STUDY

GUIDE

RT~

Jtmanda Witt

The Birth of Freedom Study Guide

2008 by Acton Institute All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. ISSN 10: 1-880595-55-9 ISSN 13: 978-1-880595-55-8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Witt, Amanda. Birth of Freedom Study Guide

I Amanda Witt

Cover design by Peter Ho Interior design by Judy Schafer

Aero N INSTITUTE
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.Jl :Note to ~aders andStudy qroup Leaders

This study guide explores issues raised in The Birth of Freedom documentary. The film should be watched first. If you found the comments of particular scholars in the film valuable, you '11 be pleased to fmd discussions of their comments here, as well as excerpts from their recorded interviews that didn't make it into the film. The guide has been divided into eight lessons. Although a group could move through these sections more quickly, ideally each class time would focus on a single section. For your convenience, there is a page for notes at the end of each lesson.

CONTENTS
Introduction Lesson 1: What Is Freedom?
A Basic Definition A Fuller Definition of Freedom

Lesson 2: Freedom as Self-Rule

Slave or Free? Free to Pursue Happiness Freedom as Exerting One's Will

Lesson 3: Foundations of Sand

Materialism: No Ground for Freedom Relativism: No Ground for Freedom Relativism versus Reality

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Lesson 4: The Judea-Christian Grounds of Freedom

Core Identity Judaism Christianity Freedom's Cost

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Lesson 5: Yes, but ...

Doesn't the New Testament Condone Slavery? Didn't Christians Keep Slaves? Aren't Christians Hypocrites? Didn't Christian Superstition Produce "The Dark Ages"?

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Lesson 6: Freedom, Morality, and Government

Balance of Power The Morality of Politicians Legislation and Morality Governmental Restrictions on Individual Liberty

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Lesson 7: Freedom and Economic Progress

Economic Freedom Safety Nets That Stifle Helping the Poor Prosper Ownership and Competition Freedom to Create

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Lesson 8: Freedom and International Mfairs

Rejecting "Made in the Image of God" Our Responsibilities Europe and the Roots of Freedom

41

For Further Study

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INTRODUCTION
When we talk about freedom , we can talk about political freedom, including things such as the abolition of slavery or the birth of democracy. We can talk about economic freedom-property rights or the freedom to buy and sell goods. We can mean freedom of thought, speech, or press; freedom of religion; freedom to choose one's own occupation; freedom to govern one's own family; freedom to pursue excellence; freedom to take enterprising risks and succeed or fail. As The Birth of Freedom suggests, the slow growth of all of these freedoms was helped along by one radical premise: Every human being-man, woman, and child-is made in the image of God and thus possesses certain unalienable rights. The idea was foreign to most of the ancient world. It emerged not in Babylon, Greece, or Rome , but in a small, contrary Middle Eastern tribe known in those days as the Israelites, and today as the Jews. The Jewish holy writings described a God who fashioned man and woman in his image, and later set up hundreds of guidelines establishing their basic rights.

ii

Introduction

Later, a Jewish carpenter-Jesus of Nazareth-spurred his followers to a fuller understanding of what it meant to be made in the image of God as well as how to treat others who also are divine image-bearers. The history of Christendom is, of course, littered with tragic instances of hypocrisy and oppression. It's not that previous civilizations were wholly wicked and Christendom all sweetness and light. The citizens of predominantly Christian nations do sin. Even the West's most revered leaders are flawed human beings like everyone else. Yet Christendom is unique in that its flawed members gradually brought Judea-Christian principles to bear on all manner of oppression-political, economic, and religious. As the New Testament explains, the freedom that Jesus called people to is not just freedom from guilt. He also called people to become free by becoming our truest selves. He called us to become the selves we were designed to be, divine image-bearers-creative, generous, merciful, and just. Another Judea-Christian idea, the idea that man is sinful and prone to sin, also played a crucial role in the birth of freedom. It did so by spurring men to craft governments with checks and balances, protecting people both from powerhungry leaders and from the tyranny of the majority against individuals. Secular history textbooks about the West often overlook the role that Christianity played in the birth of freedom. This omission is not only untruthful, but dangerous. Freedom will not thrive when severed from its roots. This is why we must remember, and we teach our children to remember. This is the purpose of the film and the study guide.

Lesson 1
WHAT IS FREEDOM?
A Basic Definition
A basic form of freedom is being able to choose one's own path, whether it be for good or for ill.
QUESTION: Does the Bible portray God as giving people the freedom to choose their own paths?

Consider the following: Moses's last words to the Israelites:

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LoRD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LoRD is your life .... (Deuteronomy 30: 19-20)

Joshua's words to the Israelites:

If serving the LoRD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve , whether

Lesson 1

the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But for me and my household, we will serve the LoRD. (Joshua 24: 15)
QUESTION: If God wants us to be good, why does he allow us

to choose whether or not to be good?

QUESTION: If we are punished for doing wrong, or if we suffer

the natural consequences of doing wrong, are we still free to do it?

