Will America retain its freedoms or will it's new understanding of freedom destroy it?

As regular readers of this blog knows, I read a lot. My goal is to read an average of one book a week. I have just finished reading what I consider to be one of the most important and powerful books I've ever read, Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat by Os Guinness. The author has a DPhil from Oxford, was born in China, educated in England and now lives in the United States. I have never read anything that better describes the current state of America. However, he not only describes our current condition, he reminds us of how our nation was founded and what has happened to cause us to veer so far from our founding to our current situation. Finally, He repeatedly shows us how we can get back to being the nation we once were.

He repeatedly compares the American revolution of 1776 to the French revolution of 1789 and shows how many in our nation today want to embrace the attitudes and values of the 1789 revolution while rejecting those of the 1776 revolution. While both revolutions were an attempt to bring freedom to their respective nations, there were significant differences in how each defined freedom.  The freedom sought by the American colonists was one that combined freedom with responsibility. The French revolution sought a freedom without responsibilities, one in which everyone did as they pleased. This is the freedom many today are pursuing in America.

However, such freedom comes with a price. Part of that price is that everyone is a victim. As soon as someone's personal freedom is violated they become a victim demanding justice. Soon new laws are passed ensuring their rights are no longer ignored. Of course, this tramples on the rights of those who disagree with the original demands. But, few care because we have ceased being "one nation." The author writes

"All citizens are now viewed, polled, analyzed, and treated as members of groups rather than as individuals. All Americans are tribal now. But then, the postmodern assumption of relativism is added to the mix of groups, giving rise to the notion of different truths for different tribes - feminist truths, black truths, homosexual truths, Hispanic truths, millennial truths, Left and Right truths, Fox truths, CNN and MSNBC truths, and the like. Each group sees the world its own way, lives in its own world and wants its own perspectives confirmed, so each is automatically suspicious of the perspectives of others."

Another part of the cost is that we become less free. Those who do not conform to the politically correct perspective of some group are shouted down on university campuses or uninvited because some organization considers their message hurtful. New laws are passed in an effort to force people into certain beliefs and values. Guinness writes, "Whereas nineteenth-century liberals sought to protect personal freedom by limiting the role of government in private life, twentieth-century liberals sought to achieve each purported advance of freedom by expanding the role of government in more and more of life, including private life." The more government dictates what we must do and believe the less free we are.

A third cost is that of chaos and violence. When everyone is free to do whatever they please it can only lead to chaos. Again, we read, "There is an obvious practical problem in stating secularist freedom in terms of unrestrained individual freedom - other people are similarly free, and that creates the fundamental social and political problem of how we are to create a harmonious society out of a cacophony of competing selves all claiming freedom in a million different ways." As these differing freedoms confront each other violence is sure to erupt as we see happening today throughout our nation.

Guinness covers much more ground than I can in a blog post. Part of his solution to our problem is to return to the source of our freedoms which is a Christian and Jewish understanding of freedom. He states clearly that "The key to the remedy of the American crisis of freedom lies in a fresh exploration of the Hebrew notions of creation and covenant that lie behind both American freedom and the US Constitution."

He goes on to write, "The open rejection of the Jewish and Christian roots of the American Revolution will mean that all the flowers that grew directly from those roots will someday die. Notions such as human dignity, freedom, justice, equality, Constitution, the separation of powers, and forgiveness have been cut off from their roots. Sooner or later they will become unrecognizable and die."

I don't care what one's political beliefs are, every American should study this book. You may not agree with everything you read in it, but it will make you think. It might also lead to some much needed dialogue about where we want our nation to be 200 years from now. Heaven knows we could use some thinking and dialogue right now.