A false and destructive concept of freedom

A recent Axios article documented what many Americans already sense but struggle to name: the United States is becoming, in the words of President Trump himself, “somewhat of a casino.” Recreational marijuana is now legal in 24 states. More than half of American men between 18 and 49 hold an account with an online sportsbook. The average age of a child’s first exposure to online pornography is 12. AI-generated deepfakes—98% of them nonconsensual—exploded in number from 500,000 to an estimated 8 million in a single year. Governments at every level didn’t merely permit this. They collected the tax revenue from it and called it progress.

We should name what this is: a moral revolution.

We’ve grown accustomed to using that phrase for the sexual revolution—and rightly so. A moral revolution occurs when what was once condemned becomes celebrated, and what was once celebrated becomes condemned. That’s exactly what happened to our sexual ethics over the past 60 years. But what we’re watching now reveals that the revolution didn’t stop there. It kept moving. Behaviors that would have landed Americans in prison a generation ago are now promoted in prime-time corporate ad campaigns as hallmarks of the good life. The slot machine is on your phone. The dispensary is on Main Street.

The revolution, it turns out, is not just sexual. It is total.

One of the revolution’s most potent weapons has been the weaponization of tolerance. Stigma was dismantled not because these behaviors became less harmful, but because naming harm became socially impermissible. We were told that judgment is the real sin—that a good and decent person proves his virtue by tolerating everything. But this gets wisdom exactly backwards. Wisdom has always required us to distinguish between three categories: the virtuous, which should be encouraged; matters of personal preference and conviction, which should be tolerated; and the genuinely destructive, which should not be tolerated at all.

We forgot the third category. And nature is now sending us the bill. The bankruptcy rates, the addiction statistics, the 12-year-olds—these are not accidents. They are the predictable consequences of a culture that confused the absence of judgment with the presence of love.

This brings us to the deeper confusion driving Sin Nation: the mistaken belief that absolute freedom was always the point of the American experiment. The framers built a system that limited government’s power to oppress because they believed human beings, ordered by virtue and accountable to God, were capable of governing themselves. Liberty was not license. It was the condition under which free people could pursue genuine flourishing—and serve their neighbors, their communities, and their God with the full capacity of their gifts. But the idea that people should be free to do whatever they wish is not enlightened, it is suicidal.

What we are discovering now—painfully, expensively—is the ditch on the other side of the road. As we chase vice in the name of freedom, we prove the point Edmund Burke was making when he said, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Human behavior must be restrained by something. The Founders knew this too. If citizens will not exercise self-control, government must eventually supply it by force, and the liberty that made self-government possible disappears. As I tell my own children that if they will not control themselves, someone else will. The former is always better than the latter.

Unless we quickly remember that liberty is only a blessing when it is restrained by virtue and anchored in an ordered vision of human flourishing, freedom will not remain our greatest inheritance. It will become the instrument of our undoing.