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HORSESHOE BAY, Texas ? Nothing catalyzes Americans to action more than the violation of personal, physical freedom, said WORLD magazine founder Joel Belz, speaking during the 2009 Association of State Baptist Papers fellowship in Horseshoe Bay, Feb. 10-13. Describing Western culture’s captivation with civil liberties, Belz warned against a grosser perversion of the God-given gift of physical freedom that occurs not at gunpoint, but in a “quiet embezzlement while no one is watching.”
“We do not have to fear atomic bombs; we do need to fear godless men and their ideas,” said Belz, quoting the late Fulton J. Sheen, an American bishop of the Roman Catholic Church who conducted a weekly television program in the 1950s.”
Liberty a gift, not a right
Admitting that it may sound “overly cheap and almost obscene” to assert that civil liberties are not at the core of the true meaning of freedom, Belz argued that physical freedom and freedom of religion are not the ultimate issues of liberty.
Noting he could easily set the stage for a discussion on freedom with warnings of Muslim extremists, or North Korea and Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Belz instead called attention to Matthew 10:28, which states: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
“There is a strange tendency among us all when we take up the issue of liberty in general and religious liberty in particular to reduce the discussion to somehow its most tangible and visible aspects,” he said. “So, we measure liberty’s progress overly much in terms of the absence of literal chains ? the absence of literal jail cells, the absence of literal guns, or the absence, in Muslim terms, of literal gallows.”
Americans think of themselves as free people primarily because the country has been mostly spared from physical restraint in the forms of totalitarian governments or repressive religious regimes, he said.
Careful not to minimize God’s gracious dealings toward the American nation, Belz said the global persecution of the church is the subject of four to five pages in WORLD magazine.
“Nonetheless, I hope we still always see such reports in their right perspective. That perspective is that throughout the long history of God’s people from Old Testament times until this very moment, persecution and the loss of civil liberty and the reduction of personal freedom have been among the very best gifts that God ever gives to his children,” he said. “Just like the blood of martyrs throughout the history of the church wonderfully watered the church as thousands of able young people committed their lives to the preaching of the gospel around the world.”
As such, Belz said, liberty is neither an end itself, nor is it a personal right. Instead, liberty should be viewed as a gift.
“Freedom and liberty of this sort are gifts God graciously extends to some of his servants, just as to some he gives good health, or financial prosperity, or beautiful children. But we should never fall into the trap of supposing that the state of political liberty or civic freedom is the norm for God’s people ? just as we do not expect that he owes us perfect health or a big bank account or deliverance from Wall Street or beautiful children.”
The fact that the nation has been largely spared from physical enslavement has both spoiled and blinded the church, Belz said, noting that “God’s goodness might be even more extravagantly expressed to his people when he sends us to Egypt or to Babylon.”
“The irony in all this may be that in our aversion to physical bondage and to persecution we have such a remarkable tendency to fall into bondage to a very different taskmaster ? our love for freedom. Our love for freedom can become our taskmaster,” he said.
And in a culture built on Patrick Henry’s famous credo, “give me liberty or give me death,” Belz said one only has to look at the annals of history to see the abuse of freedom paves the way for nominalism in the church.
“?I’m going to ask you to ponder the extent to which we, right here in America, have come to overly worship the gift of freedom that God has given us ? more than the giver of that gift himself,” he said, alluding to America’s “love affair” with the Declaration of Independence. “Just as we do with some of his other good gifts, we make freedom a false god, pushing from his rightful place the God that may or may not choose to give us such freedom. We come to the point of insisting this gift is instead our birthright.”
While agreeing that bondage is something from which to ask God’s deliverance, Belz proposed that “loss of liberty” could also serve as part of God’s plan of enrichment for his followers.
