Day Seventeen - Freedom

Last year, a brilliant new book came out exploring the principle of freedom – an ideal very close to the heart of those Christians called Congregationalists. The author is Annelien de Dijn, a political historian at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and the book is called: Freedom: an Unruly History (Harvard University Press, 2020).

The Netherlands hold a powerful place in our own history. This is where dissenting Christians, under persecution in England and Wales, found freedom to print Bibles and religious books which were banned at home, and smuggle them back to churches meeting in secret. Eventually whole congregations emigrated, first to Holland, then to what was for them a New World (though often with scant regard for its existing inhabitants!) to escape imprisonment and death for their beliefs.

What was that freedom? Firstly, it was freedom for a person or a congregation to live and worship according to their own conscience, without interference from the Monarch or the State. Secondly, it was the freedom to participate in the common good. The congregation or community was constituted for the benefit of all its members, and governed by common agreement.

Both of these are more complex, and were more limited than can be described here. But de Dijn argues that this double view of freedom actually lies behind some of the most acute disputes in Western societies at the present time.

For example, do you hold that no government should be able to force an individual to wear a mask or be vaccinated, because this is a matter of individual freedom and the State should keep out? Or do you regard laws requiring these measures as an expression of the common good, by democratic consent through representative government, to secure the freedom of the most vulnerable?

Am I freer if I have the choice not to wear a mask in a shop or a train, or is everyone freer if all are required to wear masks, to protect each other?

These aren’t purely academic arguments! They also lie behind hotly disputed freedoms: to bear arms, for example, or to express gender diversity.

De Dijn argues that these sharp debates, that divide political parties and communities across the world, have long roots in historic radical religious and revolutionary movements. In fact they go even further back than that. The same tension is there in Scripture, between the soaring prophetic ideals of justice that protects the poor, and God’s laws to the maintain purity of God’s People; between the love of Jesus that extends to the outcast, and Paul’s attempts at regulation to keep order in the churches.

In a time of prayer, look at the picture of a riverside scene in Bedford. Where do you fit into that picture? Pray that you may exercise your freedoms in a spirit of justice and love. As you move through this day, let that prayer extend to the news you hear, and the people you meet. And, if you have time, read the book!

Janet Wootton