How do you think of freedom? Perhaps you think of it as the absence of restriction. I think conservatives frequently define it to say the government is not regulating us. The free market is free from government regulation, you see. This negative definition is good as far as it goes, and perhaps the only way it makes sense when a politician talks of freedom.
However, freedom can be positively defined as the ability to fulfill your God-given roles in life, or more simply, the ability to do what is right. (These thoughts are not original with me, in case you are wondering; I’m just blogging off the top o’ me head.)
For example, think of an alcoholic with $20. He could have the first type of freedom by having no restrictions on him from his family or community, and with that freedom he could drink himself into stupor. While he would be free to drink all the whiskey he can afford, he would not be free from the whiskey’s bondage over him, and he would not be free from the turmoil or doubt that lead him to drink in the first place. How can he find that positive freedom? How can he gain the ability to what is right when he has sold himself into an alcoholic bondage?
He needs community. In a sense, he needs less negative freedom in order to obtain more positive freedom. It really does take a village to raise a child, but that village is family, church, and small community, not federal or state government. We may think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we actually act within a social context. We rebel against real or perceived restrictions. We align ourselves with teams or labels because we want to be part of that group, and we want that group to win, generally speaking.
And in the long run, don’t we want to be right? When we make our choices, don’t we want them to succeed, for them to be correct choices whatever that means? That works in community, first with the Lord who made us, next with our family biological or spiritual, and then with our larger community. The ability to do with is right is the upside of freedom.
Happy Fourth of July.
Very good.
Very good, but arguably also dangerous.
Let me explain. There are two models of religion. The one you know from the US is “religion is about doing what God wants me to do”. You may believe that God is upset that some people rejected Him when we has on Earth (Jews, like me), or misunderstand His words (members of other Christian denominations) – but you will not dream of punishing people for having the wrong religion. Or if you, it would be a nightmarish Wolf Time style fantasy – not a positive development.
However, there is a second model of religion, one that is common in the Middle East. I’d love to call it the Islamic model, but Orthodox Judaism also follows it, although in a less violent fashion. In this model, religion is about setting up a society so that everybody will do what God wants – whether they want to or not. You see this model when an Arab father murders his daughter for sleeping around, or when a Jewish Ultra Orthodox family mourns a child for dead for intermarrying(1).
(1) I don’t know if that still happens, but I know my grandfather’s family did it to one of his brothers. For the record, nobody in my family did to me.
Well, Christians haven’t always felt they should not punish others for holding to heresy, even though most examples of heretics being murdered or punished were not carried out by saintly leaders arguing soundly from Scripture. As I understand it, Calvin is accused of having someone hanged (I think) for heresy, but the truth is zealous civil leaders performed the execution over Calvin’s objections. The leaders (if it was Geneva I don’t remember) had no desire to separate church and state. They wanted to codify Calvin’s teaching into civil law.
Putting that aside, many Christians do want to force people into moral lifestyles, but not with violence. To a degree, we’ve already done that in this country. Many laws and former laws come from a Christian context.
I think the old rule (of uncertain provenance) applies: “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.”
The problem, of course, is figuring what’s essential and what’s not.
Good points. Lars, I love the rule you quoted.
Phil: Putting that aside, many Christians do want to force people into moral lifestyles, but not with violence.
Ori: How do you force people except by using force? You can give them incentives, the way IBM gives me an incentive to leave my family and spend this week in Canada (I’m teaching a class in Toronto) – but that is a completely different thing.
Laws are merely force used in a consistent, formalized manner. Laws that are not so enforced are meaningless.
Violence is not the only force. The laws can be enforced with fines, restrictions, jail time, and incentives. It’s still force. Speed limits are enforced without violence, and in the old days when Christians enforced doctrinal standards on their communities, they ran people out of town for heresy. Isn’t that how Pennsylvania or Rhode Island got started?
Speed limits are enforced without violence because the threat of violence is enough. If you speed and a cop catches you, you know you can either stop and get your ticket, or try to run away and have the cop radio for help to stop you. Jail is the same way – people would escape from jail if it weren’t for the guards.
Running people out of town means barring them from their homes – I assume using violence or the threat thereof. But it might have been more voluntary, “I don’t like you, and I don’t think God likes you either so I’ll leave and go somewhere else”.
You seem to be equating force of any kind with violence, but the threat of violence is not violence. Cops are not going to use violence to enforce speeding tickets unless the speeder gets violent first (generally speaking). People can be run out of town without violence, for example, by walking with them from the courthouse to the edge of town and having guards block them from returning.
Anyway, my point in the post was that freedom is not merely the absence of personal restriction and that we all accept some restrictions from our communities without thinking about them.
I suspect we’ll have to agree to disagree on this, it’s becoming a matter of semantics. I agree that freedom is not just the absence of personal restrictions – but I believe that that’s the best that a government can achieve. Other types of freedom require willing cooperation of the person getting the freedom.
Yes, you’re right. As in the example, the alcoholic who does not want to change will not change. You could try to force it on him, but he must buy into a new lifestyle at some point for it to take.