate with other people's money-of which there is never enough to fulfill their pandering promises to the slothful. As Mrs. Thatcher told the journalist Paul Johnson, "I am determined to capture the moral initiative from Labour -and keep it." Countering what she views as the false religion of socialism and the eviscerated religion of a secularized church, she explained to the Scottish clerics, "The Christian religion-which, of course, embodies many of the great spiritual and moral truths of Judaism-is a fundamental part of our national heritage. . . . Indeed we are a nation whose ideals are founded on the Bible. Also, it is quite impossible to understand our history or literature without grasping this fact."

Mrs. Thatcher declares herself "an enthusiast for democracy." To be sure, she allows, when Christians take counsel together, as Christians, their purpose should not be to ascertain what is the mind of the majority but to ascertain what is the mind of the Holy Spirit. In the civil realm, however, democracy is the thing, because "it most effectively safeguards the value of the individual, and, more than any other system, restrains the abuse of power by the few. And that is a Christian concept." Mrs. Thatcher knows that democracy is trump in current political discourse. She has little patience with fustian Tories who, in their contempt for the modern, are happy to grant the opposition a monopoly on the claim to being democratic.

Like Ronald Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher is adept at stealing cards from the opposition's hand. Like the Democrats here, the Labourites in Britain seem not to know what is happening, or what to do about it. Not many years ago, conservatives in America were tediously insistent that our nation was a republic and not a democracy. That tired argument has been superseded by the recognition that ours is a republican form of democratic governance. It is noteworthy that this most conservative of Presidents has constructed an entire foreign policy around the theme of "The Democratic Revolution." Mrs. Thatcher is going President Reagan one better. He has been responsive to forces that provide a religious rationale for the democratic idea; she intends to lead such forces. Like Margaret Thatcher, and unlike Ronald Reagan, George Bush is a credible churchman. Mrs. Thatcher, despite the withered Church of England to which she belongs, and Mr. Bush, despite the more withered daughter church to which be belongs, could revive an awareness of the Biblical foundation of the free society.

Reinhold Niebuhr famously wrote that "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Admittedly, the historical record more generously documents the inclination to injustice than the capacity for justice. But even the recognition of injustice requires a prior understanding of justice, and our protest of rights violated assumes some knowledge of rights bestowed. The "self-evident" truths of the Declaration of Independence are self-evident only within the Biblical tradition, however attenuated that tradition. The "moral initiative" that Mrs. Thatcher would capture belongs to those who can most persuasively articulate the truths from which the democratic idea is derived.

OR MORE THAN two centuries, since the secular Enlightenment, the democracy project has frequently been broken away from and turned against Biblical religion. In the Revolution of 1789 the idea of liberty, along with equality and fraternity, was transplanted into an ersatz religion alien to the religious soil in which it had grown. Christians of a theocratic or ecclesiocratic bent could not have been more eager to surrender the idea of liberty to the opposition. And so the pattern was entrenched in which militan t secularizers posed as the champions of freedom. Little wonder that our conventional histories leave the impression that freedom of religion and conscience was achieved not by religion but against religion. A typically miseducated college student might well assume, for instance, that Roger Williams, that devout seventeenth-century pioneer of freedom, was the first card-carrying member of the ACLU.

In reconnecting the idea of freedom and Biblical truth Mrs. Thatcher is doing much more than stealing a march on her political opposition. She and those who have the wit to join her are engaged in a historic reforging of an alliance without which the democracy project will again be captured by the enemies of both freedom and Biblical religion.