Lutheran Faith and American Freedom

Abstract

Lutheran Faith and American Freedom Gerhard O. Forde [A lecture to pastors in autumn, 1992] To get right to the point, when we confront the question of American freedom from a theological point of view, we are immediately in trouble, but perhaps we can get at it most quickly by saying that what most Americans call freedom today is what theology—particularly Lutheran theology—would call bondage. Freedom to do as we please usually ends in bondage to the self and the lusts of the day. Perhaps it was not always so. Originally, I suppose, freedom for Americans had to do with political liberty, with shaking off tyrannies which had plagued them in Europe. Originally they claimed the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness over against such tyrannical forces. But they knew well, in the early days, that freedom could not be only freedom from such tyranny. If it were so, freedom would become license and likely just run amok. If freedom were to work, there would have to be some way to restrain it and keep it from running amok. And if it were to remain freedom, it would have to be a voluntary restraint. And that meant, as Terry Eastland ("In Defense of Religious America," Commentary, June 1, 1981) and others have pointed out, that American freedom could work only if it had a religious base. It was religion that preached and inculcated the virtues and the sense of duty that gave freedom something worth-while to do. Thus that perennially quoted and sharp-eyed observer from France, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that whereas freedom allowed the American people to do just about anything, there were things which their religion prevented them [End Page 424] from imagining and forbade them to dare. Religion, he said, was America's "foremost political institution." Religion provided what a Constitution based on commercialism and self-interest could not provide. Religion provided a check on the freedom guaranteed by political institutions. Freedom depended upon the old religious warning against license. But now, as we all well know, religion is no longer a "political institution." Indeed, religion, since about the 1920s, according to Eastland, has slipped into rapid decline. Politically, in recent decades, given the impression left by court decisions and the general tenor of the times, the voice of religion seems to be about the only voice that cannot be heard on important political and moral issues—particularly, it seems, the voice of the Christian religion. Indeed, one can say that we seem to have slipped over into a more or less anti-religious mood. "Religion is a cruel joke," announced a placard in an abortion rights parade. The separation of church and state, intended originally, it would seem, to give the differing denominations equal voice, has become a divorce, an antagonism. People use the principle of separation as a defense against religion. If the original intent of the Constitution guaranteeing the free exercise of religion is to mean anything more than trivialities, then surely it should mean that religion should have an equal voice to that which is not religious. But that seems no longer to be the case. Since there is separation, people seem to think, religion has no right to speak publicly at all. Freedom of religion has become freedom from religion. Now the result of this, of course, is that American freedom has lost its religious moorings and threatens to run amok and destroy itself. Americans rarely today have the original modesty to think they have the right to pursue happiness, but rather that they have the absolute right to possess it—no matter at whose expense. Rights we talk about gladly, but not duties or responsibilities or character. And since we will not police ourselves voluntarily, from the highest Savings and Loan tycoon down to the lowest drug pusher, our police force is less and less able to cope, the jails are filling, the justice system is clogged, people are suing each other for any violations of their rights imaginable. And so on and so on. From a Lutheran standpoint one might say, perhaps, that the American marriage between [End Page 425] freedom and religious...