The New (& the Old) Evangelization When liberty becomes license, the federal mandate is near

Oct 7, 2011

Historian William Durant once said, “When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.” The habit of defining liberty as doing what you want i.e. license, instead of doing what you ought i.e. liberty, has been long touted by supporters of Secular-liberalism as the “freedom” upon which America was founded. But such liberty is not liberty at all. Rather, the so-called “right” or “liberty” to do what one wants without any reference to an objective moral standard or divine law, the very principles which orders and unifies a society, leads, in the end, to social disorder. And in turn, when people are confronted with social disorder and uncertainty, they turn to the State for help. Nevertheless, with such low moral standards having been absorbed by the people, the State, under the pretense of eliminating the social disorder and uncertainty, also eliminates the liberties of its citizenry in order to empower itself. Chief among the liberties politicians seek to eliminate is religious liberty.

In recent decades the U.S. government has been content to limit religious liberty by way of prevention; that is, restricting religious practice under certain conditions and in certain places. In 1840, this is what Tocqueville called “soft despotism.” He said that under such despotism “men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses…” Currently, however, through the new federal health care mandate, courtesy of the Obama administration, the State is venturing into new territory. It is compelling citizens to act, to purchase a particular service and in the case we are considering, compelling Catholics to violate their conscience.

Under new federal health care regulations, the Obama administration is to mandate full coverage of sterilization, contraception, and related counseling services by private health plans. According to a recent press release from the Diocese of Green Bay, the Wisconsin Catholic bishops wrote a letter to United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius arguing that the regulations do not adequately protect the religious liberty of institutions, employers, insurance providers, and others. The letter takes the Obama administration to task by stating the mandate’s “effect is to so constrain religious activity as to diminish the religious liberty of Catholics in Wisconsin and the United States.”

The letter then goes on to remind the Obama administration about the very nature of religious liberty: “Ministry in the Catholic tradition is not limited to houses of worship. It finds full expression in service to others. The faith we profess and celebrate in the parish is taken into the world through our public ministries.” Religious liberty, understood in the proper Christian context, not only means the freedom to worship but it also guarantees the freedom to obey God’s law and one’s conscience. It is not only a matter of privacy but a matter of public expression and exercise. But with the new federal health care mandate this may not be possible.

In the nineteenth century Pope Leo XIII had warned the world that confusing liberty with license is nothing short of perilous. He wrote in his encyclical “On the Nature of Human Liberty” that “license will gain what liberty loses; for liberty will ever be more free and secure in proportion as license is kept in fuller restraint.” That's right. Undue tolerance of sin, immorality and injustice under the pretense of respecting people’s freedom ultimately leads to freedom’s own negation. And freedom’s own negation is slavery and despotism (not the soft kind either).

Leo XIII further elaborated that if “unbridled license of speech and of writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of natures, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. “ We should keep his prophetic utterance in mind because they have proven to be true in the last 120 years or so; and that is with unbridled license “nothing will remain sacred and inviolate,” not even religious liberty.

But here is the greatest of ironies. What Secular-liberalism demands for itself it invariably denies to the Catholic Church. “On the one hand,” he continued, “they demand for themselves and for the State a license which opens the way to every perversity of opinion; and on the other, they hamper the Church in diverse ways, restricting her liberty within narrowest limits…” No doubt this is where the Catholic Church in America is finding itself. As has been the case so many times throughout history, the State is once again “restricting her liberty within narrowest limits.”

In his book, “Christianity and Culture,” T. S. Eliot wrote something that was very telling about modern Secular-liberalism. He said, “That Liberalism may be a tendency toward something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature…It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards something definite.” Protesting, defying and retreating from the Christian religion and its moral absolutes is precisely what T. S. Eliot referred to when he said Liberalism moves “away from, rather than towards something definite.” Moving away from anything can be hazardous since we do not have eyes in the back of our heads. We tend to stumble. And when we step backward or away from that which repels us, quite often we find ourselves in a much worse place than where we started.

As we consider the federal health care mandate, the war on terror and many other pressing issues, one gets the feeling that patrons of Secular-liberalism would rather be slaves of the State- or even of Islam –than be free in a Christian society. Perhaps this is why Eliot warns that liberty wrongly defined as unbridled license will inevitably lead to its opposite, namely, tyranny. Or, to use the words of the poet: “Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”