Elliot Ritzema

Tag: America

  • The Slavery of “Freedom”

    We Americans love to talk about freedom.

    We call ourselves “the land of the free”; our Declaration of Independence talks about liberty as an “inalienable right”; there are still few things that can get an American riled up like the threat of a loss of freedom.

    But our freedom is in jeopardy, says Os Guinness in his new book, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future (there is a very good three part interview with Guinness by Timothy Dalrymple). Guinness doesn’t find the primary threat to our freedom in an external source, like another nation, or even “big government” or “big business” or special interests. No, the enemy is us. Freedom cannot be won for all time and then left alone; it needs to be sustained. And, Guinness writes, Americans are failing to sustain the freedom our nation’s founders worked so hard to win: “The problem is not wolves at the door but termites in the floor. Powerful free people die only by their own hand, and free people have no one to blame but themselves” (37). The vision of freedom we Americans are pursuing is “short-lived and suicidal” (29).

    (Side note: The title A Free People’s Suicide might seem bombastic, but it comes from a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”)

    The problem with our vision of freedom is that the freedom we love to talk about and claim for ourselves focuses exclusively on freedom from external constraints. There are two kinds of freedom: freedom from constraint (negative freedom) and freedom for cultivating virtue and becoming the people we ought to be (positive freedom). Modern Americans are only interested in negative freedom. We claim rights and entitlements for ourselves, but do not care about duty, virtue, character, or pursuing excellence. Negative freedom alone is unsustainable. Freedom from external restraint, without self-restraint, undermines itself.

    What can be done? Guinness argues that we need to return to the founders’ vision of freedom, which he calls the “Golden Triangle of Freedom.” He demonstrates that the founders did not have a vision of freedom that stopped with freedom from constraint. Rather, their vision of freedom was part of an interdependent triangle: freedom requires virtue; virtue requires faith; faith requires freedom.

    Perhaps the most controversial part of this triangle of freedom in our time is faith (Eric Metaxas wrote a good review of this book in the Christian Post focusing on this point). The point for Guinness, and I agree, is not necessarily that the founders were Christians (though some were). Rather, the point is that the founders (even the Deists) were unanimous in their approval of faith of any kind, because faith fosters virtue, and only a virtuous people can remain free.

    Guinness’ book is intended not just for Christians or religious people, but for all Americans who care about freedom. For that reason, I understand his arguing for faith as part of the golden triangle of freedom on pragmatic grounds (he follows the founders in adopting this tactic). Nevertheless, I think his argument ought to have particular force for Christians. The Bible also understands freedom as not merely freedom from constraint.

    Seven times in the book of Exodus, God (through Moses) says, “Let my people go so that they may serve me.” (Exod 5:1; 7:16; 8:1, 20; 9:1, 13; 10:3). Jesus said, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36), but he also said, “Take my yoke upon you” (Matt 11:29). One of the earliest Christians’ favorite self-designations was “slave of Christ” (Rom 1:1; 1 Cor 7:22; Gal 1:10; Phil 1:1; Titus 1:1; Jas 1:1; 2 Pet 1:1; Jude 1; Rev 1:1). Freedom, for the Christian, can never be merely about freedom from external constraints. It begins with freedom from constraint, but doesn’t stop there. Christian freedom is not just freedom from, but freedom for: freedom to serve God and others. From a Christian perspective, those who begin by thinking freedom is merely the absence of external constraints end by becoming slaves to their own appetites: greed, lust, and desire for power.

    I applaud Guinness’ effort to prod Americans to do the hard work of sustaining freedom. I hope his argument gains a wide hearing. In particular, I hope his argument gains traction among Christians, who are just as prone to only care about negative freedom as anyone else, but who have the least reason for doing so.

    Note: Thanks to InterVarsity Press for a review copy.

  • Book Review: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

    Many American Christians operate within a “fall paradigm” when it comes to the history of the United States. A fall paradigm sees the world like this: at some point in the past, things were the way they should be. Then something happened (a “fall”) that changed things for the worse. Our task today is to get things back to the way they were. There is nothing inherently wrong with a fall paradigm. The question is whether it depicts reality accurately or not.

    Enter John Fea, who teaches history at Messiah College. He explains in his introduction that one of his goals in the book is to convince his readers to think historically:

    Most human beings tend to be present-minded when it comes to confronting the past. The discipline of history was never meant to function as a means of getting one’s political point across or convincing people to join a cause. Yet Americans use the past for these purposes all the time. Such an approach to the past can easily degenerate into a form of propaganda or, as the historian Bernard Bailyn described it, “indoctrination by historical example.” (xxv)

    The book comes in three parts. In the first part, he traces the idea that the United States was meant to be, in some sense, “Christian,” from the 1700s to today. In the second part, he examines the question, “Was the American Revolution a Christian Event?” In the third, he looks at the religious beliefs of a range of founders: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Witherspoon, John Jay and Samuel Adams.

    The last line of the book, which is intended to summarize Part Three, actually does a good job of summing up the book as a whole: “In the end, a close look at the beliefs of these statesmen reminds us that Christianity was present at the time of the American founding, but it often merged with other ideas that were compatible with, but not necessarily influenced by, Christianity” (242). When I wrote a paper on this subject for a history class in seminary, this is what I found as well. I don’t believe that the fall paradigm through which many Christians see the history of the United States is entirely accurate.

    I enjoyed this book a great deal, and I hope that it reaches a large audience, especially Christians. I hope that Fea accomplishes his goal of getting “Christians to see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political or cultural agenda in the present” (xvii).