The Wolves of Freedom
One of the most tragic conflations in most of white Christianity in the United States is of the freedom promised by America and the freedom promised by Christ. This is a twofold conflation that causes a disconnect between the claims of scripture and the actions of those who purport to follow scripture. This conflation has caused confusion, and I believe is part of the struggle those of us who claim to follow Jesus encounter. This goes deeper than cultural syncretism, as it has become the identity which many Christians hold and believe to be the truth. It is one of the reasons many clergy members fear speaking truth into cultural Christian beliefs. When identity is so deeply embedded within our view of the world, it challenges us at core levels that create tension and fear. Ironically, some who are fully captured by this conflation believe themselves to be identified in Christ and nothing else. But that could not be further from the truth.
This conflation is first evident in the approach of many Christians to the word God in the Declaration of Independence. Because we have a couple of centuries of separation, we miss the revolutionary nature of the claim that rights are endowed in human beings directly and not through a sovereign. The Declaration was not a claim that God gives rights, but a claim that God-given rights are directly given rather than bestowed upon human sovereigns. The political nature of this was to boldly say that the European system of sovereignty granted to nobility was a false understanding and should be abandoned for egalitarian rights. This was shocking to the European powers because of the shift in thinking to every* human being rather than specifically chosen human beings. It was also an ironic claim as signers of the declaration owned human beings.
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Our confusion is extended by making assumptions about what the founders believed about God. It is not the same as what many white evangelicals mean by God. In fact, the God many of the founders viewed was a distant and no longer involved creator. Almost 250 years later, we assume the idea of God still resonant from the 20th century is what they meant. But even more, it is interesting to me that God appears nowhere in the Constitution of the United States of America. Some of the founders used God as a support for their view of the new nation, but even their view was to create a secular government not encumbered by the constraints of the typical European models.
With the backdrop of some historical context, we can focus on the conflation of freedom. Words are interesting and can mean widely different things depending upon context. Freedom in our context is very different when read in Christian scripture than when read in the founding documents of the United States. Freedom in Christian thought is the freedom from sin and death. We can expand that to be the freedom from fear itself. It is not the same as the idea of personal freedom in the United States. I think the conflation can cut both ways. Christians often embrace the idea of freedom unless it is the freedom of people to not believe or live in ways that those same Christians disagree with. This is where syncretism becomes so strongly tied to the word freedom. There becomes an attitude that my freedom is diminished by the freedom of another who disagrees with what I see as freedom. I think this is a great tragedy within Christian spaces because we stop being seen as those with transformative hope and instead are seen as those who demand everyone be like us.
Ultimately, the conflation of American freedom and the freedom of Christ forms idolatrous thinking. The very people who should be prophetically proclaiming the freedom of Christ mix that truth up with the nationalistic freedom. I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Hook where Wendy confronts the adult Peter Pan who has forgotten his youth: “So, Peter…you’ve become a pirate.” The clergy who traffic in nationalism and attach American freedom to the freedom in Christ have become the wolves they warn us about. They teach a syncretic idolatry in ignorance at best and false teaching at worst. It is an easy trap because it is hard to be truthful about political ideologies in our current climate. (See Rev. Paul Dazet’s excellent essay on this idea here.) But it is even worse when the Church lies to keep the fires of fervor stoked. I often think if the entire congregation says amen to a fear of the imagination, maybe we are not challenging them to confront their own sins or actions.
How many of us can look in the mirror and maybe say:
“So, pastor, you’ve become a wolf..”
“But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.” – Romans 6:22
*excluding those deemed subhuman of course