QUESTIONS: Some people see God as unfair because he pun-

ishes us if we break his rules. This assumes that God's standards are arbitrary-that he just made them up (and that we could make up better ones). What if Absolute Good isn't something God just made up? What if Absolute Good is part of etemal Reality-and evil is a destructive flight from that good reality? What if God's biblical rules are here to keep us from breaking ourselves on the sharp rocks of this evil? Consider this analogy:
A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap etemallife. (Galatians 6:7b-8)
QUESTIONS: Is reaping what you sow arbitrary, or is the harvest a natural outcome of the initial seed? What is the application for us today as we try to understand God's call to a righteous life?

A Fuller Definition of Freedom

A basic definition of freedom is "being able to choose, whether for good or ill." However, many scholars argue that the richest form of freedom requires a deliberate choosing of the good. George Weigel describes the difference this way:

What Is Freedom?

There are two contesting ideas of freedom in the Westem world today. The one with which we're most familiar, because it dominates our culture through the language of choice, is the notion that freedom is simply a matter of willfulness. Freedom is what I want to do. And that's okay as long as what I want to do doesn't hurt anybody else. But the idea that freedom has something to do with choosing what is right, choosing what is good, choosing what we knowwilllead to human flourishing-[this] idea is the older idea. In some sense it goes all the way back to the Athenians of the 7th century B.C. It's the idea that freedom has to do with virtue, that freedom has to do with goodness, that freedom is having the right, as Lord Acton put it, "to do what we ought." Or to put it another way, to be truly free is to be able to freely choose that which is objectively good, that which really makes for genuine human flourishing. So you've got this content-less idea of freedom, freedom as choice--emphasis on me, myself, and l-and you've got a richer, thicker notion of freedom as inextricably tied up with questions of good and evil, nobility and ignobility.

QUESTIONS: Based on what Weigel says, is an evil or ignoble man truly free? In what way is he limited or bound? QUESTIONS: Weigel says, "To be truly free is to be able to freely

choose that which is objectively good." If a person does not believe in objective good-if he thinks good and evil are just categories people made up and that religion merely defines good as part of some power scheme-can he ever be truly free? What is it that imprisons him?

Lesson 1

\, ""'

Study :Notes ...

LessonZ
FREEDOM AS SELF-RULE
Slave o-r F-ree?
Samuel Gregg explains that true freedom is more than freedom from constraint:
Freedom is the opposite of being subjected. Freedom is the opposite of servitude, freedom is the opposite of being in bondage. So that's one negative understanding of freedom that we have .... But the other thing about freedom which makes it good is that it gives every individual, providing they're willing to take the responsibility, the opportunity for self-rule. It literally means "free" "dom" in the sense of we exercise the type of kingly dominion over ourselves. Not kingly dominion in the sense that we just make up the rules ourselves, but rather in the sense that we have the freedom to know the truth, to recognize the truth, and then to choose the truth .... I think the best way of describing the Westem understanding of freedom in its best sense, is the idea of freedom for excellence. I can be free in the sense that I play a musical instrument without any training, without any
5

Lesson 2

instruction, without any learning, but essentially that just amounts to me just banging away on the piano or rubbing away on the violin without making any beautiful music. Instead, all I get is noise and static. On the other hand, however, if I train myself, if I discipline myself, if I'm humble enough to submit myself to the guidance of those who are wiser than me, then I can learn to begin to play the piano. I can learn to begin to play music that others have written. I can even learn to begin to compose my own music. In other words, I can create something beautiful with this freedom. That's freedom for excellence. It's not freedom in the sense that I can just choose whatever I want arbitrarily and willynilly. What it's about is choosing what makes us better as human beings, which means having an appreciation of the truth about ourselves and the truth about the way the world has been made.

QUESTION: In what way is doing whatever we want not true freedom? QUESTION: Can we become slaves to our own whims or appetites? QUESTION: In one of his two surviving letters, the apostle Peter said, "A man is a slave to whatever masters him" (2 Peter 2: 19). What things often master us today? QUESTION: Consider a college student who exercises his freedom from parental supervision by skipping classes and blowing off his assignments. Mter four years of such behavior, will he fmd himself more or less free, with more or fewer choices, than the person who bound himself to academic toil? QUESTION: Consider this with regard to husbands and wives: How does disciplining or limiting one's choices through marriage bring increased freedom? QUESTION: In what other situations can a measure of discipline-of self-rule-expand and enhance one's freedom?

Freedom as Self-Rule

Free to Pursue Happiness

In Love is Stronger than Death (1979), philosopher Peter Kreeft makes a provocative claim: "The pursuit of happiness is a terrible thing." He goes on to explain:
In fact, one must choose either life (eros) and liberty or the pursuit of happiness, if we mean happiness in the modem, rather than the ancient, sense. The modem sense of happiness is subjective contentment, not objective perfection, not the fulfillment of the ... purpose for which we exist. For us, if you think you're happy, you're happy. The ancients (such as Solomon, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas) would disagree: A fool thinks he is happy, but he is a fool. ... Modern man reinterprets liberty as he reinterprets happiness. Liberty is no longer freedom to attain my true, objective end, but freedom from obstacles and frustrations to my subjective desires.
QUESTION: We all want to be happy. When is it wrong-and a limiting of true liberty-to pursue happiness? QUESTION: Kreeft contrasts objective good and subjective good. What is the danger if each of us pursues only what subjectively feels good to each of us? QUESTION: What is the difference between being free to do

something and being free from frustrations?

