On a Mission for Both God and Country

We should explain. Freedom is not from God, that is.

We Americans kinda think it is. 'Cause we love it so much. Which is, as mentioned, kinda the problem.

It is, as it turns out, freedom from God when it's about slaves and captives. I did a word search. You can do that. Here's some of what I found:

Isaiah: The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.

Jesus used that verse in Luke when he was getting busy with it. That is, starting up, getting everything going, dumping the carpentry gig and getting into the son-of-God gig.

If you keep on reading, you'll see the word "freedom" used over and over as though it is the kind of political freedom we think it is.

But, to go all religious on your head, it's not. It's freedom from the consequences of your inherent naughtiness. In the Jewish context of the time, the Jews were subjugated by their law into spiritual slavery, forced by the weight of their laws to stagger along without ever really knowing if they had been good enough to keep God happy.

Jesus came along and said, you are no longer a slave to that burden. To go all religious on your head again, they were freed from the law, but they were to become slaves to righteousness. Slaves to Jesus. Slaves in the kingdom of God. 'Course, that included becoming children of God, invited into the family of God, sons and daughters of the high holy one. And not high like in Colorado.

So freedom is a real thing in scripture, and being freed from slavery and captivity is a thing, but on the much grander scale of God's interaction with all of humanity, we are freed from condemnation to become slaves to goodness. You know, the whole "love God, love your neighbor as yourself" thing. We are freed from hatred, slaves to love.

Our problem is that we pretty quickly in American history started reading "freedom" in the Bible, and thinking that it was political freedom, American-style freedom.

Our even bigger problem is that we thought it meant freedom for white landowning men, but not for tenant farmers, women, or slaves.

That's when we did two bad things. We forgot the whole "loving your neighbor" bit, which means technically we also forgot the whole "loving God" bit. And we co-opted the word "freedom" into a purely political context, made it radically different than what God intended, didn't apply it to everyone the way that God intended, and turned it into theology. I think that's probably more than two bad things.

We made a god out of freedom, and lost touch with the God of actual freedom. We started twisting the word "freedom" to fit our own needs and purposes, and we denied it to those who deserved it most. As time passed, we turned it into a marketing tool to justify some really terrible things that we did to other peoples and countries. Everything we did was said to be about "freedom", when most often, it was more about money and power. As I wrote once in one of my other books, we will not send our children to die for money, land, power or oil, but we will send them off to die for freedom.

And we wrapped it all up in the flag.

(My books are available for purchase at www.lulu.com/spotlight/andyfletch42 and www.lulu.com/spotlight/andyfletch)(The former is books on American Christianity, the latter is books on 20th and 21st century physics and cosmology and really, they're all very cool. IMHO.)