A Story of Liberal Deicide
Law & Liberty, December 17, 2025, by Juliana Geran Pilon
Western civilization is inconceivable without the biblical proposition that all humans were created in God’s image (Tzelem Elokim [צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים] in Hebrew; imago Dei in Latin). But over time, paradoxically, the idea turned humanity against its own Maker. So argues Tomer Persico of the Shalom Hartman Institute in his ambitiously titled In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea, recently translated from the 2021 Hebrew version.
It took a few centuries, but inexorably “religion was rejected in the name of personal autonomy and a wish to become fully human,” writes Persico. “The value of the human subject, created through the idea of the image of God, came to demand the repudiation of divine authority—of any and every God.” God’s progeny, having inherited Adam’s chutzpah, coveted divinity for itself. Being created in God’s image inspired quasi-theocratic aspirations, even deicide. Man could no longer resist the urge to annihilate his own Creator.
To get to this startling conclusion, Persico begins by contrasting the God of the Torah (the Hebrew bible), Yahweh, with the uber-god of Greek mythology, Zeus. While Zeus declared contemptuously that “nothing is more wretched than a man, of all things that breathe and move upon the earth,” Yahweh fashioned adam (Hebrew for “earth”) as the crowning glory of His Creation. This was diametrically opposed to the relationship of polytheists with their capricious gods, who needed coaxing, flattering, and special favors.
In other respects, early Judaism shared with pagan societies a form of communal, collective self-definition. Throughout the ancient world, as communities fractured—conquering, fighting, pillaging, and enslaving one another—people’s identities tended to coalesce around their most senior (usually male) member. Groups rather than individuals were the locus of political power.
Persico highlights the novelty of the Hebraic concept of man, but then goes on to downplay it. Ontologically distinct from everything else He had created, the only being capable of language, understanding, and consciousness, man, as described in Genesis, was intended by his Creator to tend to the world and improve it. By cherishing it, seeing that “it is good,” man would enhance God’s pleasure. That would seem to make him almost a co-creator.
But it was Christianity, not Judaism, that placed the greatest importance on the inner life of the individual, which henceforth replaced the proto-national, covenantal source of identity. It was not so much due to Judaism but through “the rise of Christianity,” argues Persico, that “the life of the individual … became a focal point of redemption. The image of God was internalized and turned into a power of reason and free will.” Jesus redeemed all mankind.
Christianity, Persico thus argues, changed the psychological locus of identity from a relationship of the community as a whole with God to that of each self with Him through faith in Jesus. “Unlike in the Kingdom of Israel, where the king followed Torah law and subordinated the realm to this same code of law, Christianity emphasized from the outset (usually more in theory than in practice) the clear division between the two domains.” Individualism replaces tribalism: “I” takes center stage.
The Apostle Paul masterminded this revolution “by transforming communities into sets of individuals, and by turning the covenant with God into a personal, not collective, matter,” according to Persico. He writes that for Paul,
“conversion,” or admission into the covenantal community, was predicated on faith, the “circumcision of the heart,” and the immersion (or baptism) of the spirit.” … No longer is the covenant between God and a specific, special people. … All humans are rendered equal through their faith in Christ and internal metamorphosis, and all humans may be baptized “into one body”: the universal spiritual corpus.
He argues that Paul’s words constitute the most significant precursor of “liberalism, [which] would base itself precisely on this axiom.” But what specific example does he select to instantiate this ideology? Astonishingly, it is the document issued in the immediate aftermath of a bloody revolution by an anti-clerical regime that would subject the most advanced nation in Europe to a reign of terror: the August 26, 1789, Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Why not select the US Declaration of Independence as the model of incipient modern liberalism? In fact, he barely mentions this document. He alludes to it only casually and in passing—worse still, linking it to the very different 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. Both are commended for being “commonly imagined nowadays as moments of creation, small big-bangs of human triumph.”