Freedom as Exerting One's Will

William Allen uses the image of a ball rolling down a hill to challenge a common misconception about what freedom means:
When we say that we have no impediments to doing what we do and we describe that as freedom, we're actually describing nothing very different from the ball that rolls

Lesson 2

down the hill without a stone being in its path. There's no glory in that. No credit for it. It's just something that happens to it. We aren't concerned with whether there are impediments to our action. We're concerned whether we can choose our action .... But it means not choosing just any purpose because human beings are certain kinds of beings; therefore they have appropriate purposes. Let me put it this way, why would anyone consider it freedom for a human being to choose to do an inhuman thing? That's not a freedom. That is irresponsibility.

What is genuine freedom? Allen says it's tied to moral power:

Freedom is primarily a description of moral power .... It's agency. It's the notion that individual human beings can undertake efforts, endeavors, labors, work. And that they do that to some purpose-to some end .... We will, we human beings, we strange beings, we will do many things unthinkingly in our lives. And someone is likely to describe some of those things as freedom. But if they do so they'll be making a mistake. The things that we do unthinkingly we do not do freely even if there's no impediment to our doing them.

QUESTIONS: Allen also says freedom is doing something deliberately, not unthinkingly. Do you agree or disagree? Is freedom in its fullest sense an act of will? QUESTIONS: Allen asks, "Why would anyone consider it freedom for a human being to choose to do an inhuman thing?" Is there any answer to his question? Does doing inhuman things-and therefore making oneself less than humanexpand or restrict one's freedom?

Freedom as Self-Rule

\.

~ Studj :Notes ...

Lesson 3
FOUNDATIONS OF SAND
Materialism: No Ground for Freedom
Philosophical materialists believe that matter and energy are all that ultimately exist. They view man as just an animal that stands upright; a curious collection of atoms thrown together by blind evolution.
QUESTIONS: If we're just highly evolved animals, doesn't pro-

tecting the weak just water down the human race? If we're just products of evolution, shouldn't we let nature take its course and allow disease, warfare, slavery, and so forth to weed out weaker human specimens?

Relativism: No Ground for Freedom

Moral relativists say there's no such thing as absolute truth, no such thing as right and wrong. They say we each make up our own morality, as individuals and as societies, and no morality is inherently better than another. Many today see this approach as a good way to promote freedom and toleration. Robert George disagrees:
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12

Lesson 3

Some people seem to think that the way to defend principles of freedom and democracy is to appeal to moral relativism, the idea that we ought not to be imposing values on other people because after all, there is no moral truth, there are only subjective opinions. What's amusing about that is that it is the worst possible way to defend the ideals of freedom and democracy because moral relativism, if it does anything, undermines those ideals. If all things are relative in matters of subjective opinion, then the belief in the dignity of the individual, the belief that people ought not to be enslaved, the idea that people should have their freedom respected, the idea that all citizens should participate in government and have a right to-the democratic ideal-all of those would be undermined. There would be no reason for believing those. The contrary opinions of Stalin or Hitler would have just as great a claim to governing, to ruling as our own claims for democratic freedom and liberty.
QUESTION: A bigot might criticize a group of people because

they are less developed technologically, have a different color skin, and wear different clothes. Is this the same as opposing a cultural practice because it treats certain people cruelly? A good example is when English colonial leaders banned the practice in India of murdering widows and burying them with their newly deceased husbands.
QUESTION: Is it permissible to say some countries are better

than others because they treat their citizens better?

Relativism versus Reality

Relativism says that each social group constructs its own value systems, that there is no universal standard of good and evil.
QUESTION: Is there any worldwide agreement regarding good versus bad behavior?

Foundations of Sand

13

In Mere Christianity and in The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis concedes that there are minor variations in what is considered decent behavior. He also argues that cultures around the world have always agreed on key points of human behavior. In all nations and at all times, for instance, courage and selflessness have been esteemed, cowardice and selfishness deplored. Lewis also says:
The most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one . ... It seems, then, that we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.

QUESTION: Have you ever known someone who professed tolerance but was severely critical of some particular opinion?

Relativists say there is no absolute good or evil, that right and wrong are just fictions that differ from one culture to the next, but as Lewis shows, people everywhere acknowledge certain basic distinctions between good and evil. This means that relativists are arguing counter to history and common human behavior, including the relativist's own behavior.
QUESTION: If cultures everywhere agree about certain stan-

dards of behavior, where did that consensus come from?

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Lesson 3

Consider the words of the apostle Paul:

When Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts .... (Romans 2: 14-15)

Contrary to the claims of moral relativists, natural law-the law written on the human heart-does seem to establish certain ground rules for human behavior. However, history shows that natural law alone never led to widespread freedom. Natural law might lead a few to promote freedom for all, but such attempts remained isolated and fitful. They never gathered sufficient momentum and sweep to carry an entire civilization to freedom. Something else was needed.

Foundations of Sand

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~ Study :Notes ...

