Free and Conservative

Avik Roy and John Hood recently launched what they hope will be a movement, Freedom Conservatism. In consultation with others of like mind, they drafted a statement of principles. It’s available on their website, freedomconservatism.org. One can debate the principles and their formulations. Quibbles aside, the deeper problem is this: Taken as a whole, the statement is irrelevant.

We do indeed have a liberty deficit in America. Our culture of freedom is eroding. But we won’t restore freedom by talking about it in a loud voice. We can’t insist upon freedom, we can’t demand freedom and refuse to kowtow and submit, unless we have a solid place to stand. Our loyalties and loves stiffen our spines. In my experience, it’s not lost on young people that those who are willing to venture public resistance to woke tactics of intimidation are often religious. They can see that fixing one’s eyes on God’s Word and harkening to his authority nurtures freedom. There are powerful natural loves as well: of a mother for her child, a soldier for his comrades, a patriot for his country. These loves motivate self-sacrifice, which is freedom’s highest expression. Greater love—and greater freedom—hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

So let me put my objection to Freedom Conservatism as directly as possible. The most fundamental problem in the United States in 2023 is not the lack of legal freedoms or even the tactics of intimidation used by cultural progressives. It rests in the sad fact that many once solid truths and anchoring institutions have been dissolved. If we do not address this growing deficit—and Freedom Conservatism does not—our protestations on behalf of freedom are in vain.

One of the Freedom Conservatism principles asserts, correctly, that we are happiest within loving families, and that parents should enjoy the freedom to raise and educate their children in accord with their values. I would add a further observation. We are freest when part of a strong family. Raised by a mother and a father, we’re more likely to embark on risky ventures and better able to resist social pressures.

Yet, as I write, a newborn child has only a 50 percent chance of being raised by both of his parents. The United States leads the world in the incidence of single-parent households. If we care about freedom—and we should—we can’t ignore these facts. We won’t get a vigorous culture of freedom without restoring marital stability. This restoration requires talking about commitment, covenant, and responsibility, first and foremost—not nattering on about notional freedoms that damaged, disoriented, and atomized people cannot exercise.

A strong culture of freedom requires substantive foundations. Even if we adopt a libertarian definition of freedom—in which freedom means the ability to do what one wants to do—we should recognize the need for solid foundations. The libertarian definition is not sufficient, but it’s not altogether wrong. In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul reports that he does what he does not want to do and cannot do what he wants to do. He desires to become a free man, a man able to do what he wants, which becomes possible only when he anchors his soul in Christ.

It’s crucial for us to recognize that in today’s America, few seem to enjoy even a libertarian freedom. Consider marriage. How many people take wedding vows, whether in a church or before a civil authority, without wanting the bond to be permanent? Very few, I’d venture. Yet divorce is rampant. How is it that so many of those who get married cannot do what they have vowed to do?

Or consider the desire to get married in the first place. Polling suggests that most younger Americans hope to marry. But at the moment, we are heading toward a future in which a significant percentage of them never will. How can such a basic desire be thwarted? And if this basic good, desired by so many, isn’t attainable, even supposing we secure our constitutional rights and blunt the power of woke revolutionaries, can we say that we are living in a “free society”?

An even more glaring condition of bondage is widespread. Presently, more than 100,000 people die of drug overdose every year. It beggars belief that all those individuals want to die. Yet, in our “free society,” a stunning number of people fail to do what very nearly everyone wants to do: stay alive.

I can imagine a libertarian interrupting to point out that undisciplined and self-destructive people tend to get divorced, take drugs, and do other things that undermine their well-being. Divorce, deaths of despair, and other dysfunctions are signs of freedom misused, not a lack of freedom. True enough. But a “free society” that ushers so many toward such patent bondage gives freedom a bad name.

Even society’s “winners,” those who are disciplined and in command, lack freedom. As they run through the meritocratic gauntlet (made unpredictable and even more daunting by the funhouse mirrors of diversity, equity, and inclusion), talented young people are terrified of taking the wrong step. Gen X high achievers spend hours in the gym, anxious about their appearances. Baby Boomers are engaged in a desperate struggle not to get old. And in what world are gated communities and private security guards, unknown in my childhood, signs of freedom? Anything remotely carefree and adventuresome—having children, for example—seems impossibly remote to those who aim for success. If this mentality is commonplace, can we say that we live in a “free society”?

