Sunday, November 26, 2023
Sunday Reflection: On Freedom
Yesterday, I had a piece in the Waco paper (you can read it here) about the tendency for politicians to talk a lot about freedom, but not actually value it. In truth, the threat to our freedom almost always comes from ourselves, not a foreign power-- and we recently have done a lot to restrict personal freedom.
And freedom is an important thing. I believe there was a creator, and that our creator gave us great agency over own lives. We get to make important choices about the things that create our paths. We are built that way. With that agency comes responsibility, of course. We have the freedom, physically, to harm other people-- but that doesn't mean we should. So much of morality is about personal restraint of the freedom we have, but that is very different than governmental restraint, when we are told what we can read, who can vote, what happens with our bodies.
Freedom from government control is what allows our conscience to roam to those counter-cultural places the Christian faith points to-- sacrifice, austerity, love for enemy. When we talk about it but don't protect it, we denigrate our faith above all.