Lesson4
THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN GROUNDS OF FREEDOM
CoTe Identity
In his extended interview for The Birth of Freedom, John Witte Jr. commented:
The Hebrew Bible is really one of the great, great textbooks of liberty for the West. Genesis 1 and 2 of the story of creation and fall is a really critical part of the narrative of human rights .... There's the notion of man and woman being created in the image of God and a notion of the image of God where human dignity is a critical part of the core identity of the person that needs to be protected by human rights.
QUESTION: Human dignity isn't defined by the state or conferred by the government. Human dignity resides in "the core identity of the person." Why is this point important to remember? QUESTION: If the state confers a right, can the state take it

away?

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Lesson 4

Judaism
The God of the Jews is often painted as a finger-shaking old tyrant who wants to prevent people from having fun, a cosmic control freak who punishes anyone daring to cross him. Witte suggests that the actual biblical picture of God is both more complex and more comforting than this false caricature:
In the Hebrew Bible when you have the first encounter of sin, frrst with Adam and Eve in the Garden and then of Cain who murders his brother Abel ... what's interesting in both accounts is that due process is served on the defendant in both instances. Adam and Eve are asked, "What did you do?" and Cain is asked "What did you do?" They had an opportunity for a hearing. They had an opportunity to defend themselves. They were ultimately spared the ultimate sanction of death which had been foretold and they were given a chance to start over. That's a wonderful first indication of divine due process that ultimately becomes woven into how we interact with people that are declared to be defendants. We move a little further into the Hebrew Bible you have the Torah, the fabulous question of 613 commandments that govern all kinds of different relationships between people and God and between persons and society. The most important of those documents is the Decalogue's two tables ... setting out some of the basic rights of family, of life, of marital fidelity, of property, of reputation that are central to any understanding of modern understanding of human rights. The Torah itself sets forth a number of basic relationships between actors and society; buyers and sellers, creditors and lenders, the rich and the poor.
QUESTION: Many people today say they can't love a God who

punishes. However, if they are assaulted, or if a loved one is murdered, usually they want the wrongdoer to be punished. Does our perspective regarding punishment change depending on whether we're the victim or the criminal?

The Judea-Christian Grounds of Freedom

19

QUESTION: Hebrew laws protected the innocent, the helpless, the foreigner, the marginalized, the down-and-out. Meanwhile, the nations around Israel largely followed the "might makes right" principle. So why does the Hebrew God have a reputation nowadays of being unfair and oppressive? Is it a matter of ignorance, of perspective, or of something else?

Christianity
Samuel Gregg says the idea that all humans are made in the image of God was revolutionary:
It's very important to remember that in the pre-Christian age, there were literally people [who were] understood as not being fully human beings. With Judaism, however, we have this understanding of humans being made in the image of God regardless of their race, regardless of their sex, regardless of their age. This was literally revolutionary, because it was very unknown outside the Jewish world. Christianity universalized this idea of human beings all being equal in dignity. Not equal in the sense that they are the same, but equal in the sense that there are certain responsibilities that they have, but also certain rights that they enjoy simply by virtue of being people, of being human persons with reason and free will.
QUESTION: Gregg says we are equal in dignity and rights,

but not equal in the sense of being the same. Some of us are very attractive physically, some are not. Some of us are strong and healthy, some are not. Some are born to nurturing, well-connected parents. Some are not. What problems arise when we misunderstand "all men are created equal" to mean we ought to all have identical advantages?
QUESTION: Gregg mentions that everyone has both rights and

responsibilities. Does modem culture talk much about the idea that everyone has responsibilities?

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Lesson 4

QUESTION: Gregg notes that in the pre-Christian age, many

people were not considered fully human. Are any people today not considered fully human? In Jewish World Review (June 12, 2006), Nat Hentoff describes a memorable encounter he once had with a civil rights leader "who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer":
He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: "There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life." "That," he continued, "was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned." This passionate reverend used to warn: "Don't let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn't a human being. That's how the whites dehumanized us .... The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do-and not even feel they'd done anything wrong."

That preacher was Jesse Jackson, who reversed his position when he ran for president. Later, Hentoff met Jackson:
I ... told Jackson that I'd been quoting-in articles, and in talks with various groups-from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he'd had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views. Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, "I'll get back to you on that." I still patiently await what he has to say.

The Judea-Christian Grounds of Freedom

21

QUESTION: What are the similarities and differences between

the arguments for slavery in the American South before the Civil War and contemporary arguments for abortion rights?
QUESTIONS: In his 1963 "I have a dream speech," Martin

Luther King Jr. appealed to the biblical idea that all humans are made in the image of God. He did so to argue for equal rights before the law, for blacks and whites, rich and poor. More recent civil rights leaders, however, have argued that certain groups should get preferential treatment. How should those of us who disapprove of this change regard the earlier civil rights struggle? Should we distance ourselves from the entire Civil Rights Movement, or should we emphasize the good so evident in that earlier period and call people back to the biblical principles that undergirded it?

