Earlier this month, in honor of the anniversary of our nation’s founding, I wrote about the meaning of freedom at Crisis Magazine. Ours is a materialistic culture that increasingly views freedom solely in terms of license and power. This does not reflect the human experience and does not serve us well.
We don’t have to look far to find examples of people who want freedom that is merely the ability to do whatever we want. On the other hand, I argue:
In the Christian worldview, the Cross—a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles—is the means of our salvation. What, then, is the freedom that Christ offers? Freedom for the Christian is not found in self-sufficiency but in our weakness.
True freedom is, in the end, doing the good.
In thinking about the United States of America and freedom, I cannot help but return to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her conclusion that God is America’s King. In the story of Little Town on the Prairie, 15-year-old Laura realizes that freedom is doing the good:
She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.
Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’s God, to Thee, author of liberty…” The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.
There is much more that could be said about interior freedom. For now, here are a few thoughts on the growing conservative movement and the expanding, and diluted, understanding of what freedom means.
