Relative Liberty

vol. 1                                                                                  issue 5

  A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

On October 19, 1781, the British Army of Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown. As the proud army of Cornwallis marched to surrender their weapons, a British army band played a ballad entitled, The World Turned Upside. The proclamations of the Declaration of Independence, sanctified by the blood of patriots, gave birth to an American Liberty which has since that day turned the world upside down.No people in the history of the world ever formed a nation on the premise of human equality. As each succeeding generation has struggled to protect and define our birthright as a nation of free people, blessings of prosperity, wealth and power have come forth. Americans are called to understand the responsibilities we hold as a nation. 

Pope John Paul II  offered an insightful observation concerning what it means to be an American:

The Founding Fathers of the United States asserted their claim to freedom and independence on the basis of certain "self-evident" truths about the human person: truths which could be discerned in human nature, built into it by "nature's God." Thus, they meant to bring into being, not just an independent territory, but a great experiment in what George Washington called "ordered liberty:" an experiment in which men and women would enjoy equality of rights and opportunities in the pursuit of happiness and in service to the common good. Reading the founding documents of the United States, one has to be impressed by the concept of freedom they enshrine: a freedom designed to enable people to fulfill their duties and responsibilities toward the family and toward the common good of the community. The American democratic experiment has been successful in many ways. Millions of people around the world look to the United States as a model in their search for freedom, dignity, and prosperity.  But the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation, native born and immigrant, makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic. Their commitment to build a free society with liberty and justice for all must be constantly renewed if the United States is to fulfill the destiny to which the Founders pledged their "lives...fortunes...and sacred honor.

Our success as a nation of free people is directly related to whether each succeeding generation accepts the moral truths upon which this country was founded.  To the Patriots of Yorktown, the sovereignty of men is limited only by the sovereignty of God. The existence of God therefore orders our freedom. God, not men, ultimately defines the natural order of things. Yet, within this framework, man has the ability to make choices which affect himself and others. It is within this framework that American Liberty has provided our nation with wealth and power unknown in the history of the world.

Unfortunately, American Liberty is being redefined as God, and the moral truths associated therewith, are removed from the framework of our society. When we define our liberty as the unlimited right of a person to define their existence apart from God, a form of Relative Liberty emerges.  This Relative Liberty is therefore limited only by the restraints of societal order, individual responsibility and community standards. These restraints change from generation to generation and from community to community across our land. The unchanging self-evident expression of God’s endowment to mankind is thus reduced to fodder for opinion polls, focus groups and political pundits. In a world with few absolutes, every personal preference is truth and each man is his own king.

The celebration of such Relative Liberty is evidenced by the moral decline of our public institutions and our private lives. With the nationwide debate over civil unions and gay marriages; with out of wedlock births creating matriarchal families in the poorest of our neighborhoods,with divorce ending more than half of marriages elsewhere, our generation has systematically redefined the notion of family. The myopic pursuit of material abundance has created a society made up of people who buy things they don’t need, with money they do not have, to impress people they don’t even like. Our dedication to the attainment of personal peace has placed blinders on our eyes, muzzles over our mouths and anesthesia upon our hearts as we reject involvement in controversial issues bowing to the pressures of political correctness and the desire just to let things be.

To understand just how far the concept of Relative Liberty has crept into our political and social psyche, consider the opinion of three Republican Supreme Court Justices, addressing the issue of abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Our Founding Fathers pledged their fortunes, their lives and their sacred honor to create a new nation conceived upon a proposition of liberty that every man, woman and child, stands equal before God and that freedom and happiness are products of His blessings. At the heart of the liberty they espoused was the notion that God was the author of life. Those called to lead our nation who prefer to sacrifice the self-evident moral truths of God upon the altar of relative liberty reject the birthright bestowed upon us by the Patriots of Yorktown. It is because of such leadership that we now live in a world turned upside down.