Civics Lesson: Part V (Liberty)

The next right that Jefferson enumerated is Liberty. What is Liberty? Many use freedom and liberty interchangeably. This is a misnomer. Freedom is merely a component of Liberty. So, what is liberty? It is a fine balance between freedom of choice (freewill) and objective morality.


When one has too much freedom without the constraint of objective morality, ones life will descend into anarchy. When one is constrained by too much morality with out the ability to freely choose between right and wrong, ones life will descend into tyranny.

What is objective morality? It is the laws of nature and nature's God that our Creator has given us in Holy Scriptures - a form that the finite mind of fallen men & women can understand. These laws are apart of the self-evident Truths that Jefferson alluded to in the Declaration of Independence. Subjective morality (each individual defining their own moral laws) is the same as the relative truth of secular humanism (See Part I). When a society that operates in subjective morality, it operates in unbridled freedom that leads to anarchy. When anarchy becomes unbearable, one person's or group's subjective morality becomes the standard (instead of God's morality). It is the subjective morality of the few that becomes the objective morality for the rest of society. The only way for it to be enforced is by corrosion. A tyranny manifests itself where the rule of law based on the objective morality of God is replace with the rule of personality based on the subjective morality of the tyrant.

We must beware that we don't use the objective morality that was lovingly give to us by God as a religiously legalist tyranny. While the Truth of God's morality is good the use of this truth to tear people down to build yourself up is just as evil as the imposition of another person's subjective morality on the rest of us. Liberty is not license to sin, but freedom to make our choices and reap the consequences for them (for more on the tyranny of condemnation).

We see the basis for liberty in the Creation Story in Genesis. God's love for humanity (consisting of just Adam & Eve at the time) was demonstrated by the freedom given by God (eat of any tree in the garden) and the morality set by God (except for the tree of the knowledge of good & evil) with the consequences spelled out by God (life for choosing not to eat, death for choosing to eat).

When Eve chose to listen to the lies of the serpent, when Adam chose not to protect his wife from the serpent, when they used their freewill to choose to eat from the forbidden tree, they reaped the responsibility of the right of the liberty they exercised. The consequences we are still reaping today.

Liberty is the freedom to choose between what God defines as right and wrong, and to be awarded the consequence of those choices - in the here & now and the hereafter.

Author Note & Edit: I just saw this quote and thought that is summed up what I was trying to say in this article:

"We can breathe the air of liberty only to the extent that we are ready to bear the burden of moral responsibility associated with it."
—Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1965)