Each year this day reminds me that Christians have much to tell America about the nature of true freedom, even while they are grateful for a country that allows them the liberty to practice their faith pretty much as they wish and need. Too often today, however, Freedom is thought of as the ability to do anything we want -- without real regard to others or their similar call to Freedom. Understood this way, freedom (license) is the quintessential value of the narcissist. Unfortunately, the pandemic our global community continues to face has revealed just how prevalent is the valuing of liberty (a license our founders did not enshrine in the Constitution) over genuine freedom; we are seeing it both touted and modeled by our leading politicians and their supporters.
And yet, within Christian thought and praxis freedom is the power to be the persons we are called to be. It is the direct counterpart of Divine sovereignty and is other-centered. I believe our founding fathers had a keen sense of this, but today, it is a sense Americans often lack. Those of us who celebrate the freedom of Christians can help recover a sense of this necessary value by embracing it more authentically ourselves. Not least we can practice a freedom which is integrally linked to correlative obligations and exists for the sake of all; that is, it involves an obligation to be there for the other, most especially the least and poorest among us so that they too may be all that God has called them to be. We act and struggle to allow everyone to have a voice, indeed, to have their own voice in their lives and workplaces, in the political and other choices they make and seek to ratify in voting their minds and hearts.
In the past several years, the wearing of surgical masks and sheltering-in-place have become small but powerful symbols of this kind of freedom and its correlative sacrifice for the sake of others. And yet, how difficult these relatively minor inconveniences have been for so many of us. Many simply refuse to put others first (or consider them at all!). And yet, the truth remains that one way we celebrate this holiday is by refraining from any usual practices which endanger others and our planet --- eschewing fireworks wherever it is unsafe, maintaining social distancing, working for the rights of all, etc. In so doing we demonstrate our freedom to be loving persons who, despite minor inconveniences like masking and continued social distancing, are only ourselves and only truly free in interdependence with others and all of creation.
But today the United States is in danger of choosing to "protect" our freedom by refusing to open ourselves to "the other". In significant ways it defends racism and the way it is exercised in law enforcement and symbolized in monuments to past historical figures whose legacy is stained, at best. This year the refusal to be open to the other took the form of a refusal to accept the results of a legal election and a concerted effort to subvert the results of that election climaxing in the desecration of our Capitol's most powerful symbol of freedom in a riot that killed and/or injured capitol police and others. In all of this we have forgotten that we are free only insofar as we are open to loving others, to sharing our lives and our freedom with the other, the alien. Like love, personal freedom is lost when we fail to extend it to others and make "neighbors" of them.
Once we build walls against the other so too have we walled ourselves into the narrow confines of our own fear, ignorance, or selfishness. Authentic freedom always seeks the freedom of the other, including the freedom to let everyone vote their consciences without unfair constraints. It is expansive and, to some extent, missionary in nature. And it is sacrificial. While the boundaries of American freedom involve borders and finite resources that must be honored and husbanded, its heart is global and so must its vulnerability be.
All good wishes on this anniversary of the birthday of our Nation! May God empower us to live up to the obligations of the freedom, both personal and national, which we recognize as both Divine gift and human responsibility. And may we celebrate the interdependence we are sometimes still only just learning to associate with this Freedom !
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