Freedom Is a Funny Word
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I doubt that any concept has greater currency among Americans than “freedom” and its synonym, “liberty.” It is prominent in the Pledge of Allegiance, which ensures justice and liberty for all; in the Star Spangled Banner, which characterizes the United States as a “land of the free and home of the brave”; and in the words of practically every politician, as they pay lip service to the concept while vying for public office or promoting legislation.
Given the premium that U.S. culture has placed on freedom, it is hardly surprising that a faith tradition such as Unitarian Universalism should have arisen within it. Thomas Jefferson once described Unitarianism as the religion most in harmony with the democratic, freedom-loving American spirit. Drawn by its anti-creedal, non-dogmatic and democratic principles, generations of free thinkers have entered our movement’s ranks, including such notables as Susan B. Anthony, champion of women’s rights; Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union; and John Haynes Holmes, co-founder of the NAACP.
As the late Stephen Fritchman, a Unitarian minister whose Los Angeles church provided a spiritual refuge for actors and writers caught up in the anti-Communist crusade of the early 1950s, put it:
Unitarians are men and women of the free spirit. No party has us in its pocket, no dictator writes our creed, no monolithic power robs us of our native strength to say, “The King is wrong.” We are a people braced by centuries of freedom who love maturity and despise…all meek surrender to those in search of witches.
Nevertheless, freedom has often been a vexed word, a source of both confusion and conflict. If I have heard it said once I have heard it a thousand times: “As a Unitarian Universalist I can believe anything I want.” But while it is true that our faith tradition encourages freedom of inquiry and allows for much greater latitude in belief than is typical for religion, it most certainly does not say that “anything goes.” Nor does it imply that any one belief is as acceptable or as valid as another.
To hold such a position is to misconstrue freedom. The fact is, Unitarian Universalism would be completely stripped of all moral and theological substance if freedom was conceived and practiced in this way. As former Unitarian Universalist Association President Dana Greeley wrote, “Just to advocate freedom in religion does not of itself constitute a religion.”
To be sure, for Unitarian Universalists the “right of conscience” is accorded high value; it is embedded in the fifth of our seven Principles. But the fourth Principle, which calls for “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” puts the fifth in proper context and helps us distinguish between freedom and mere license.
The latter—license—tolerates no restrictions, rejects intelligent discernment, and demands absolute autonomy. No matter that my belief is ill-founded, irrational, and pernicious, it is my categorical right to claim it, license says.
Freedom, on the other hand, is ever and always subject to certain limits—the dictates of reason perhaps, or the necessity of living in community, or of ensuring our own and other people’s safety. As Barack Obama put it in his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention:
What is the American promise? It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, and that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.
But just as Unitarian Universalists have not always been clear about or in agreement over what freedom means and what it implies, neither has the rest of the country. Although Americans have been blessed with a commendable record of freedom, we are also burdened with a long history of hesitancy and inconsistency when it comes to putting that principle into practice.
The struggle to determine freedom’s meaning and establish its parameters commenced with the arrival of the first religious refugees in the early 17th century. The Puritans had hardly established a beachhead in Massachusetts before their leaders began placing severe restraints on religious faith and practice. Thus, John Winthrop, the first governor of the colony, distinguished sharply between “natural liberty,” which suggested the liberty to do evil, and “moral liberty,” or the liberty to do only what is good. In keeping with that distinction, 17th century Puritan minister Jonathan Boucher defined “true liberty” as a liberty to “do every thing that is right and being restrained from doing any thing that is wrong.”
These pious settlers arrived here with an understanding of freedom that has its origins in the writings of ancient authorities such as Aristotle and St. Augustine. For them, as for the Puritans, freedom and morality were indissolubly connected. As Augustine put it, “He that is good is free, though he be but a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.” Those among the early settlers who desired a less restrictive and more open spiritual atmosphere—Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, for example—were ultimately forced to leave the colony. The point is, both of these factions valued freedom, but they simply could not reach a consensus on what it meant and how it ought to be properly exercised.
Americans have also struggled for centuries over who is entitled to freedom and who is not. Democratic freedom—the right to have a say in matters of politics and governance—was initially restricted to white men who owned property. At the time of the Revolution only property owners were believed to be cultured enough and to have a sufficient stake in public policy to act responsibly. Wage labor was associated with servility and immaturity.
