The idea of freedom is not absent from the Holy Scriptures. Their approach to it is unique, however. It is not an absolute value; it is always hedged about with various limitations. The Holy Apostle Peter’s First Epistle to the Christians in Asia Minor provides a good example of this. He writes,
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation. Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God (I Peter 3:11-16).
This is not quite what we have ended up with in the United States. Christianity has always been present amongst us, but so too have other influences, some of them outright pagan, as Christopher Ferrara shows in his indispensable book Liberty: The God That Failed:
After 1770, writes Albanese, “songs began to appear which celebrated the Goddess [of Liberty]” and “preachers took up the cause of the Goddess in their turn.” For example, Jacob Duché, the Chaplain to the Continental Congress who delivered its opening prayer, gave a sermon explaining how Liberty “true to her divine source, is of heavenly abstraction” and that both Liberty and the “divine virtue” which is her “illustrious parent” come to dwell “in the hearts of all intelligent beings” where “they ought jointly to be worshipped.”
The sign and sacrament of this veritable cult of the Goddess Liberty was the Liberty Tree in Boston . . . . As Oliver’s brother wrote, Liberty Tree had been “consecrated as an idol for the mob to worship” and was the place for imposing the discipline of the “Tree of Ordeal [on those] whom the Rioters pitched upon as State delinquents.” In addition to being both a totem and locus of the power of Liberty, Liberty Tree was a place of worship where revolutionary liturgies were enacted. In Providence, Rhode Island a Liberty Tree was dedicated during a ceremony in which the participants laid their hands on the sacred object as a local minister invoked the worldwide unity of a kind of mystical body of Liberty . . . .
The “sacred elm,” writes Albanese, became “a kind of transcendent cosmo-historical tree around which the other Liberty Trees and liberty signs of the colonies took root . . . Like the sacrament it was, Liberty Tree was the reality which oriented the patriots, yet it pointed beyond itself to another source of power”—the power invoked by Paine with his talk of remaking the world and regenerating man in a disquieting analogy to the working of divine grace (Tacoma, Wash., Angelico Press, 2012, pgs. 150-1).
A group of Yankee Christians known as the National Reform Association saw clearly the spiritual battle between Christianity and heathenism that has been waged since the early days of the newly-independent States:
Even more explicitly prophetic was the President of Wheaton College, Prof. Charles Blanchard, whose address to the 1874 convention [of the NRA—W.G.], entitled “The Conflict of Law,” predicted that, failing adoption of the proposed Christian Amendment, no state law favorable to Christianity “can stand a suit in the Supreme Court of the United States. . . . This conflict of law is inevitable and irrepressible. Our laws will be heathenized or our Constitution Christianized, and Americans must soon decide which they will have done.” In like manner, Felix Brunot’s address warned that while “Our nation is Christian . . . the Constitution is unchristian. . . . Can this anomaly continue? Impossible. One by one your Christian laws . . . and all the Christian features of State Constitutions, must come to the test of the Constitution of the United States; and they must fall before it.”
. . . Under the influence of the Godless Constitution as wielded by anti-Christian forces, predicted Tayler Lewis, it would not be long before “our whole political page becomes a pure, unbelieving, irreligious, Christless, Godless blank” (Ibid., pgs. 533-4, 535).
It is clear which side has won in this battle, as the States have been scrubbed of most everything overtly Christian in public spaces. Even federal Supreme Court cases that conservatives have cheered, like Dobbs v Jackson, make no mention of Christianity at all (which makes the victories doubtful over the long run).
Thus, instead of the Christian idea of limited freedom directed toward virtuous ends (and ultimately to union with God Himself), we have the Luciferian-Promethean idea of unlimited freedom. Examples –
. . .
The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2024/04/garlington-at-the-extremes-of-liberty/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
