There is a house down the street from us with a homemade plywood sign mounted in the front yard. It reads:
FREEDOM
+
RESPONSIBILITY
=
LIBERTY
Whenever I drive down that windy road and pass the ramshackle house, the sign has given me pause. Is this a local Concord Township tea-party PSA? Just what does 'Freedom' mean anyway? And why is the idea of liberty so important to a person that would motivate them to erect a semi-permanent fixture in their front yard reminding people like me about it every time they drive by?
I don't know anything about the owner of the house. I am also relatively ignorant about our country's founding, our system of government, and our roots as a nation. I mostly write about faith and theology because it's where I live, what I know. Concepts like 'freedom,' 'responsibility,' and 'liberty' are lofty terms with a transcendent quality; they can jump the fence and play with the theological, but they also posses a unique conjuring that is rooted and lives in American political theory.
Poli-sci is not my schtick. I vote, but that's about about as involved as I get in exercising my citizenship. That being said, I am in a ripe position to learn more about things I have for the most part just taken for granted as Joe American--an American in name only. Which is why I am finding Eric Metaxas' If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty such an enlightening read.
As a catechist, I see first hand the consequences of failing to hand on the faith--a faith that has been passed down and transmitted from generation to generation since the time of Jesus. Catholics who identify as such, but can't name any of the Apostles, don't believe in the True Presence in the Eucharist, and are ignorant of the moral precepts of the Church, not to mention the actual daily practice of prayer and immersion in scripture. What you don't preserve, you risk losing. And so there is a real threat there with eternal consequences (eternal damnation) when we fail to take seriously our responsibility to pass the faith down to our children.
What I like about the way Metaxas approaches the topic is that he does not divorce the "experiment in liberty" of the Founding Fathers from its roots in the lofty ideal of religious virtue; what strikes me in fact is that the very existence of the Republic, a nation like no other, so precariously depends on it. "Our Constitution," as John Adams wrote, "was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian, traveled to America in 1831 on behalf of the French government to examine the penal system and report back on what he learned. Tocqueville marveled at the flourishing American democracy at that time, recognizing that the uniqueness of such a system depended on a liberty "which cannot be established without morality, nor without faith."
Metaxas cites Benjamin Franklin who said, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom" and describes a concept referred to as the "Golden Triangle of Freedom" which is a basic but profound kind of 'closed-loop' on which freedom depends. It goes like this:
I don't know anything about the owner of the house. I am also relatively ignorant about our country's founding, our system of government, and our roots as a nation. I mostly write about faith and theology because it's where I live, what I know. Concepts like 'freedom,' 'responsibility,' and 'liberty' are lofty terms with a transcendent quality; they can jump the fence and play with the theological, but they also posses a unique conjuring that is rooted and lives in American political theory.
Poli-sci is not my schtick. I vote, but that's about about as involved as I get in exercising my citizenship. That being said, I am in a ripe position to learn more about things I have for the most part just taken for granted as Joe American--an American in name only. Which is why I am finding Eric Metaxas' If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty such an enlightening read.
As a catechist, I see first hand the consequences of failing to hand on the faith--a faith that has been passed down and transmitted from generation to generation since the time of Jesus. Catholics who identify as such, but can't name any of the Apostles, don't believe in the True Presence in the Eucharist, and are ignorant of the moral precepts of the Church, not to mention the actual daily practice of prayer and immersion in scripture. What you don't preserve, you risk losing. And so there is a real threat there with eternal consequences (eternal damnation) when we fail to take seriously our responsibility to pass the faith down to our children.
What I like about the way Metaxas approaches the topic is that he does not divorce the "experiment in liberty" of the Founding Fathers from its roots in the lofty ideal of religious virtue; what strikes me in fact is that the very existence of the Republic, a nation like no other, so precariously depends on it. "Our Constitution," as John Adams wrote, "was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian, traveled to America in 1831 on behalf of the French government to examine the penal system and report back on what he learned. Tocqueville marveled at the flourishing American democracy at that time, recognizing that the uniqueness of such a system depended on a liberty "which cannot be established without morality, nor without faith."
Metaxas cites Benjamin Franklin who said, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom" and describes a concept referred to as the "Golden Triangle of Freedom" which is a basic but profound kind of 'closed-loop' on which freedom depends. It goes like this:
Freedom requires virtue;
Virtue requires faith;
Faith requires freedom.
These are lofty concepts, but then again our country was founded on lofty ideals, an "experiment in liberty" that was completely unique--of all men created equal, the unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and the concept of self-governance.
* * *
I think what struck me throughout this election cycle was just how far we have drifted from being a nation rooted in virtue. And if the Republic depends on virtue to maintain its very existence, what does that mean for the future of our country?
My vague but driving motivation during this cycle was the issue of religious freedom. While it was important to me on a personal level, I felt it went deeper than just my own personal self-interest, though I couldn't put my finger on why it was important. It wasn't til reading Metaxas' analysis of the importance of religious liberty in maintaining the unique identity and existence of the Republic that I realized that it wasn't some ancillary topic isolated and pursued for its own sake, at odds with the so-called "separation of church-and-state" so often argued today, nor was it simply the mis-quoted "freedom of worship" by political leaders wishing to relegate religious expression to an hour a week within the confines of a church, safely out of the public square.
No, religious expression is tatamount to our very identity as a nation. Virtue depends on it, and on virtue depends our freedom. "As nations become more corrupt and vicious," Benjamin Franklin noted, "they have more need of masters." I think I understand a little better the push-back from ordinary, everyday Americans that felt that something "just ain't right," even if it is just a vague sense that our freedom as citizens were under siege, the Federal Government was overstepping its bounds, and that the idea of self-governance was being undermined as a result.
What is often forgotten, though, is that responsibility is an integral part of the plywood liberty-formula. Self-governance doesn't just happen; we don't just 'do our duty' as citizens at the voting booth and leave the rest to our elected officials. No, the cultivation of virtue is central to our identity as American citizens, and we have an civic obligation to engage in such practice. Not only that, but it must be passed down through generations, and the conduit for such a transmission is none other than the family itself. Healthy societies depend on healthy families, healthy families are formed in the cultivation of virtue, and virtue finds its roots in religious expression. Threats to the family are threats to the potential for self-governance itself, and so liberty is in fact not restricted only to the political, but extends to the realm of faith and religious practice, which help to form strong healthy families.
Or, as Bernard Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman) said in I Heart Huckabees, "It's all connected."
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