Hawley, the freshman senator from Missouri, equates modern secularism with pelagianism, in an article he published last year in Christianity Today. Pelagianism is originally an ascetic and aristocratic movement. Pelagius, to the contrary of Augustine, didn’t believe that humans were totally depraved because of an original fall but held that they could initiate the needed steps towards salvation on their own, aside from the help of divine grace.

Pelagius’ concern was to defend asceticism against the accusation of Manichaeism by insisting on human capacity to chose the good thanks to a God-given power. The denial of the doctrine of original sin seems to have been introduced later by Rufinus the Syrian and doesn’t seem to have been of interest to Pelagius himself. In other words, Pelagius was no leftist liberal and Hawley’s effort to pull the Augustinian rug to the conservative radical side is a misreading.

By linking this ancient heresy with modern secularism, strangely enough, Hawley is casting himself in the role of a Manichaean for whom the dramatic struggle of light and darkness is playing itself out in predestined souls. Note that the capacities of human nature have long been recognized, if not celebrated, in many Biblical passages: Genesis 1, Psalm 104, for instance. Of course, the idea of human self-sufficiency is in conflict with the notion of human sinfulness. But the resolution of this tension doesn’t have to be Manichaean, or even Augustinian, and exaggerate the depravity of human beings as irremediable. It is all too easy for elites à la Hawley to take this proto-fascist path in which non-elites are damned.