Freedom's Cost
As Glenn Sunshine explains, Christian abolitionists were busy long before American abolition, long before William Wilberforce, long before even the Catholic and Quaker leaders who opposed colonial slavery in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries:
That idea of freedom so permeated the idea of the early Christians that they believed that if Christ set them free, it was their responsibility to set other people free. There were Christians who went to the slave markets to buy slaves specifically for the purpose of releasing them. They were doing this in imitation of Christ who had set them free.
QUESTION: We are all willing to live by our ideals, as long

as those ideals don't cost us anything-money, reputation, friends, career. What standards have you fallen short of because they will cost you?

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Lesson 4

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~ Stuc{y :Notes ...

Lesson 5
YES, BUT
Doesn't the New Testament Condone Slavery?
The Birth of Freedom argues that the spread of Christianity spread freedom in the West. Some passages in the New Testament, however, seem to endorse slavery. Consider the following comments from Glenn Sunshine as you think about this apparent contradiction. In his interviews for the documentary, Glenn Sunshine discusses a short epistle in the New Testament, Paul's letter to Philemon. Philemon was a Christian and a slave owner whose slave, Onesimus, had escaped and eventually found his way to the apostle Paul. During his time with Paul, Onesimus repented of escaping from Philemon, and he asked Paul to write a letter to Philemon asking him to receive Onesimus back. That sounds pretty pro-slavery, but Sunshine encourages us to look more closely:
Onesimus had run away from his master and was therefore eligible for the death penalty. And yet this rabbi [Paul] found Onesimus, talked to him and sent him back to his master with a letter saying to him, "Here's your

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Lesson 5

slave back. I've talked to him. I'll take care of any debts that he's got. And oh, by the way, you should consider freeing him." This is a totally unprecedented and frankly bizarre event because like I said, that master would have been well within his rights [according to the law of the day] to have that slave executed.

In another letter, Paul advises slaves to serve well, "not only when [the master's] eye is on you and to win his favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord." At the same time, he tells masters to "provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven" (Colossians 4: 1). In yet another letter, he says, "Were you a slave when you were called? Don't let it trouble you-though if you can gain your freedom, do so" (1 Corinthians 7:21).
QUESTION: Does the New Testament condone slavery? QUESTION: If the New Testament depicts slavery as less than

ideal for a kingdom made up of a brotherhood of believers, why doesn't it ban slavery outright?

Didn't Christians Keep Slaves?

Susan Wise Bauer suggests why for a long time many Christians continued to keep and even misuse slaves:
I think what we see in the Christian church is an increasing realization of the implications of the creation story. The creation story says that the image of God is in man and that didn't mean particular men, it meant every single man and every single woman. And what we see in the church is this working out of what this means in each historical situation. And finally the Church came to the realization that this was entirely incompatible with the idea of slavery. And of course, the slave holders were so influenced without realizing it, I think, in many cases by their desire to

Yes, but ...

hold onto their temporal power .... And those people who are not able to see their own desire for power-their own desire for domination-take these powerful principles and twist them in order to keep that power. And this is what we see in the slave holders. They could not recognize that their interpretation of Scripture was tied to their own wealth, their own prosperity, their own desire to maintain power, they were so blinded by it.

25

QUESTIONS: How are individuals nowadays blinded by a desire

to protect power, economic security or convenience? When? In what way?

Aren't Christians Hypocrites?

Christians often are attacked for being hypocrites. Samuel Gregg turns this line of attack on its head:
Now one of the great criticisms of Christians, of course, is that they are hypocrites. Someone like Thomas Jefferson, who spoke so eloquently about the self-evident fact that all men were created equal, owned slaves. Now people have looked at innumerous instances of Christians, for example, killing or murdering, or engaging in infanticide, or owning slaves and saying, "Well, these people are obviously hypocrites." But that's the point! They're hypocrites. They're not acting consistently with what their own belief system is telling them to be the truth about themselves, and the truth about humanity as a whole. People like Plato and Aristotle could not be accused of being hypocrites because they didn't believe, or at least pretend to believe, in the first place, that all human beings were created equal in the sight of God. That's the difference. Christianity gives people-even people who would consider themselves to be very secular-it gives people today the capacity to critique ourselves, to critique our behavior, and to design better institutions, and to behave in better ways so that we live up to what

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Lesson 5

the Judea-Christian tradition tells us is true about the nature of human beings.
QUESTION: Is it better to have high standards and sometimes fail to live up to them or to have fairly low standards that you maintain consistently? QUESTION: Advertising executive Leo Bumett once said, "When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either." How does this relate to Paul's advice to strive to be perfect and to accusations that Christians are not perfect?

Didn't Christian Superstition Produce uThe Dark Ages"?

Mter the fall of Rome and the struggle for power in the early
sixth century, Italy lay in ruins. Later writers sometimes portrayed the hundreds of years following this time as "the Dark Ages," when ignorant peasants were manipulated and oppressed by superstitious priests, while equally superstitious monks in monasteries walled themselves off from the real world. However, historians such as David Gress have argued that this view of the Dark Ages is untrue. Certainly this period was difficult and tumultuous, but historians of the Middle Ages generally agree that it also was a time of innovation and progress. In From Plato to Nato, Gress tells the poignant story of Cassiodorus, a sixth-century Roman nobleman who "proposed to the pope that they jointly found a college of higher leaming in Rome, which would preserve Christian and secular literature, philosophy, and religious writings." Unfortunately, another war came to Italy. When Cassiodorus retumed years later, he lived in a monastery. "There, as a very old man, he wrote his last book in 580. Not a book of philosophy, ethical reflection, elevated theology, or literature, it was instead a book on spelling, because the monks had told him that they

Yes, but ...

