In November’s Heartlander I summarized and commented on Richard Epstein’s presentations on “skepticism and freedom” at The Heartland Institute’s anniversary benefit dinner held on October 5. This month I comment on Fr. Robert Sirico’s presentations on “religion and freedom.”
Skepticism and Faith
The reader may recall from the November essay that Richard Epstein, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Chicago, explained how a defense of individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise could be built and justified without appealing to natural law or God-given rights, two concepts that were central to the thinking of our nation’s Founding Fathers.
Fr. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute and pastor of St. Mary Catholic Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, defended classical liberalism from a very different starting point, the belief that men are created in God’s image and therefore are entitled to freedom and capable of acting “for reasons that transcend their own comfort or their own interest.”
A Most Unusual Priest
Many people with deep religious convictions are inclined to support welfare, progressive income taxation, and other government programs popularly believed to reduce the suffering of the poor by compelling charity toward others. One often hears priests, preachers, and rabbis endorse an activist government able to solve social, economic, and perhaps even moral problems.
Fr. Sirico offers a powerful challenge to this conventional wisdom. Religious principles, he says, require that men and women be free to practice virtue or vice, and freedom in turn requires a limited government and vibrant free-market economy.
What Is Religious Faith?
Concern that religious faith can be at odds with individual freedom is rooted in historical episodes–the prosecution of Galileo, the Inquisition, and the Crusades–as well as a concern that persons who claim to know the truth often claim also the authority to impose their beliefs on others.
Fr. Sirico addressed the first concern by acknowledging the checkered background of the Roman Catholic Church as it pertains to individual freedom. “I do not deny these sad moments in my tradition’s past,” he said. “Rather, I repent of them, as John Paul the Great repented of these and other sins at the outset of the liturgical season of Lent in the year 2000.”
That such episodes are now criticized by the Church is testimony to the Church’s fundamental commitment to the use of reason, the dignity of individuals, and the inseparability of human freedom and virtue. “We denounce coercive activity that would bend, or attempt to bend, the conscience of man at the behest of some ruler, autocrat, or theocrat,” said Fr. Sirico.
Christian Anthropology and Freedom
Jewish and Christian faiths are fundamentally pro-freedom because they view man as being made in God’s image–imago dei. This means every individual is simultaneously corporeal and transcendent. By virtue of our birth we have rights and values, “not merely derived from tribe or family or nation, much less state,” said Fr. Sirico, but by our very existence as rights-bearing children of God.
The Jewish and Christian faiths are also pro-freedom because they view the material world as good because it comes from a good God. It is not a sin or unnatural for men to cultivate the earth and solve the problem of scarcity that is part of the natural condition. Property rights and commerce arise as men use their God-given talents to discover and develop what God has provided for their sustenance.
The Judeo-Christian tradition places a high value on the use of reason to solve the problem of scarcity and better understand the nature and meaning of God. This distinguishes the Jewish and most Christian faiths from fideism, the notion that reason is irrelevant to or incompatible with religious faith. In Europe today, the Catholic Church is the leading defender of reason while secular philosophers claim truth is subjective or unknowable, Fr. Sirico said.
“Liberty,” according to Fr. Sirico, “is not a virtue in itself. It is the context in which virtue or vice can be enacted.” Religious faiths that respect the power of reason acknowledge that virtuous acts can be meaningful only if freely undertaken. Such faiths necessarily stand in opposition to institutions that rely on or justify the use of coercion to accomplish even worthy goals. People must be “internally compelled” to do the right things through an understanding of the human dignity of others and of our vocations as children of God.
Religion and Government
Fr. Sirico finds in both the Old and New Testaments a strong skepticism toward government. When the Israelites asked God for a king (I Samuel 8), He warned them that a king would conscript their sons and daughters to fight his wars, take one-tenth of their crops and livestock, and “you yourselves will become his slaves.”
The tradition of having courts separate from political rulers comes from the Jewish tradition, and the separation of church and state owes much to the words of Jesus Christ (Matthew 22:21): “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”
Christianity was, at its inception, “a subversive religion, because it did not see Caesar as a god to be worshiped,” said Fr. Sirico. Freedom was a major theme in the letters of St. Paul, and Christianity’s appeal to slaves and former slaves helps explain its rapid spread. The vital role played by Christianity in the emergence of individual liberty as an affirmative value–as opposed to group rights and the freedom to impose one’s will on others–is a central theme of Orlando Patterson’s great book, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (Basic Books, 1991).
Religion and Economics
By carving out from the totalitarian rule of monarchs and other religions a physical as well as moral realm of individual freedom, the Jewish and Christian faiths created a space for the evolution of private property, enforceable private contracts, and other free-market institutions. Absent the pro-freedom doctrines of organized religion and the ability of religious institutions to defend decentralized sources of power from the state, there would have been no emergence of market economies during the Middle Ages.
It is no surprise, then, that economics–the science of how markets work–began in the Middle Ages as monks and moral philosophers began to observe and study the new institutions made possible by individual liberty. “The merchant in the Jewish and Christian traditions,” said Fr. Sirico, “is one who is responding to a vocation as a result of the nature imposed upon their reality by the God who created them. And this vocation tells us that each human being is entrusted with certain talents, certain gifts, which they have the responsibility to use, and to use wisely, to use generously, to use creatively and productively.”
It is a short step from this moral philosophy to the teachings of Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published in 1759) and then The Wealth of Nations (1776), the book widely regarded as the first systematic treatise on economics.
Religion versus Skepticism
Toward the end of his remarks, Fr. Sirico challenged Richard Epstein’s view that a persuasive case for classical liberalism can be made without reference to “the question of human meaning.” Without a fundamental respect for the dignity of individuals–of their God-given rights and vocations–the tolerance toward others that Epstein shows to be necessary for prosperity could soon disappear.
Prosperity and the materialism it naturally encourages pose their own threat to freedom, Fr. Sirico said. They make it easier to forget the values and beliefs that “can inspire men and women to confront [human vulnerability] for reasons that transcend their own comfort or their own interest.” We forget, for example, the real reasons for marriage and so engage in debates over “gay marriage,” and conflicts between religious groups are settled in ways that violate the principle that the freedom of the individual to choose ought to be paramount.
Freedom, in the words of Lord Acton, the Acton Institute’s namesake, is “the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” Preserving it requires a renewed understanding of the values and principles, many of them based on religious belief, that made freedom possible and still offer its strongest defense today.