And then there is the atmosphere of fear. It affects us all. Some are convinced we’re on the brink of climate catastrophe, the return of Hitler, or the onslaught of white supremacy. Others warn of the Great Reset and an embrace of socialism. Hobbes understood that fear drives the engines of submission. College students wept when Trump was elected. Administrators rushed to assure them that they were “safe.” In the face of a novel coronavirus, fear of death caused the vast majority of Americans to cheer dire restrictions on our lives. These are not signs of a “free society,” nor of a citizenry that wants to be free.

How did this happen? How did the land of the free and the home of the brave become a country of disoriented, dysfunctional, anxious, and fearful people? The answer is simple: We have undermined the institutions and authorities that give people solid places to stand. This erosion makes freedom an empty promise.

There’s a hurdle we need to get over before we can enjoy the libertarian’s kind of freedom, the liberty to do as we desire. We must acquire the wherewithal to resist coercion. The promises of freedom are a dead letter if we cannot stand firm and say, “No, I will not do that, I will not be propagandized, intimidated, or suborned.”

The capacity to say “no” rests on the power of a deeply installed “yes”: an enduring affirmation, a fierce loyalty, a burning love. The “yes” anchors our souls to something more solid than the flux of passing wants, more powerful than the threats issued by worldly powers. The “yes” of faith makes us slaves of God, a condition of indomitability, as the martyrs make so evident. There are natural loves that, while lacking the supernatural power of faith, also rivet our souls. I’ve mentioned marriage and parental love. There’s a love of truth as well, and a love of beauty. These and other loves galvanize our souls and make us free.

For two generations, higher education has favored a pedagogy that aims to disenchant the objects of our love. This assault on love contributes to the erosion of freedom. It has not been conducted only by postmodernists in the humanities. Economistic theory and materialism in the natural sciences are pedagogies that promote reductive explanations at every turn. The same process has been at work in society. After abandoning the interests of the working class, progressive activism has worked to undermine institutions of authority that evoke, shape, and deepen our commitments. The marital bond, patriotic ardor, and religious faith: All three have been discredited as “oppressive,” derided as engines of patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia, and other purported pathologies.

Our economic system has contributed to cultural demolition. A great deal of life has been commodified. Consider dating. In my teenage and college years, churches, youth groups, and social organizations sponsored “mixers.” Boys and girls paired up in the ebb and flow of civil society. Now the dance between the sexes is mediated through dating apps. In the pursuit of profit, these enterprises organize one of the most basic functions of culture into a “rational market.” Only a willfully blind person can fail to see the unhappiness arising from this particular instantiation of what Max Weber called the “iron cage.”

What is to be done? A thousand things and more, no doubt. Our deepest political problem is that we’ve put off the search for answers for too long, often because we’re tempted to sing the freedom songs in the Reaganite hymnal rather than face up to today’s realities. Only now are people like Michael Toscano calling for blue laws by which to restrain the virtual world. Is our “freedom” compromised by requiring dating apps to suspend operations for one or even two days a week? I’d say the opposite is the case.

We desperately need creative policies to address the decline of marriage. I’ve proposed a divorce tax. Patriotic love? What about prohibiting those who hold more than a U.S. passport from holding public office or receiving government contracts? Religious observance? I favor reversing the wrongly decided school-prayer decisions made by the Supreme Court in the early 1960s.

Maybe my ideas are wrongheaded. I’m a sometime theology professor, not a policy wonk. But of this I’m sure: We will not restore the American culture of freedom by “defending freedom” after the fashion of Freedom Conservatism. In recent decades, the foundations of freedom have been severely damaged. When a field has eroded and its fertile soil drained away, one scatters seed in vain. The first step of remediation is to build dams and embankments that restrain the damaging currents. The same holds for human societies. If we care about freedom, then we must get about the work of renewing the restraints that allow love’s liberating power to take root and grow.