27

could no longer read the theological works in their own library nor could they set down their own thoughts" (161-62). At this point, it would have been tempting to simply give up. Samuel Gregg describes what followed:
One of the great ironies of history at this particular period, one of the great comic reversals, is that this little band of monks-and not just this particular band, but monks all through Westem Europe-not only did they engage in this civilizational enterprise of recapturing and reclaiming what had been lost from the classical period, they also went on together with the inventors, and the merchants, and the lawyers of the Middle Ages to go forward and build a culture that was going to surpass anything that had existed before it.

QUESTION: What are some ways the European civilization

of the Middle Ages eventually surpassed anything that had come before it?
QUESTION: What ideas drawn from Christianity helped spur

economic and technological progress?

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Lesson 5

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' ~ Study :Notes ...

Lesson 6
FREEDOM, MORALITY, AND GOVERNMENT
Balance of Power
To throw light on the early Christian attitude toward state power, Rodney Stark repeats a joke the church father Augustine once told: "What's the difference between an emperor and a pirate? ... The emperor has a much bigger navy." Stark tells the story to illustrate Christianity's long-held and well-earned distrust of governmental authority-distrust that began when the young church was persecuted by the Roman Empire. Today, the United States government has a system of checks and balances to prevent any one person or branch from becoming tyrannical, as the Roman Emperors did, and even to prevent the people themselves from becoming tyrants, as they became in the Greek democracy of ancient Athens.
QUESTION: The job of the judicial branch of the United States

government is to interpret the laws made by the elected legislative branch. Lately, though, many judges have begun decreeing law. They have begun "legislating from the bench." Does this pose a threat to the future freedom of our country?
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In his interview for The Birth of Freedom, Alan Crippen comments:

The American founders were in agreement that virtue was necessary to sustain and perpetuate a republic. And they also knew that the fountainhead of virtue in those days was the Christian faith. The Christian faith, morality, fostered and perpetuated virtue .... John Adams said that our constitution was made "for a moral and religious people" and "wholly inadequate for the government of any other." ... George Washington, in his farewell address, talked a little bit about religion and morality as indispensable supports, and that's what he called them, the "indispensable supports" of the American order.
QUESTION: Many people see religion and morality as shackles. How could the American founders have seen them as indispensable supports for a free society?

The Morality of Politicians

Today many urge voters to consider a candidate's political fitness without considering his personal morality. Morality, we're told, is a private issue irrelevant to public life. William Allen disagrees. He argues that a key reason the American Revolution succeeded while the French Revolution descended into anarchy was that the United States had George Washington, a man of great personal integrity:
You could not do without George Washington. He literally had to turn down the offer to become king in order to give the American Revolution the chance of success. He literally had to give concrete direction to his country and tell it to prefer union to separation for the Revolution to have a chance of success. He had to set down the goal of self-government with the clarity that he did in order for the people to focus on it as well as they did .... He had to administer the govemment the first eight years and establish the precedence of moderation and deference

Freedom, Morality, and Government to the legislature and to public opinion in order for that to be in place and sustain itself. . . . There were lots of important people in France. Good heavens, the thinkers, the writers of the encyclopedia ... on and on. We can talk about all kinds of important people who pulled together the intellectual infrastructure of the French Revolution. They all lacked one thing: None of them produced the moral infrastructure that George Washington produced.

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QUESTIONS: On the one hand, personal morality influences

political decisions and should, therefore, be considered when we are electing government officials. On the other hand, American history offers many examples of gifted political leaders whose lives were marked by glaring moral lapses. So what is the answer? Should we consider a candidate's personal integrity when we vote, or not?
QUESTION: Are some moral failings more critical than others

in someone who will shape public policy?

QUESTIONS: Should we hold our leaders to a higher standard

than we require of ourselves? Why or why not?

Legislation and Morality

QUESTION: It is sometimes said, "You can't legislate morality," meaning that while the government may restrain our actions through a criminal code, it cannot change our hearts. To what degree is this true? QUESTIONS: Can what our government declares illegal shape,

to some degree, people's sense of what is morally inappropriate? In other words, is there a teaching function to the law?
QUESTION: While most of us abhor hate crimes, many argue

that they should not be considered a separate category of crime because they penalize people not only for their evil

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actions but for their attitudes. What is the danger if we begin to criminalize thoughts and attitudes?

Governmental Restrictions on Individual Liberty

QUESTIONS: A key point of contention in the American Civil War was the question of self-rule: Should new states coming into the Union be able to make their own laws regarding slavery, or must they be bound by federal law? The controversy is part of a larger question: Are there situations in which the federal government should place restrictions on the self-rule of states and individual liberty in order to protect fundamental human rights?