Ironically, by seeing himself as mirroring the Divine, and thus partaking in His ineffable divinity, however faintly, man’s congenital hubris escalated to the point that he could not resist the urge to annihilate his own Creator.
Where is the parallel? The first is America’s covenantal creed, the first legal instrument in all of human history to articulate the principle of universal human rights, which would go on to secure their observance through the oldest liberal constitution still in effect. The second is the nominal instrument of diplomacy, whose main function has been to enhance the credibility of states that sponsor and promote terrorists who turn knives and machetes into swords. Nothing diminutive about it, the former is the premier founding document in the world. The latter served mainly to instill false hope in starving innocents and political prisoners rotting in labor camps and psychiatric hospitals.
Though not easy to detect, the reason why Persico glosses over the American Declaration lies in his definition of liberalism as “an idea that any heteronomous constant [read: law] is a barrier to freedom, because freedom means being unrestrained.” This new notion of “freedom” is hardly the classical “system of natural liberty” that of Adam Smith and his fellow-liberals in America, all of whom believed that self-restraint, discipline, and the cultivation of virtue are necessary for effective self-government. So was restraining the state, to prevent its encroaching unduly upon the inalienable natural rights of each citizen to liberty.
The kind of liberalism reflected in the US Declaration was meant to protect citizens willing to abide by the nation’s laws, regardless of ethnicity or creed. In time, racial and sexual barriers to political participation were eliminated as well, in law if not always in practice. But the universal scope of America’s founding document was always meant to serve its national survival and integrity. To this day, almost everyone stands when the national anthem is sung at ballgames.
Persico’s new liberalism, by contrast, is predicated on outright hostility to national or civic bonds and what he calls tribalism.
This modern liberal notion of autonomy is not solipsistic, as it had been for the nihilist atheist German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Rather, it purports to be altruistic in a manner similar to that of Karl Marx. In his early manuscripts, Marx had written that with the abolition of property, class-determined myopic humans would mutate into “species-man” (Gattungswesen). Thus understood, modern secular liberalism “compels us to see the divine in another, their unique, irreplaceable value, which stems from their subjective exceptionality.” Humans being both one another’s servants and their masters, however, is a prospect with sinister Hobbesian undertones.
Ironically, by seeing himself as mirroring the Divine, and thus partaking in His ineffable divinity, however faintly, man’s congenital hubris escalated to the point that he could not resist the urge to annihilate his own Creator. The logical conclusion of Persico’s argument, unfortunately, is that by denying all divine source of morality, man ends by exterminating himself. Suicide by deicide. Does this mean that liberalism is its own worst enemy? If so, are we doomed?
The answer is not clear to the reader, nor perhaps to Persico. I might suggest that he re-examine his definition of “liberal thought” outlined in his epilogue, which purportedly “conceives of individuals as abstract, genderless beings unencumbered by a past, ethnic roots, or religious attachments, who sign their social contract behind a ‘veil of ignorance.’” He rightly notes that “this definition of the individual … works to encourage abstract individualism.” Indeed it does. He might want to reread Hannah Arendt’s 1963 masterpiece On Revolution, “Compassion, by its very nature cannot be touched off by the sufferings of a whole class or a people, or, least of all, mankind as a whole.”
Real people need roots, communities, and purpose. To overcome suffering, pain, and fear, they need to not feel alone. This is the poignant, persistent relevance of imago Dei, which Natan Sharansky first understood during his eight-year-long imprisonment in the catacombs of the Gulag. He had found it in a precious present his wife Avital had given him when he was arrested: the Psalms. The message is simple: “Mankind was created to be worthy of [His] image and be true to it.”
He would later tell her that he suddenly realized then that it was “the fear of not being worthy of the divine image, not the fear of death, [that] I was most afraid of in my interrogations with the KGB. I was afraid to lose the world of inner freedom I had found, to fail to stay true to my inner self.” It gave him the strength never to lie, no matter what the consequences.
That self, in each of us, reflects eternity.