What Is true Freedom?

Freedom is the song of the human heart. Our forefathers crossed the sea to find freedom on these shores. They forged the United States constitution to protect this freedom from governmental tyranny. And they shed their blood on every continent to defend human freedom from the armed assaults of evil governments.

From Francis Scott Key’s, “the land of the free,” To Sammy Davis Jr.’s “I’ve Got to Be Me,” to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” freedom’s song still rings out in every generation. That’s the good news.

We still have common ground. We all yearn to be free. We all have the same indominable desire to be the person that we are, to be true to ourselves. This desire for liberty strikes such a deep chord in us that it is unarguable. It is common ground. It binds us together as human beings.

So why is it that this solid common ground does not seem to be holding us together anymore, but tearing us apart? In times past, “Freedom!” was a rallying cry that united us in a common struggle against every oppressor. Today, “Freedom!” is more often a cry that divides us into a million individuals competing against one another for power to make others bend to my will.

In times past, fighting for freedom meant fighting both Nazis and Communists, totalitarians of all sorts who would undermine or destroy the constitution of the United States. Today so-called “freedom-fighters” may openly oppose the constitution and believe that it is a hindrance to their true freedom.

What happened? The answer is fairly straight-forward. While the definition of freedom has remained the same, the definition of who we are, has been turned on its head. Freedom remains the ability to be who I am, to think, speak, and act according to my true humanity. All of us still agree on this. But we have become divided on the more foundational question: What IS my true humanity?

Who ARE you? Who AM I? Are we the same, or are we utterly different? And if we are the same, how are we the same and what unites us?

This is the root problem in public discourse today. Everybody is yelling out “freedom.” Everyone wants to be free to be who you are. But There are two wildly different accountings of who we are.

One accounting says that we are creatures, first and foremost. The Declaration of Independence says, “all men ARE CREATED equal.” Our equality is firmly grounded in a common Creator. “They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Human rights are not given by governments, but given by our Creator.

Because there is a common Creator above us all, our individual human rights cannot be in conflict, but must be in perfect harmony with everyone else’s rights. And governments, because they neither created us nor gave us our rights, are duty-bound to recognize and protect the God-given rights of every individual.

This accounting of human nature was the bedrock of our US constitution. It is also found imbedded within the constitution of every state. All fifty states in our union have reference to God or the divine in their constitution.

The other accounting of human nature denies a common Creator. This denial comes in so many shapes and sizes that it is impossible to enumerate them all here. For the moment, it is enough to say that a common Creator is denied – either explicitly or implicitly.

But without a common creator, it is practically impossible to account for human rights. If there is no common Creator above us, are there multiple creators so that we are divided one from another and fundamentally different? Or is there no creator at all, so that each person is his or her own creator?

Either way, rights come into conflict. Interests cannot be harmonized. People are pitted against each other. We are tribalized, or atomized into a million competing individuals with no real hope of harmony. This world-view raises some serious questions both about human rights, and about the nature of government.

If I am not endowed with full human rights by virtue of my conception as a human, just exactly how and when do humans get any rights at all? We see these confusions at work in everything from embryonic ethics to assisted suicide debates. For these unfortunate people, right to life and liberty is not absolute, but depends entirely upon what other people think about them.

If there is not a God who transcends every human being and every human institution, just exactly who are we responsible to? What principle limits government?

America was not born in a vacuum. The founding fathers did not simply assume a Creator because they didn’t have the imagination to think any other way. At the writing of the Declaration of Independence, there were already philosophers and ways of thinking that discounted God, and posited that human beings alone were the source and measure of all things.

Those philosophies led France to a completely different kind of revolution than America experienced. The history of the French Revolution is bloody and hellish. Those who seized power from the crown were not humble and restrained like the authors of the US Constitution.

Heads rolled. A lot of them. The guillotine first killed the royalty. Then, it turned on the people. Without accountability to a Creator, the revolutionary government became a god unto itself.
We saw the same thing happen in Hitler’s Germany with its extermination of 10 million, and in Stalin’s Russia which liquidated 50 million of its own citizens, and in Mao’s China which is still killing and imprisoning its own people, and the list goes on, and on.

Each of these places tried to replace the common Creator with a different basis for unity. Each made the sovereign individual the basis of freedom, and wound up denying rights to millions of those same individuals.

So back to the question at hand. What is true freedom? I am thankful that we have such a solid common-ground. That we all want to be free to live true to ourselves, provides us with a huge potential for unity around this idea.

But whether or not we achieve that unity, depends entirely upon how we answer the prior question: Who are we?

Are we fundamentally creatures, accountable to a Creator? If so, the path to true freedom lies in knowing who I am through His eyes, through His revelation. And seeing myself through God’s eyes, I can have every confidence that my freedom serves my neighbor and does not impinge on the freedoms of those created by the same God.

But if we are fundamentally independent and sovereign beings, with no Creator, we have a challenge before us that no country has ever yet figured out how to live with. If my true freedom depends only on actualizing self-will, how can I ever be confident that my freedom serves my neighbor and is not in direct competition with everyone around me?

Each person must wrestle with these questions for himself or herself. My only purpose here is to point out the necessity of thinking this through. I know where I stand. I hope you will stand with me. But either way, the more thought we give to these questions, the better chance we have to understand ourselves and one another.