Restoring Freedom

A current of fear is coursing through more than political and cultural conflicts. It’s fueled by more than progressive tyranny. Polling suggests that young people are pessimistic about their economic futures. Debt, rising house prices, and healthcare costs—they fear that they’ll never get a solid foothold. Will they find the right person and get married? ­Many worry that they won’t. In Return of the Strong Gods, I argue that our “open society” and “open economy” consensus has dissolved what once were solid places to stand. In a liquid world, we fear that we will drown.

In these pages and elsewhere, I’ve argued that we need to reconsolidate our society around enduring truths. There are many, but among them are the three Fs: faith, family, and flag, three anchoring loyalties that give us places to stand, bulwarks against fear’s onslaught. Unfortunately, this cultural-political project is not popular today. Moreover, even if our elites shift their emphasis and turn toward renewing solidarity around shared loves, the renewal will take decades. In the meantime, we need to recover personal and interior sources for freedom so that we can live with dignity in difficult times.

In the years immediately after World War II, the German writer Ernst Jünger penned a meditation on freedom, Der Waldgang, translated as The Forest Passage. Jünger does not detail the social situation in occupied Germany. Rather, he evokes a general atmosphere of threat and intimidation that punishes anyone who is not “with the program,” as we might say. Under these circumstances, one seeks, somehow, to “get out.” The image of going into the forest (one sense of Waldgang) serves, therefore, as a metaphor for spiritual escape, while that of walking the forest paths (another sense of Waldgang) serves as a metaphor of living in freedom.

The city is man-made; the forest is nature’s place. ­Going to the forest means reconnecting with reality, trusting that God’s creation endures, even as man’s vanity erodes and destroys. In a different way, Matthew ­Crawford sounds a similar note. His books and essays detail the ways in which competent navigation through material reality builds our confidence. A man who knows how to fix his car is far less likely to be pushed around by an officious bureaucrat or intimidated by someone who tells him that his views are “out of date.” In the forest—in the repair shop—we are disciplined and anchored by ­reality. Thus disciplined and anchored, we can endure the onslaughts of propaganda and resist groupthink.

There is much to be said for the curative power of nature. I’ve known doctors whose intimate knowledge of the human body makes it impossible for them to conform to transgender ideology. But Jünger recognizes that our full freedom requires more. Tyranny threatens our jobs, reputations, and places in society. Tyranny warns that if we dissent, we will be stripped of every protection: our salaries, bank accounts, and friends. These threats stoke fear. Naked before the world, we are vulnerable to annihilation. “At all times, in all ­places, and in every heart,” writes Jünger, “human fear is the same: it is the fear of destruction, the fear of death.”

When he wrote The Forest Passage, Jünger was not yet a Christian. But he was a fellow traveler, seeing in Christ the image of one who “enters the kingdom of death” and conquers its power. In Christ’s train, fear of death is overcome. Although Jünger does not quote St. Paul, the apostle’s bold words in 1 Corinthians are apposite: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” One thinks of St. Lawrence, who when put upon a grill above a roaring fire, mocked his executioners, telling them that he was done on one side and should be turned over.

Tyranny can maintain its governmental, social, and cultural power. Our soft tyranny is likely to do so, at least in the near term. But insofar as you and I mock death, as did St. Paul, we are more powerful still. In Christ’s wake, Jünger notes, “followed not only martyrs, who were stronger than stoics, stronger than caesars, stronger than the hundred thousand spectators surrounding them in the arena—there also followed the innumerable others who died with their faith intact.”

Nietzsche saw Christianity as a way of life that celebrates weakness. Against this “slave morality,” he asserted that only the strong could be free. Even as an unbeliever, Jünger recognized that Nietzsche, while right about freedom, was wrong about Christianity. Those who do not fear death are the strongest of strong men, for they can never be conquered. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, in Christ “we are more than conquerors.”

This claim to possess indomitable power is no pious illusion. Today we are subjected to tremendous pressure to endorse transgender ideology, and we are cattle-­prodded to affirm gay marriage. Some resist, because they are rooted in reality and recognize that men are men and women are women. But if we look around the public square, we see that the majority of those standing up against woke tyranny are religious believers. We do this not because basic facts about biology and the male-female difference require the affirmation of revealed truths. Our ability to speak out rests in our freedom, which, as Jünger recognized, comes from our knowledge that we are under the command of a King far stronger than any worldly power.

As I write, the renunciations and disciplines of Lent are aiming toward Easter. We owe our fellow citizens a due measure of civil involvement. We need to fight perverse cultural norms and bad laws. And we need to vote and lobby to reverse some of the destructive trends. But the greatest service we can provide is to yearn for an ever-greater interior conversion. At the Easter Vigil, in the gloom of night’s darkness, the ­Exsultet, ­Christianity’s great triumphal song, announces: “This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.” To thrill to those words prepares our hearts for a free life. And thus do we inspire our fellow citizens. They see that even a common man, an ordinary woman—which is to say, people like us—are undaunted and unbowed by ­worldly powers that imagine their petty threats can rule our lives.