Freedom without Responsbility

It was the sermon for the fourth of July and before I and my husband found our religious home three years at Piedmont Unitarian Universalist Church in Charlotte, we went to church with some friends of ours. They’re good friends and good people, when we needed a place to stay they opened their doors and we did the same when they needed help… and the Sunday that we went to church was an eye opener…

We learned that we wanted the opposite in a religious home.
 

He did pose an interesting question though, that I am not ashamed to admit that I was flustered on before I found an answer of my own that I could stand behind. The sermon was dealing with the fourth of July and how we receive our freedoms from God – this is hardly a revolution idea- and how liberals are attacking these very things with their secular notions (also not the first time I heard this). He asked us to think about things that we consider freedoms and things that we are able to do that are freedoms. Quite predictably I thought about this in the terms of the Bill of Rights, and freedom of religion (I wonder why), which was one of the answers that fit into the whole concept of his sermon. He had me. I admit it, and as he went on the explain that idea that you could not have freedoms unless you submitted to the will of Jesus and God and all of the ways you might be able to escape hell and liberals (though who could tell the difference by the way he spoke,) something about the way he defined freedom annoyed me… such as he really didn’t define freedom. He made a rather thinly veiled attack at the secular way society is and laid out an easy to follow plan with nice marching orders on how horrible a group of people are for simply pointing out that there are more answers that what he has on his short list but he never defined freedom. Never really explained it in a way that made sense, freedoms comes from you submitting to God, and freedoms come from accepting Jesus and admitting your awful sinful nature. But what is freedom really?

After this rather disappointing and annoying lecture, in which I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes a few times (Seriously—Thomas Jefferson had some REAL issues with organized religion…. Maybe he missed TJ being a founding father… Who knows) I stopped and pondering the idea of freedom. Because he had not given me an acceptable definition I was needed to find an answer that I could make sense of.

The definition you will find online if you use Lord Google of freedom is Noun:   The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint/ Absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government.   

Both of these are acceptable answers but they are not really anything useful and they do not answer the question in the way that it was asked. Ignoring the fact that questions such as this are made simply to be answered the one way I thought about it some more. I also disagree with this notion of freedom as determined by Lord Google, though he too is a dear friend.

Freedom is nothing more that the ability to have responsibilities. When you boil all of the Bill of Rights down, it’s what it is. When you extract that loads of B.S. and factual inaccuracies that were littered throughout that man’s sermon years ago, and distill it into something useful you’d never find it. My definition really takes all the fun out of the idea of freedom, it cuts through all of the romantic, fanciful notions that we have about our ideals and culture. The ability to have responsibilities. That’s not so in dictatorships, where you must always follow marching orders or are only allowed one idea of reality, though that’s closer to the freedom that was being pushed by a church that we visited that Sunday.  That’s not so in Monarchies were you are given your rules by kings and queens who were “picked” by God or were in some way divine… Nobility make the rules. There wasn’t really even freedom in this church where your options are fall in line or fall to Hell.

Freedom being the ability to have responsibilities’ changes the way you look on what you do. It is different. It is more than being able to preach your religion because you have the freedom to do so, it is more than knowing that you are guaranteed due process and it does not need religion to make it valid. (Not that our freedoms do in the first place. Atheists are just as ‘free’ as anyone else.) Being responsible for what you say and do sheds a new light on it because while you are free to say what you please, you are also the person who is accountable for the way your words impact the world, for the way your actions make others feel. The freedom to be accountable for the way your life impacts the world is a responsibility, it is a job. It is one that we must be able to question ourselves so that we are able to do it well. It would have been an answer well received in a time when there are so many churches whose actions and words help lead the type of environment lead people to value their lives so little that they would take them. It would have been an answer well received when preachers call for the detention of same-sex individuals inside of a fence so that they will "die-out."

Responsibility would have been a wonderful call for the idea of freedom, because people who know they have freedom should have to deal with understanding of the charge that they are given. Any answer would have been wonderful. A call to question, not to shake the foundations of faith but to provide it with a more honest footing, would have been refreshing but that was not what was given. Instead, there was a none answer to an a leading question that was not meant to answer but meant to distract. To push people in a certain direction, to make people follow. And there's not much freedom in that at all.