Positive Liberty

As Rowe mentioned downblog, he and I recently had the chance to see The Birth of Freedom, a one-hour documentary produced by the Acton Institute. The aim of the film was to illuminate the Christian ancestry for the freedoms of the modern West, and to suggest that if we do not keep this ancestry in mind, we risk losing everything we’ve gained. The film made a number of claims that sat badly with me, both logically and empirically, yet I found them woven together so well and presented so confidently that it was a little breathtaking.

Now, there certainly were Christian elements, and vitally important ones, in the history of individual liberty. It’s hard to understand how we could have anything like the modern idea of liberty without several concepts that come to us directly from Christianity or Judaism. These elements’ origins are sometimes undersold or downplayed, particularly among libertarians of an Ayn-Randish bent. It is unfortunate that this should be so.

Some of the elements I have in mind here are the idea that there are higher standards of justice than mere promulgated law; that individuals possess a worth and dignity beyond what the state or the society imputes to them; and that every individual has supreme, inviolate purposes of his own, rather than being made for the purposes of others. We owe the origins of these ideas to Christianity, and to Judaism before it.

Yet there are right ways and wrong ways to argue for the importance of Christianity in the intellectual history of freedom, and I felt that the documentary made some highly doubtful factual assertions in trying to prove the case. Continue Reading »