February 27, 2025
By Samuel Goldman
Americans talk a lot about freedom. In his new book, Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License, Brad Littlejohn asks whether the modern understanding of freedom has drifted too far from its theological origins. Although his argument is directed at Christians, Littlejohn raises broader questions about the purposes and limits of government in a "secular age".
What do you mean when you say that Christians are called to freedom?
This title comes from a verse in the book of Galatians, which is probably the book of the Bible that talks most about the idea of freedom. Paul says, “you were called to freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” And in the same chapter, he says “for freedom Christ has set us free.”
For Paul, freedom is not really a political project. The freedom they were called to is not the development of more and more political rights or ability to exercise self-government. The freedom that we are called to is ultimately the freedom of mastery over our sinful desires so we can serve those around us. And it's a freedom that is exercised in community and in which we find our fullest flourishing as members of a body.
That language of “members” and “body” is interesting. We don't really think that much about that metaphor so much now that it’s been 2000 years since Paul coined it. Paul's saying each of us should see ourselves as a body part of this larger community. Our freedom is found in that corporate form.
What does that have to do with freedom in its more familiar political and social sense?
Our current discourse tends to be one-sidedly focused on what Isaiah Berlin called negative liberty. Negative liberty is essentially being left alone, not being tied down. But in itself, it's directionless. And so if you all you have is negative liberty you don't have really human action because human action has to be purposeful and has to be goal oriented. You need an end that you are being driven toward, as opposed to simply feeling free to go in any direction whatsoever, which actually is a sort of sense of paralysis.
So freedom can't just be negative. It has to be positive.
Freedom also can't just be individual. It has to be corporate because we're social creatures. We seek to act in ways that have meaning and that are recognized to have meaning. Just think about something as basic as freedom of speech. This is one of the most prized freedoms but of course it presumes a social context. Speech is meaningless unless there is someone to speak to. And unless that someone understands my speech. They have to speak the same language in order for me to have freedom of speech.
Similarly, in all sorts of other behaviors, we are only free to really act in certain ways if we act within a context of shared understanding in which we know that those actions have certain meanings. One of the frustrations of recent years is that woke progressive norms seem to be constantly changing the rules of the game in terms of what you're allowed to say or how you're allowed to behave. That changes what social significance formerly innocuous actions had in ways that were alienating and confusing. So there needs to be this communal dimension to our action for us to actually experience freedom as individuals.
Finally, we have to think about the inward dimension of freedom as well as the outward dimension of freedom. We tend to think now freedom just means having space out there in the world to protect your agency.
But a paraplegic is not free to walk around, just because nobody's holding him down. He lacks within himself the capacity to walk around. So there's some kind of unfreedom that is internal to him rather than merely external.
Similarly, there are forms of moral unfreedom. What I think Paul is most concerned about is the idea that we can enslave ourselves. We can behave in ways that enslave ourselves so it doesn't matter how much external freedom we have, we're not actually free—if we're addicts, for example. And I think many of us in the modern world are addicts to our various luxuries to our technologies. With that comes a deep inner unfreedom in the midst of our historically unprecedented external freedom.
Is there a risk in applying that idea from moral and spiritual domains to politics? It strikes me that the example you give of the paraplegic is very similar to Lyndon Johnson's famous argument that, to paraphrase, you don't take a man who's been in chains and then say you're free to run a race. I wonder if some people of more-or-less libertarian orientation would say that you’re doing here is providing a justification for a state that uses all kinds of intrusive and coercive powers to give everyone an ostensibly equal degree of freedom when life just doesn't work that way.
Yeah, I think the answer there would be If I remember correctly, I think Lyndon Johnson is using this as a way of saying basically we need to give people more money so that they have more positive freedom to act. So it's a very materialist version and I would say the fundamental error there is thinking that just increasing somebody's material capacity or addressing their current material incapacity is therefore going to make them free.
From the standpoint I'm operating from, moral unfreedom is far more serious issue than any merely material unfreedom. So the government giving people more spending power doesn't really solve the problem. In fact, it might make it worse.
If the government actually wants to address the capacity problem, they would have to address moral incapacity. And that's where I think we would say that's just not something governments are very good at doing.
I think libertarians might say that's not government's business at all, to be worried about moral unfreedom.
