“For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
I’m finally back. We’ll have one more short break the week after next, but then we’ll be rolling again for a while. Yesterday was the Fourth of July, the day we celebrate our independence as a nation. It is a day filled with nostalgia and patriotism (and the occasional, ungrateful, “here’s why I hate America” meme). It is a day set aside for us to give some attention to rejoicing in the freedom we have as Americans. Yet across the world, freedom isn’t all that common of a thing. There’s a reason for this: not many people and not many nations are willing to commit themselves to pursuing the things freedom requires to be maintained. There is diminishing evidence that our own nation is so willing. Let’s talk about what freedom takes and how we can sustain it.
Freedom is often defined in a negative sense as the ability to do other than what we did. In other words, if when you made the most recent choice you made you could have just as easily chosen something else, then that choice was a free one. There wasn’t anything externally restricting your ability to do what you wanted.
And that’s not a bad definition of freedom. But freedom in this sense requires that we do want to do some things and don’t want to do some others. For instance, if you are choosing between not hurting someone and hurting someone, choosing to hurt someone impinges on their ability to make free choices. So, while your choice may have been a free one, your making that choice negatively impacts the freedom of another person and thus reduces the total amount of freedom in your society.
Because of this, a caveat is often added to our working definition of freedom. Freedom in a national sense is the ability to choose whatever you wish as long as your choosing it doesn’t restrict the ability of someone else to choose whatever they wish. This changes things somewhat. With this caveat in place, we are no longer able to simply choose whatever we want. We are limited to choosing things that will at the very least have a neutral impact on the people around us, and at the most be actively for their benefit.
Indeed, if we actively choose to hurt other people, and if the people around us similarly make regular choices to hurt other people, a couple of things are going to happen. First, those people are going to make choices that directly impinge our ability to make free choices so that we are somehow limited in our ability to hurt them. What shape these choices actually take are going to vary, but if they are intended to directly limit our ability to do something, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess at what they might look like, and those guesses don’t tend to play out in our favor. This decision on their part will likely (and understandably) result in similar decisions on our part. The other people around us will be doing the same thing with respect to the people around them, and soon we will have an entire culture in chaos.
The second thing that will happen is that the culture as a whole will come together in order to pass laws to make certain choices illegal. When a critical mass of the population are making choices that the majority recognize as actively harmful to others and unhealthy for the culture, the majority will come together to declare those choices to be legally out of bounds. In order to make this decision a meaningful one, the culture at large will assign specific penalties to those who decide to make these choices anyway. The culture will then draft a group of people who are specifically authorized and commissioned to both make sure people are making the appropriate choices and to enforce the penalties that have been agreed upon for those who choose to make them anyway.
What this means in practice is that the freedom of any nation is limited to those choices the majority has decided are generally beneficial for people to make. The kick is, the more people try to make choices that are actively and intentionally harmful to those around them in spite of the limitations that have been put in place, the more limitations that will have to be put in place. What turns out to be the case, then, is that in order for freedom to be maintained with the fewest number of external restrictions possible, the people of a certain nation must be committed to making choices that are beneficial for those around them. These kinds of choices we might more generally call virtuous choices.
To put that more directly, without virtue, freedom cannot be maintained for long. The reason is simple. When we make unvirtuous choices that hurt other people, laws must be passed to limit our ability to make those choices. More laws requires a larger governing apparatus in order to sustain and enforce them. Larger governments quickly begin to declare that more and more of the lives of their citizens falls under their purview of authority, a declaration that always translates into more laws and rules and regulations. These laws and rules and regulations restrict freedom by necessity in that they take away our ability to choose from as wide a slate of options as possible.
Lives of virtue, on the other hand, don’t need any such restrictions on them. People who pursue a path of virtue voluntarily choose what is beneficial for those around them. This applies whether we are talking about explicitly Christian virtues or classical virtues that were recognized long before Jesus made His grand appearance and the church exploded into existence.
There’s an additional problem here, though. Virtue isn’t something toward which we are naturally inclined. Left to our own devices, we make choices that are selfish and prideful and hurtful of others with remarkable consistency. Don’t believe me? Just look around. Read the news. The evidence of humanity’s strong commitment to selfish, hurtful, and generally unvirtuous behavior is all over the place. What we need, then, if we want to maintain the freedom we cherish (unless you don’t actually cherish freedom at all, in which case your options broaden considerably, although none of them are very good), we have to have some means of encouraging and sustaining virtue.
Well, historically speaking, there is but one means of sustaining virtue that has demonstrated itself to be able to accomplish such a feat with any amount of consistency. Faith. Not religion per se, but faith. People who have a meaningful faith in the existence of a God or god or divine being more generally whose character or command or both sets out the expectations and boundaries of moral behavior tend to live within those boundaries more consistently than those whose only real guide is their own personal desires. People who simply subscribe to one religion or another for reasons of culture or family expectations or some other perceived obligation do not benefit similarly here as those who have an actual, life-altering faith in the divine head of that religion. And, the character or commands of that divine head matter as well. If the figure is little more than a glorified person with all the same foibles and failings we possess but on a grander scale, the encouragement toward a freedom-sustaining virtue is going to be more limited.
What all of this means is that faith matters. And everyone has faith in something. It may only be faith in themselves, but everyone has some kind of a faith that affects their daily living. The object of that faith matters and not all faith is equal in impact here. The faith that has historically been the most successful at encouraging the kind of virtue that allows for a flourishing of freedom is the Christian faith. That doesn’t mean it is the only one capable of such a feat, and we have to draw a clear line of distinction between cultures that have self-consciously referred to themselves as “Christian” and those marked by a broad-based and genuine commitment to Christ and an application of His character, but the evidence of history suggests that the freest nations have nearly always and almost only been those with at least some measure of commitment to a Christian faith.
Now, what exactly this means for you as an individual is a question for you to answer. But if you live in a cultural context where there is a strong and robust Christian faith tradition, you are far more likely to be able to work that out for yourself freely than if you don’t. So, even if you don’t buy any of the truth claims of the Christian worldview, at least be grateful that there are folks who do. Your ability to enjoy any measure of real freedom just may depend on their being nearby. If you do buy it, then understand just how important your commitment to the character of Christ really is. The freedom of those around you depends on it. It depends on not only your getting it right, but on how well you are able to point others in the same direction. That’s a big job, but so is our call in Christ. Let’s get busy living up to it.
The Nexus 