Freedom and Christianity

"Freedom cannot be bestowed on or taken from a Christian or Christians. Freedom is an inalienable possession of the Christian"

Tolstoy “The Kingdom of God is Within You”.

So are all of the calls for religious freedoms pointless? Are the claims of religious persecution in the west meaningless? Maybe they are.

Here's the thing, when I hear that someone is being “persecuted” or restricted for their faith, I have an immediate air of caution. When I hear that “our Christian freedoms are being eroded”, I wonder what this actually means. This quote might help me to understand it a little better.

As a Christian, we have freedom. We have the freedom to wear the symbols of our faith or not. We have the freedom to accept others regardless of their sexuality or not. What we do not have – and never have had – is the freedom to express our faith in contradiction of the law without consequences.

Freedom is something for us. I am sure that Paul would not have considered state sanction for his actions and behaviour to be fundamental to his calls for freedom. I am sure that Philemon would have preferred Paul not to have spoken quite so explicitly about freedom. I am sure that when we use the word freedom today, the biblical writers would not recognise what we are talking about.

Freedom, Tolstoy continues, is about the achievement of a closer relationship to God. That is something that no state can bestow or remove. Freedom is not about being allowed to do anything without criticism or sanction. It is about not being constrained by what others expect, and not being constrained by their reactions.

Note that I do not mean that we should always and at all times obey the law of the land. Where this gives us moral qualms, we are duty bound to oppose it. But – critically – we are also duty bound to accept the consequences of our opposition. We may campaign to change the law, but to do so, we must ourselves be subject to it. That, surely, is what Paul demonstrated in his life.

If we expect our "freedom" to be state supported, then we not longer have freedom, we are then bound to the state, slaves to acceptance by the state. There is no freedom there. In the end, Paul lost his life by state sanction, but nothing took away his freedom.