From chapter 5 of his book ‘Making Sense of God’, Timothy Keller wrote (an invitation to the skeptical):
Why Can’t I Be Free to Live as I See Fit, as Long as I Don’t Harm Anyone?
When “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung at sporting events, the climactic phrase comes to an elongated high note: “O’er the land of the freeee . . .” The cheers begin here. Even though the song goes on to talk about “the brave,” this is an afterthought. Both the melody line and our culture highlight freedom as the main and value of our society. It’s our national anthem, and for good reason.
Certainly anyone in our society who seeks to measure “progress” will do so to a great degree by measuring increasing freedoms. Justice is done when marginalized and oppressed groups are given more political and economic freedom. Religions, as well as nonbelief, all flourish more when society gives freedom to believe, live, and worship (or not worship) as their consciences lead them. In their landmark sociological study of American culture, Robert Bellah and other researchers discovered that “For Americans . . . freedom was perhaps the most important value.”1
Human beings have always valued freedom, of course. There have been slave revolts back to at least Spartacus and the Third Servile War in the first century BC.2 Aristotle and Plato called for freedom and democracy, though in a very limited way and for a limited populace. But today, as Bellah and company discovered, freedom has become perhaps the only publicly shared and moral value of our culture. In Alan Ehrenhalt’s study of 1950’s Chicago, he summarizes the modern attitude: “Most of us in America believe a few simple propositions that seem so clear and self-evident they scarcely need to be said. Choice is a good thing in life, and the more of it we have, the happier we are. Authority is inherently suspect; nobody should have the right to tell others what to think or how to behave.”3 Charles Taylor gives his own expression of the secular moral order: “Let each person do their own thing, and . . . one shouldn’t criticize the others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do. The [only] sin which is not tolerated is intolerance.”4 As Ehrenhalt notes, these slogans about freedom are today considered self-evident givens, truth that everyone knows intuitively and that cannot be questioned.
The History of the Idea
How did freedom become not just one valuable thing among many but the ultimate good? (continued – this is the first of three posts) ~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (New York, New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2016), 97-98. (continued, see * Free to Live as I See Fit II)
