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 one wants -- without real regard for others or their similar call and right to Freedom. Understood this way, freedom (which is really a misunderstanding of license) is the quintessential value of the narcissist. Unfortunately, the pandemic our global community continues to face in greater and lesser ways, 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 some of our leading politicians and their supporters.
And yet, within Christian thought and praxis, freedom is the power to be the persons we are called by God to be. It is the direct counterpart of Divine sovereignty and is other-centered and rooted in empowering relationships. 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 and speak with 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. As COVID's danger waxes and wanes and waxes yet again with every new variant, many simply refuse to put others first (or consider them at all!). Still, 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 whenever appropriate, are only ourselves and only truly free in interdependence with others and all of creation.
But today portions of the United States are in danger of choosing to "protect" a narrow, crippled notion of freedom by refusing to open us to "the other". In significant ways, some in power defend 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 banning of books, marginalizing of citizens we consider somehow defective or alien, actions taken to prevent all of our citizens from voting or otherwise being effectively heard in our country, and the growing white supremacist movement and unethical and politicized tendencies in even the most powerful and revered court of our land, color this day with shame and sadness. 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, and those without the privilege of certain forms of wealth and power. 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 and lost our most fundamental identity as the US, the democratic republic we desire to defend. Some today even militate for a second civil war!! But 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 which must be honored and husbanded, its heart is global and so must its vulnerability be --- not only to those who wish to join us in this enterprise of freedom, but to the needs, yearnings, and potential of all of our citizens -- no matter their party, creed, color, or degree of conformity with what we may call the will of God.
All good wishes on this anniversary of the birthday of our Nation! May God empower us to live up to the obligations of the personal and national freedom, we recognize as both a Divine gift and human responsibility. And may we respect and celebrate the interdependence we are sometimes still only just learning to associate with this Freedom!
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