Consider this with regard to homicide. Should states be allowed to decide whether murder is legal, or is life a fundamental right that the federal government should demand that all citizens respect?
QUESTION: What some see as reasonable governmental involve-

ment, others see as a nanny state trying to micromanage the lives of its citizens. Consider state laws regarding the wearing of motorcycle and bicycle helmets. Are these appropriate protections of life, or are they meddlesome infringements on personal liberty? What about local laws banning smoking in restaurants? Should the government make this decision, or should this issue be handled by individual restaurant owners and the choices of consumers?

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Lesson 7
FREEDOM AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS
Economic Freedom
Some people defend freedom and democracy by appealing to relativism-the idea that everybody makes up his own truth. Robert George disagrees:
If freedom and democracy are in fact defensible , then it's not because there is no absolute truth. Rather it's because that is the truth. The truth about man is that man has a special dignity that requires that his fundamental freedoms be respected and that he be entitled to participate as a full citizen in the affairs of the community.
QUESTIONS: Some argue that the general public is not wise

enough to spend its own money well, so the government should levy high taxes in order to do what's best for the people. Is this argument fundamentally different from the slave-owner argument that blacks were like children, incapable of governing their lives well? Does such a high-tax approach undermine the wage-earners' freedom?

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QUESTIONS: The American founders insisted that democracy

must be based not only on the opinions of the many, but on the rights of the individual. They included in this the individual's right to own and manage property. We are quick to defend this right when it concerns our own wealth, but are we equally willing to let other people do as they wish with their own wealth? Why or why not?

Safety Nets That Stifle

QUESTIONS: The U.S. government often protects citizens from

their own poor decisions. For instance, it reimburses citizens for houses built so close to the ocean that no private insurance company would cover them. Think of the government as a parent of young adults: When the government behaves this way, is it behaving as a responsible parent? Do people learn to make good decisions if they are shielded from the consequences of bad decisions? Are we crippling the nation by refusing to let people fail as well as succeed?
QUESTION: British physician and author Theodore Dalrymple argues that some poor people in Western nations are poor because they keep making bad decisions. Dalrymple refers to such people as the underclass, as distinct from those who are poor simply because of circumstances beyond their control. Are we robbing the underclass of both freedom and dignity when we give them the sort of assistance that enables them to persist in destructive behavior? Are we hurting them by protecting them from the consequences of their own bad choices?

Helping the Poor Prosper

What allows a poor nation to prosper? Samuel Gregg sees part of the answer in how rural medieval England moved from poverty to relative prosperity:

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The world industry of medieval England was famed throughout the world. Now why, we have to ask ourselves, did this industry develop here? ... Rural entrepreneurs, people who were interested in exploring and developing the world industry in new and unique ways, were institutionally privileged in the sense that they could conduct these experiments. They could create new machinery. They could set up farms and do things in new ways, precisely because there were commercial legal codes that protected their behavior. There were property rights that ensured that what they produced could not be arbitrarily taken away from them . . . . So we see these particular institutional protections existed in such a way that they enabled rural industry, rural woolen industry, to develop and grow without being oppressive. And not only protection in the sense of protectionism; I mean in the sense that gives rural entrepreneurs secure rights that give them the confidence to know that their experiment, the capital that they invent, the ideas that they have, will pay off for them in the long run.
QUESTIONS: In countries that aggressively redistribute wealth,

some people reap what they do not sow, and others sow far more than they are allowed to reap. When this happens, how motivated are people to create new wealth through hard work and ingenuity? Are there historical examples that could help us answer this question?
QUESTION: Robin Hood is often held up as a hero for "stealing from the rich and giving to the poor." What's often forgotten is that Robin Hood "stole" from corrupt noblemen who had plundered hard-working peasants. In essence, Robin Hood was helping to return stolen property to its rightful owners. What happens when we ignore this part of the story and assume that it's noble for so-called freedom fighters to steal from the rich and give to the poor even when the rich people's wealth was obtained by legitimate and legal means?

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QUESTION: If we penalize people in this way for succeeding, will either the rich or the poor be motivated to work hard and be creative?

Ownership and Competition

QUESTION: Both history and everyday experience tell us that

people work harder, are more creative, and are better at solving problems if they "own" the situation. Conversely, we all have experienced the frustration of dealing with the bureaucrat who has a don't-ask-me,-1-just-work-here attitude. Workers often won't risk trying to solve a problem if they get their paycheck regardless of customer satisfaction or company productivity. Given this truth about human nature, why do we still hear people clamoring for socialized and centralized government programs to solve problems in service industries such as health care?
QUESTION: Poorly financed private schools in inner cities often outperform lavishly funded public schools in the same neighborhoods. This epitomizes a larger pattern. Governmentrun programs-the postal service, the social security system, the public school system-all tend to perform less effectively than they might because they are protected from competition in a free market. How can we balance the need for certain universal services with the understanding that competition and ownership usually deliver services more effectively?

Freedom to Create
We are told in Genesis 1 that men and women are made in the image of God. Dorothy Sayers notes that when we tum back to see what the book's author has told us so far "about the original upon which the 'image' of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, 'God created.' The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire to make things" (The Whimsical Christian).

