The Freedom of Religion

Religion cannot be other than freedom and still remain true religion. Fear, which is the antithesis of true religion and the heart of false religion, promotes autonomy and, in turn, produces slavery. True religion, rooted in love, promotes submission and, in turn, produces freedom. If freedom is the ability to act free from external compulsion, then the restraining influence of religion is what preserves freedom. To be sure, fear masquerades as an efficient restraint, but it is a pseudo-restraint. Restraining with fear is like damming a river: It works for a while but only by forcing the river to do what it does not want to do. Eventually, the dam will break, and the restraining efforts will have only exasperated the problem. Religion’s restraint is different. It does not dam the river; it changes its course and then allows its free flow. Fear can change a man’s actions, but only religion can change his nature.

After decades of communism and fear’s restraining influence in Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel lamented the “contaminated moral environment” that existed there. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, and forgiveness had all but disappeared. “We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves.”¹The Czechs had no religion. And without religion, as Edmund Burke argued, “it is utterly impossible” to empty ourselves “of all the lust of the selfish will.”² Where there is no religion, there is no real restraint. We walk according to the self, doing whatever fear does not condemn. We stumble around as ethical eunuchs.³

True religion, on the other hand, changes a man and makes him responsible. Fear, like damming a river, can never genuinely achieve this end; it can only delay irresponsibility. The difference between religion and fear is the difference between the “ought” and the “or else.” Through external compulsion, fear does what religion does by internal transformation. In an address to the United States Congress, Havel admonished, “We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.”⁴ Havel is right. There is no such thing as autonomous responsibility. Autonomy, by definition, precludes responsibility because it claims for man what alone belongs to God—complete, unchallenged, and inscrutable determination and execution of will. To whom is man responsible without religion? To himself? Then to no one. When God is recognized “as the living norm and point of reference for all existence,” there can be real responsibility—but not before.⁵

Responsibility is indispensable to freedom because either anarchy or tyranny will assume the throne whenever responsibility abdicates. To use John Fletcher Moulton’s language, without religion there is no “obedience to the unenforceable,” that middle ground between law and freedom where restraint is self-imposed.⁶ When citizens lose a sense of responsibility, the middle ground collapses. Freedom grows wildly upward, extending until it meets the heavy downward thrust of law. Over time, either unchecked freedom will break through the dam of law and lead to anarchy or the weight of law will crush freedom and produce tyranny.

By expanding this middle ground, religion preserves both the individual liberty that freedom desires as well as the individual responsibility that law seeks to engender. Moulton contended that the “real greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of this land of obedience to the unenforceable.”⁷ In a similar vein, Burke believed that corruption of laws was not nearly as serious as what he called the corruption of manners. “Whilst manners remain entire, they will correct the vices of law, and soften it at length to their own temper.” ⁸ The deterioration of manners, which depend on the spirit of religion, means the degeneration of generosity, humility, and dignity.

Conversely, the improvement of society has followed the flourishing of the unenforceable ought. When the first Great Awakening swept New England, Jonathan Edwards noted a “strange alteration” in behavior provoked “by a powerful invisible influence.” The revival of true religion did what fear and law could not do: It made the people responsible and, therefore, made them free. “In vain did ministers preach against those things before, in vain were laws made to restrain them, and in vain was all the vigilance of the magistrates and civil officers; but now they have almost everywhere dropt them [their bad behavior] as it were of themselves.”⁹

The Awakening in New England, which encouraged obedience to the unenforceable and promoted responsibility and freedom, was true religion, but, as has been intimated, not all religion is true religion. There are counterfeits that bear all the resemblance of religion but work counterproductive to the goals of true religion. Take equality, for example. Religion, it is thought, makes men equal. Lincoln was dedicated to this proposition, and Jefferson believed it to be self-evident. It is assumed that religion abolishes distinctions and promotes thoroughgoing egalitarianism. After all, is not equality a necessary mark of the imago Dei? Religion, it is claimed, makes men equal, which, in turn, makes them free.

This position, however, is no longer tenable. Fear makes men equal. Religion makes men free. Certainly, every religious person must acknowledge that there is an intrinsic worth to all human life that makes any bigotry in our hearts, prejudice in our society, or inequity in our courts anathema. But that is not the problem because that is not equality—at least not anymore. There is, at present, a kind of equalitarianism that undermines true religion and, consequently, endangers real freedom. Equality before the law is one thing, but equality of condition, ability, and achievement is quite another. Where the latter is promised, there can only be a collapse of freedom because this sort of equality is impossible. “Whatever efforts a people may make,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete equality of position, the inequality of minds would still remain, which coming directly from the hand of God, will forever escape the laws of man.”¹⁰ Once the natural and even God-given inequality of life is recognized, those who still hold to the myth of absolute equality of condition, ability, and achievement will have no other recourse but despotism. “Nothing but a despotism could enforce anything so unrealistic, and this explains why modern governments dedicated to this program have become, under one guise and another, despotic.”¹¹ Religion does not entail equality of condition because this equality binds men instead of setting them free.

Similarly, look at the contemporary cry for tolerance. Tolerance is often hailed as a religious virtue, but it is nothing of the sort. Tolerance is merely a product of an emasculated secular religious ethos based on fear—fear of being wrong, of being right, of being offended, and of being offensive. Surely, there should be legal tolerance and even social tolerance for those different from ourselves, but intellectual and religious tolerance sets the bar too low.¹² The problem is not that tolerance asks for too much, but that it asks for too little. It seeks external conformity to some arbitrary standard of civility, which can never be true religion, for true religion goes far beyond tolerance and leads to love. What Richard Weaver said about fraternity and equality fifty years ago is true about religion and tolerance today: “Fraternity directs attention to others, equality to self.”¹³ The Apostle Paul did not advocate unity among the Corinthians because of tolerance but because of their mutual love. Yet we are told to be tolerant, not because love of neighbor compels us, but because all ideas and beliefs, especially our own, are said to have equal validity. When this validity is challenged, however, there is no hope for unity because there is no religious virtue, no bond of love, on which to fall. There is only fear.

But religion charts a more excellent way. Instead of tolerance, it offers benevolence. Instead of equality, fraternity. Instead of civility, charity. Tolerance and equality are lorded over; religion is loved. As John Calvin says in his section on civil government in his Institutes, “Love will give every man the best counsel.”¹⁴ Love is stronger than equality and harder than tolerance because perfect love has no place for fear. But this love must be religious love. And religious love is not simply kindness. It requires transformation. It means a fundamental reordering of perspective.

Religious love abandons self and looks to others because it has an eye toward God. And we can have an eye to love God only because he first set his sights on loving us. This is crucial. The freedom found in love, found in true religion, is pure only because it is an extension of God’s freedom to act in love toward his creation. Just as God is not compelled or coerced to love, so his love allows us to act free from external determination. By definition, our love looks to God first, others second, and self never. In the end, the freedom of love, with its invisible power of self-restraint, always leads to responsibility, which is true freedom.

This is the essence of true religion, and it is indispensable for society. True religion, with its transforming love, acts as society’s conscience, minister, and preservative. It restrains wickedness, promotes goodness, and prevents corruption. Working with an internal invisible hand, religion does something that fear, working with an external visible club, can never do. It makes men responsible, thereby making them free.