Thomas Jefferson, for one, felt differently, which is why the right to “property” disappeared from the Declaration of Independence and the “pursuit of happiness” was inserted instead. By the time of Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826 (the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration), property was no longer a requirement for voting or holding office in most states.
Both slavery and industrialization afford vivid examples of just how complex debates over freedom have been. For defenders of slavery, property rights and local control were at stake. “The right to property,” Virginia’s Arthur Lee argued, “is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this is to deprive them of their liberty.” One might well ask, as some did, “What gives one man the right to claim another as property?” To which slavery’s defenders replied, “White men were ‘made for liberty.’” Blacks, on the other hand, were regarded as “utterly unqualified for rational freedom…. They are perpetual children for whom freedom would be a curse.”
For abolitionists, the operative conditions of freedom were quite different. To have “property in oneself” and the right to possess the fruits of one’s own labor is what mattered to them. When Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery and acquired his first paying job in Massachusetts, he declared, “I am now my own master.” Douglass’s wage was an emblem of his freedom.
Here is how Abraham Lincoln contrasted these two views of freedom in 1864:
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty.
A similar dispute over the word “freedom” roiled the nation during the Gilded Age, when a new generation of industrialists and wage earners found themselves contending over its economic implications. The business community placed primary emphasis on “freedom of contract.” As long as labor relations and economic transactions were governed by contracts independently arrived at by autonomous individuals, all was well. To the degree that labor unions and governments interfered with such contractual arrangements, freedom was at grave risk.
For their part, workers and their advocates argued that the right to organize and to bargain collectively for decent wages ensured workers’ freedom and protected them from becoming “wage slaves.” In an age of industrial and commercial giants, labor maintained that the negotiating positions of management and labor were hardly equal.
As a culture, we have yet to resolve this issue. For many today, the locus of freedom par excellence is the marketplace with its myriad products, available to anyone for the right price. As David Lilianthal, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, once declared: “By freedom I mean essentially the freedom to choose to the maximum degree possible…. It means a maximum range of choice for the consumer when he spends his dollar.”
I imagine more than a few Americans would agree wholeheartedly with Lilianthal, and it is why they are often willing to accept oppressive work environments as the price for exercising freedom of choice in the marketplace. If asked to identify which dimension of freedom matters most, what percentage of the U.S population would choose consumer sovereignty over civil liberties or democratic freedom? I suspect many would opt for the former, but not Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who wrote:
Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as [they] can for [themselves]. And freedom is worth fighting for. Because it does mean more than unrestricted grabbing.
In recent decades the struggle over variant understandings of freedom has hardly let up. In 1952 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a man of Unitarian sensibilities, opined that “The right to be left alone is the beginning of all freedom.” This set the stage for a series of “right to privacy” decisions handed down by the high court in the years that followed. The right to use contraceptives, to seek an abortion, to cohabitate outside of marriage, and to enter into same-sex relationships all follow from the privacy principle.
Yet for many social conservatives, this has been an unwelcome development. For those who still think of freedom in moral terms, its expansion into such traditionally sensitive areas is patently offensive. Like those old Puritan divines, our modern moralists equate liberty with an inner disposition to do only what is righteous and Godly.
As a morally freighted concept, freedom, writes historian Eric Foner, “has been used to convey and claim legitimacy for all kinds of grievances and hopes, fears about the present and visions of the future.” What that suggests is that we need to exercise great care in using the word and insist on a certain precision when we hear it mentioned.
Americans are suckers for freedom. The popularity of politicians rests upon it, the wars we fight are justified by it, advertisers shamelessly exploit it, and it is an ever-present factor in how members of families and communities relate to each other. As an American and a person of privilege, I cherish it as much as the next person. And, as a Unitarian Universalist, it probably means more to me than to most.
But in the end I have learned that the choice we have before us isn’t whether or not to defend and promote freedom per se. It is the much more difficult one of determining which of our freedoms really matter and are most worthy of our loyalty.
- Freedom Is a Funny Word - March 1, 2013
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