Enslaved to liberty

Westerners love liberty. It is our inheritance. But have we traded it for the pottage of license? Brad Littlejohn assumes so. His latest book, Called to Freedom (B&H Academic, 192 pp.), offers a challenge to the predominant libertine myths of our age, which confuse Christian liberty with antinomianism and anarchism. We are primed to think that any limit to our liberty by the state or society is an injustice, and we are often blind to the ways we enslave ourselves. A big part of the problem, according to Littlejohn, is that we have confused categories when it comes to freedom. To tease out true liberty, he helps us disambiguate dimensions of freedom.

Littlejohn structures the work by tracing out the distinctions between spiritual, moral, and political freedom. He argues that things go awry when we do not properly distinguish these freedoms. His exposition gets particularly interesting when he combines this threefold distinction with his three “axes” of freedom. Those are: (1) the tension between negative and positive liberty, (2) the tension between individual and corporate liberty, and (3) the tension between inward and outward liberty.

Spiritual freedom can be understood (with reference to Littlejohn’s axes) primarily in “negative” terms: We are freed from the guilt of sin and the burden of good works as a means of earning eternal life. If we fail to grasp this, we will remain under the curse of the law, either as condemned under divine judgment or trying to save ourselves from such condemnation through our obedience to the law. But the negative pole in the first axis must also be combined with the positive pole: Christians who are liberated from any attempt to earn salvation through good works are enjoined to do good works as those thus freed and forgiven. This is moral and “positive” freedom—the freedom to be able to do good. As Paul explained, and Luther affirmed, we should not use our (spiritual) freedom as a cover to serve our flesh, but we were “called to freedom,” which is manifest in our service to others. We must refuse any temptation to seek justification through our works or to abandon the pursuit of good deeds. Legalism and antinomianism are both antithetical to Christian liberty. They emerge when we lose sight of spiritual freedom or confuse moral freedom with it.

But we also err when we fail to grasp the truths in the second and third axes. Without these, Littlejohn astutely observes, we can easily fall into anarchism. This brings his arguments more into the domain of the political, where we find Littlejohn’s most insightful contributions. As Littlejohn explains, anarchism results from confusing spiritual liberty with freedom from political obligation and the laws of man. This brings us to the category of “corporate liberty.”

To live in society, one must come to terms with the fact that there will be inevitable constraints on individual liberty. A society built on absolute individual liberty is an oxymoron. As Philip Rieff famously observed, cultures and societies can be understood by their “Thou Shalt Nots.” The lie of late modern liberal cultures is that you can have a society that forbids forbidding. That is not civilization, but barbarism; not a society, but anarchy. To clarify this, Littlejohn contributes the category of corporate liberty. We simply must permit corporate bodies some freedom to decide what is and is not permitted within them. This will entail some curtailment of personal liberty.

Littlejohn’s third axis is illuminating here. There is a difference between inward and outward liberty. No one can touch internal liberty, which is where political freedom combines with spiritual freedom. The domain of the conscience is a matter of the individual and God. No one can compel faith or disbelief; no one can stand between the soul and the Savior. However, freedom of belief is not the same thing as freedom of religious expression. Here Littlejohn offers a classical Protestant two-kingdoms framework which upholds spiritual freedom but permits corporate political freedom to promote true religion and restrict destructive public action related to false religion. This brings us to Littlejohn’s retrieval of “toleration,” which is a lost art today. We have traded this for maximum religious liberty, which Littlejohn wisely suggests might reflect our contemporary religious indifferentism. Most today simply don’t think religion and public religious expression matter all that much. But classical Protestant political theology has always understood that civil authority must punish evil and promote the good (cf. Romans 13; 1 Peter 3), which will entail, in some measure, restraint on false religious expression that jeopardizes the common good. The distinction between inward freedom of conscience and outward freedom of practice is the ground of corporate political liberty, argues Littlejohn. Spiritual liberty is not the same as liberty of worship, exercise, or proselytizing. Some of the latter might be legitimately restrained for the common good. Littlejohn gives examples of how we already do this in the United States with reference to Mormons and polygamy or Wiccans and human sacrifice. What we need, besides this conceptual distinction, is to regain our tolerance muscles. Toleration is quite different from the Millian liberalism of past decades; toleration acknowledges something as evil that we wish did not exist, but we permit in some measure. These points are well worth the attention of our contemporaries if we are to think well about liberty.

However, at multiple points in the book, Littlejohn invokes opposition to COVID policies as examples of libertinism and confusion of categories. I think this is simplistic. It’s noteworthy that Littlejohn focuses his examples on masking policies, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. There were also issues related to the indiscriminate pushing of the vaccines, shutting down the economy, the hypocrisy of public leaders, etc. And even with regard to masking, there were (quite early on) legitimate concerns about the negative impact on young children of prolonged masking policies, which made very little sense given the risk data. These policies could be questioned out of concern for others and the common good.

But on the whole, Littlejohn’s work merits close engagement. We need to think more clearly about liberty instead of parroting slogans that fail to disambiguate dimensions of freedom, leading to confusion and chaos. Littlejohn’s categories help us begin to chart a way forward.