We celebrate the American achievement of human liberty this Fourth of July. Every July 4, everywhere in America, we see liberty extolled. But what does liberty mean? Does every individual have the ability to do what they will, or does true liberty entail limits? A consideration of the meaning of liberty is as important today as ever, as our culture applies liberty to all sorts of activities and ideas that are harmful to human dignity and human flourishing.
Liberty—and freedom, a synonym for liberty—is an ambiguous word. Everyone who uses it assumes that everybody understands what it means and agrees on how it should be used. The word liberty is a lot like the word love, but we know that love has different meanings and different applications, even though we all assume a universal understanding for what it means. Misuse of the term love, as in the expression “love is love,” comes from the problem of ambiguity. In a similar way, misunderstanding of liberty, illustrated in the expression, “my body, my choice,” comes from the same problem. We need to be careful about how we understand what freedom means, and what it does not mean.
At the core of American political philosophy is a commitment to liberty. The Preamble to the Constitution, precisely and explicitly articulates the purpose of government in America, which is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The role of government is not to define the common good, but to set the conditions by which citizens can discover the good for themselves.
The Founders understood liberty to be the birthright of every individual, drawing on the Western tradition going back to the second century. Liberty is based on natural rights and is only possible under the rule of just law. Liberty is expressed in specific contexts—there is religious liberty, which entails a disestablished church and the ability to practice faith in public and private. There is economic liberty, based on the sanctity of private property, which is the product of mixing one’s labor with the stuff of the earth. Once a good is produced by an individual laborer, that good cannot be taken away without the consent of the laborer, and the laborer has the ability to dispose of his property in the way that he chooses. There is political liberty, in that government is limited as to what it can do. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” And one of the great limitations to governmental power is that all government is by consent of the governed.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
John is a professor of church history and philosophy and chairman of the Church History Department at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
