Freedom Deregulated

In his Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, Rusty Reno finds a “false view of freedom as unimpeded choice and self-definition” at the root of many of our political, economic, and social pathologies. In the name of freedom, we have “deregulated” culture, a policy shift with far wider and deeper consequences than market deregulation – far wider and deeper economic consequences. Our aspiration to absolute freedom “has benefitted the strong and hurt the weak” and so it’s in the name of the lower classes of American society that Christians need to advocate for Christian society (5).

One of the best things about Reno’s analysis is his admission that he is himself bewitched by the dream of freedom. He’s worked on oil rigs, climbed sheer cliffs, tramped the lonely mountain trail. Reno’s is a critique of the American dream from a dreamer.

Reno is hardly the first to say that America is about freedom, but he expounds in in surprising ways. He sees it behind multiculturalism, which he describes as “an egalitarian cultural therapy”: “The curricular decision to sideline ‘dead white males’ and highlight minority writers is the cultural equivalent of the progressive income tax that funds a substantial income supplement for the poor. . . . Far from an anti-American perversion, multiculturalism serves the American dream – everyone must have the greatest possible freedom to make his own future. Every cultural barrier must be dismantled!” (21). We must throw off the shackles of our own inherited civilization as much as we threw off the shackles of monarchy and class hierarchy.

On Reno’s reading, even anti-Americanism is an expression of the American dream of untrammeled freedom: “If we prize the dream of freedom above all else, the most American thing to do is to renounce the authority of Western culture! Anti-Americanism is thus a kind of hyper-Americanism” (23). And if so, asserting “traditional American values” is hardly an effective antidote.