In Defense of Christian Freedom

License destroys freedom, and force denies it. True freedom is a perfect paradox: somehow both fully free and fully bound.

Christians are rightly reticent to adopt the progressives’ unnatural definition of freedom. Freedom, we insist, is not simply freedom of the appetites, for appetites enslave the whole person. Freedom, properly conceived, must involve the suppression of those habits that would enslave in favor of those that are humane and allow humans to freely grow into their created nature. Restraint is thus indispensable to freedom. However, in our insistence on restraint, we must not neglect that liberty does indeed still connote a level of autonomy; a man is not free when he is beaten and dragged along the good way.

Our Father does not coerce us; He woos our intellects with His truth, our wills with His goodness, and our appetites with His beauty. This principle is fundamental to the Christian faith. It is our prerogative, not to force baptisms, but to convert souls. This view of liberty as rooted in nature yet freely chosen should shape the Christian approach to government. We should affirm neither the insubstantial “freedom” of liberalism nor the coercive “freedom” of postliberalism. Ultimately, freedom cannot be conferred by the state—either through protecting an ever-growing laundry list of human rights or by imposing systems of virtue on an unwilling people. Freedom must be found, must be taught, must be recounted like a dear memory and lived out by those who have tasted and seen. This is not the role of any distant despot; it is our duty to our neighbor. That is all.

Every person must be allowed to live their own life. No matter how efficient it may be for them to outsource their thinking to machines, their labor to foreign industries, and their basic sustenance to the state, they must insist on each doing their own living. In his book Heretics, Chesterton mocks the technological reasoning that proposes we export the common person’s life to the expert, saying, “Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on,” he warns, “only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.”

This world of specialization and alienation does not lead individuals in the good way. Rather, Josef Pieper in Leisure As the Basis of Culture suggests that the only way to “deproletarianize” the masses is to free them from narrow, servile work by offering the ordinary person a chance at owning property, by limiting the power of the state, and by “overcoming the inner impoverishment of the individual” through the liberal arts. It is only when the individual learns how to “occupy his leisure”—when he learns to live his life well—that he will really be liberated. It is through self-government, yes, but not in the distant, impersonal sense. Government, like writing our own love letters, says Chesterton, is another one of those things each of us must do ourselves. We do not become more human when we go to the ballot box; we become more human when we are bent in compassion before our neighbor in need.

Civil society is the arena in which real life is lived. The more of life’s basic responsibilities society shrugs off and cedes to the state, the more emaciated this civil society will become. Sir Roger Scruton, in his book How To Be a Conservative, observes that “the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.” This is the great tragedy of our time. We scramble towards the ballot box and demand our right to join in setting the machine in motion. Yet, as soon as we have pressed our way into the throng, we have lost the ability to take a stand outside of it. We clamor for the right to vote and bind ourselves to conscription. We demand free healthcare and cede our ability to care for ourselves. We protest the welfare system’s shortcomings and render our neighbor’s suffering someone else’s problem. The belief that freedom is conferred by the state has led each person, in the name of liberty, to hand over the reins of their own lives and join the mindless mechanism of the state.

Power cannot restore what herein was lost. Power cannot and should not force those habits of heart and mind that once animated society. When power imposes a certain end on civil institutions, it simply stifles their growth. Schools, churches, book clubs, and art societies cannot be mechanized and harnessed for a monolithic, progressive social purpose. They must be allowed to simply be. “Intrinsic values,” Scruton says, “are not imposed by some outside authority or instilled through fear. They grow from below.” Alexis de Tocqueville was likewise insistent that a just constitution alone does not have the strength to reform a society unless the people already have virtuous mores. It is with the hearts, the intellects, and the wills that we must begin, not by the exertion of power but by the attraction of love, to draw Americans again toward the good way.

This is what Christians must recognize: shaping the habits of hearts and minds is not a top-down endeavor. A true conversion of the will and intellect cannot be forced. Love cannot be forced. The beauty—and the power—of the Christian ethic is that it is truly humane. And so, it is for Christians to simply display the beautiful freedom that comes from living the life we were made for. We do not have to grope for power for fear that the sword will elsewise be used against us; the truth shall endure despite persecution. If we truly believe that this life of faith and family, work and rest, association and contemplation is natural to us—if we believe it is truly humane—then we should trust its profound freedom and beauty to speak for itself.

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