A glance at the social and cultural landscape of this nation reveals a deep and abiding conviction about the singular importance of liberty among the values that citizens hold. Yet even a casual glance reveals that the idea is now, seemingly, being torn asunder, divided within itself. In fact, citizens seem to have completely different ideas about what liberty is and what it entails. As former President Obama noted in his address to the graduates of 2020, the veil over the social, economic, racial, and sexual inequalities has been torn away. And many others have argued in the face of grievous loss, sorrow, and tears that now is the time to refashion our collective national life. But how would we do so and based on what values and norms? And what about religion? Wait for it! 

Competing notions of liberty in our nation are routinely divided and named: blue versus red states; right versus left; never Trumpers versus Trump’s base; liberal versus conservative; journalism versus fake news, and on and on. Each side accuses the other of causing (and exacerbating) the division; all while each side believes itself to represent the true spirit of the nation. But as Lincoln rightly noted—citing scripture—a house divided cannot stand. As it was in his time, so too is it in ours. While the opposing sides of our torn nation are identified, the tension within the modern conception of liberty is left largely unexplored, at least in public discourse. Since Sightings is about religion in public life, it befalls this columnist to examine why that is, how social life is riven with debates spinning around a conception of liberty and its deep roots in biblical religion. 

This is neither the time nor the journalistic space to survey conceptions of freedom, whether individual or communal. Likewise, we cannot examine the complex arguments—philosophical, religious, or metaphysical—about freedom and determinism. Yet, in terms of public life it is not far-fetched to say that the biblical account of the Exodus of slaves from captivity can be seen as igniting the quest for freedom that ebbs and flows throughout Western and now also global life. This is not to forget that our world was also built on the backs of enslaved peoples. But it is to say that the human spirit seeks an open space. That longing is evident now among many during our present confinement in a season of shelter-in-place orders. Yet it is also true that without boundaries, without contours, nothing exists. And these truisms bring us to the tension in the modern idea of liberty that is now rupturing, perhaps as never before. 

Stated by John Stuart Mill in his famous On Liberty, our concern is with a conception of freedom within social life. Three of Mill’s points are especially important. First, Mill defines liberty as “[living] one’s own life in one’s own way.” That is to say, if one is compelled to adopt a plan for life by some power other than one’s own, one’s liberty is unjustly restricted. Second, Mill argued that there is a rightful boundary to one’s liberty. He called it the “harm principle”—my liberty goes only so far as it does no harm to others. Of course, “harm” is difficult to determine, let alone to circumscribe, in social life since it is an elastic term. Yet the idea is that liberty without boundaries is chaos or war. Mill’s third point: ideas not tested through the rough and tumble of public debate in order to emerge as validated cannot be true or livable. Ideologies—left or right—imprison the mind and condemn it to ignorance. 

Mill’s thoughts on liberty undergird the public life of modern liberal democracies like the U.S. But his three points, while in tension with each other, are now being torn asunder. “Liberty divided” helps us make sense of our current social plight. Protesters armed with AK-47 rifles, masked, and donning combat gear enter state capitals to demand their “liberty” to visit restaurants, tattoo parlors, and open their businesses seeming unmindful of the harm they might inflict on others by potentially carrying COVID-19 into public spaces and transmitting it to others. And how did orders, whether federal, state, or local, meant to protect public health ever come to be seen as a restriction of rights or liberty? It happens when freedom becomes license unbounded by concern for others. Of course, the vast majority of citizens do follow shelter-in-place orders out of concern for others, especially first responders. But this is rarely seen as an act of liberty, an act of choosing how to live one’s own life. How has sheltering seemed to elide any concern for healthcare as a basic human right and led to complacency about the deep harm done to people lacking access to healthcare? Concern for others without the right to fashion their own lives is socially vacuous. And, again, on the left and the right, ideologues refuse to submit their ideas to public scrutiny and prefer to sling insults of ignorance or fake news at one another. When did an enslaved mind become a virtue? When truth is not seen as ingredient to both liberty and care. 

Liberty is divided. It has been reduced to sheer license, complacency, or righteous feelings parading as reasoned argument. Little wonder that the war on the coronavirus feels like a war on the nation, because, in truth, it is. Little wonder, too, that so much anxiety and sorrow is sweeping the land. 

Readers have waited long enough to know where religion fits in this mess. This is a Sightings column, after all! It is, at least implicitly, everywhere. Whether it is the Exodus and Sinai, and so the giving of law for a life in freedom, or the so-called Golden Rule, the teachings of Jesus, the holy Qur’an, or the Buddha’s middle way, the religions have sought to hold in tension freedom and liberation with a rightful submission to the law of other regard. Each has developed complex means to define and determine a truthful orientation of life amid life’s turmoil. A complex and internally tensive idea of liberty is as old as the religions. This is emphatically not to suggest that we need religion to underpin our social freedom. Heaven forbid! Yet it is to say that those who seek to fashion a more perfect union in our bleak times might yet learn something from ancient forms of wisdom as well as from the best lights of the modern world.

Sightings is edited by Joel Brown, a PhD Candidate in Religions in the Americas at the Divinity School. Sign up here to receive Sightings via email. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Marty Center or its editor.