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Sayers is not talking only about physical things such as sculptures or machines; we can be creative in a wide variety of physical and nonphysical ways. We can create happy homes. We can create processes. We can create human organizations. We can create solutions. We can create wealth.
QUESTIONS: In what ways have men and women created wealth, not just for themselves, but for others? Consider Henry Ford. Did he create wealth, a higher standard of living, only for himself by means of his automobiles, or for others as well? What are other examples of wealth creation that ripple out beyond the creative individual or creative team? QUESTION: Some people who propose political solutions to limited resources slip into the mind-set that economics is a zero-sum game, a fixed pie where one person's big piece means another person's small piece. Can you think of specific examples of how humanity's urge and ability to create contradict the notion of wealth as a zero-sum game?

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LessonS
FREEDOM AND I NTE RNATI ONAL AFFAIRS
Rejecting HMade in the Image of God"
In the last century many individuals and governments discarded the belief that humans are made in the image of God. Robert George discusses the consequences of that decisian:
We 've seen all too often in the 20th century and now in the 21st the consequences of forgetting or casting aside the doctrine that man is made in the very image and likeness of God. Where the doctrine has been cast aside, all too often some human beings have been willing to subject others to cruel torture, to being killed in concentration camps and gulags, to being enslaved. Communism-Soviet-style communism, Chinese communism, with an extraordinary death toll-reflect the loss of faith in the proposition that there is a more than merely human Ultimate Creator and Sustainer of the universe who truly loves man and made man in His image and likeness . Fascism, above all Nazism, is rooted in a denial of the authority of God and a glorification instead of the State and the leader ... and again, the cost
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is paid in human lives, people killed in ovens, people treated as slaves, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the massacres and genocide in Rwanda, and even today and even in the West, we see it in the trafficking of women and children sold in to sexual slavery. We like to think that we abolished slavery in the United States back in the 1860s after the Civil War, but the reality is that the ugly phenomenon of slavery continues to this day beneath the surface in a black market in which women and children are sold as slaves into prostitution, into sexual slavery. That comes from forgetting that every single human being is made in the very image and likeness of God and has a dignity that is simply incompatible with buying them, selling them, relegating them to an inferior status, treating them as if they were manufactured objects to be manipulated and used by other people.
QUESTIONS: What are some consequences of rejecting the

idea that humans are made in the image of God? Can you think of any examples of countries that have reaped terrible consequences after forgetting that every human is made in the image of God?
QUESTION: If the belief that man is made in God's image lies

at the root of freedom, what could we logically expect to happen if (1) people cease to believe in God, or (2) God is pushed out of the public square?

Our Responsibilities
QUESTION: In the West, the idea that man is made in God's

image is a cornerstone of freedom. At the same time, many have argued that a vibrant moral culture is needed to sustain freedom. If that's true, what can we do to help freedom take hold in oppressive cultures?

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QUESTIONS: Do we have a responsibility to champion freedom around the world, or should we mind our own business? What responsibilities do we have as a nation? What responsibilities do we have as individuals made in the image of God?

Europe and the Roots of Freedom

Over the past few years, Europe has been working toward a European Union Constitution-that is, an intemational treaty governing the present twenty-seven member states of the European Union. The treaty would streamline commerce, clarify previous treaties, and codify human rights throughout the EU. Part 2 of the charter lays out fundamental rights, including life, liberty, dignity, security, and property; the right to marry and start a family; and the right to choose an occupation and run a business. It guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, expression, peaceable assembly, and religion. Moreover, it prohibits (among other things) slavery, human trafficking, eugenics, reproductive cloning, discrimination, and the selling of human body parts. It would seem, that this is a sound freedom document. However, as George Weigel points out in The Cube and the Cathedral, the various draft texts-some of which have been ratified by more than half of the EU's members-intentionally contain no reference to the vital role Christianity played in articulating and protecting God-given human rights in the development of European civilization. Indeed, Weigel shows that despite many hard lessons of history-the Soviet Gulag, Nazi concentrations camps, various totalitarian governments-many European leaders still insist that human rights can only be protected by a formal commitment to a purely secular public square. Weigel and others have argued that this is not only false but dangerous. As Weigel puts it, quoting historian Christopher Dawson, "A thoroughly secularized democracy, constitutionally and politically disabled from bringing transcendent moral truths to bear in its public life, is self-destructive."

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QUESTION: Are there any examples of anti-religious European

democracies disintegrating or self-destructing?

QUESTION: If Europe concludes that the state, and not the

Creator, grants us our fundamental rights, what can we expect to happen eventually?
QUESTION: How might Europe's situation affect the United

States?

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FOR FURTHER STUDY

Lord Acton. The History of Freedom. Dawson, Christopher. Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. New York: AMS Press, 1979. Gregg, Samuel. On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003. Gress , David . From Plato to Nato: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. New York: Free Press , 1998. Hayek, F. A., ed. Capitalism and the Historians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954. Stark, Rodney. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

- - - . The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005.
Sunshine, Glenn. Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, projected 2009.

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For Further Study

de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. New York: Modern Library, 1981. Weigel, George. The Cube and Cathedral. New York: Basic Books, 2005.