I think that's too far because we tend to see addiction as a real threat to human freedom even if it’s the result in some sense of choices taken in the past—choices that have basically destroyed the capacity for choice. So we view regulating addictive substances as a legitimate task of government to help protect people's capacity to develop moral freedom.
But while government can take action to remove or to mitigate some of the worst threats to moral freedom, all that does is makes it more likely that someone might be able to develop into a morally free individual. It doesn't guarantee anything. Ultimately, if somebody wants to be ignorant and slothful and sit around the couch drinking beer and eating potato chips all the time, there's no there's no federal policy that's going to solve it.
I want to return to your earlier point about the importance of a shared context on enabling moral agency. How can we promote that or is that even possible in a pluralistic society?
Shared context does not need to encompass all 350 million Americans. The larger the unit you're talking about, perhaps the thinner the shared norms can be there. But there obviously have to be some shared norms in order for us to have a meaningful public life as a nation.
But what I'm concerned with above all is the is preservation or revitalization of smaller political units that actually offer meaningful sources of identity for Americans and can promulgate shared norms within those communities. That’s how they provide their members with a space for meaningful free action.
Many, many political commentators say that essentially what has happened over the last 100 years is a steady hollowing out of this middle space between the individual and the state. And this is even true of churches. The denominations used to be very strong structures in American life that provided these shared norms and contexts of shared meaning. Denominations have been tremendously weakened so that now most churches are now non-denominational.
The strength of community has also weakened tremendously under the pressure of mass media. Churches feel the need to adapt to new forms of media and offer online worship services so people can just tune in from home. All these things have collectively resulted in a situation where we relate to each other fragmented individuals trying to find something in common with 350 million other fragmented individuals.
I think the fantasy of a Christian nationalist project is like, wouldn't it be great if we could reestablish these shared norms and structures of meaning and grand narratives at a national level? That's never going to happen. But we can we do things to make it more possible for Christian communities and other religious communities to have real integrity and vitality as communities rather than just as places where individuals go to worship or tune in to worship and then carry on the rest of their lives in other very consumeristic contexts.
So that leads up nicely to one last question. Is there any prospect here for some version of fusionism or idea that a relatively restricted state, and especially national state, is actually compatible with religious and social vitality?
I'm skeptical of the language of fusionism because it seems to me to imply that we have found a way of creating this new compound from two different strands, libertarianism and classical conservatism. As if we have found a way of this chemical reaction or a nuclear reaction, turning them into some third thing that is better than either of them alone.
I would say no. I think what you have is a highly unstable compound that has a short half-life and is liable to break down. So as a political project, fusionism needs to be understood as a kind of cobelligerency that is honest about the fact that we can travel together a good ways in pursuit of shared goals or against shared enemies. But there's going to come a parting of the ways where the libertarian says, “okay, we've got rid of the oppressive state, the way is clear for each individual to pursue his own vision of life” and the traditionalist conservative says “now we've gotten rid of the progressive state, let's now aggressively try to create other structured communities within which the individual finds his moral compass.”
I do think that there is an opportunity for co-belligerency in the areas that I've outlined. I'm not sure if it works with a card-carrying Libertarian. But certainly, with somebody who says, going back to what we said about Lyndon Johnson, that what happened in the 1960s was that all these churches, families, voluntary organizations were crowded out by government aid and bureaucracy. These contexts where freedom is genuinely exercised in its fullest form were destroyed or crowded out by too much state action. And so we can all agree that rolling back some of that bureaucracy and re-empowering institutions of civil society is desirable.
I think that's a little different from the original fusionism. Frank Meyer says “look, I'm concerned about morality as well. I'm concerned about moral freedom. But as I see it moral freedom requires individuals able to make their own decisions without the law telling them what to do. And so therefore we need to have a small government so that we can have moral individuals.”
And I would say no, moral freedom requires more freedom for a community that can form the individual. And those communities, as I said, are crowded out by an overgrown state. Therefore, we might need to cut away at the state where it's interfering with the life of those communities. It's a similar kind of fusionism, but I think it's an important tweak because it sees that the goal is healthy communities not maximally free individuals in a libertarian sense.
Brad Littlejohn is Director of Programs and Education at American Compass.