From my perch, America at 250 seems not to be in a particularly celebratory mood, and it’s more than just being stuck in the middle of an unpopular and embarrassing war. Perhaps one reason for such meager enthusiasm on an otherwise auspicious anniversary is because many of our people have become spiritually tired and morally feeble. In his first inaugural address President George Washington stated, “there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble bond between virtue and happiness.” Novelist Michael D. O’Brien asks, “Does the erosion begin when we decide that God is there first and foremost to serve our will, and to aid our lives on our terms? Are we evangelizing or are we being anti-evangelized? To what degree have we mistaken the assimilation by paganism for legitimate inculturation, that is, the adaptation of Christian culture to the ‘language’ of the surrounding non-Christian culture?”

The very essence of liberty is religious freedom, that is, the freedom of the children of God without which political rights mean very little. St. Peter exhorts, “Be free, yet without using freedom as a pretext for evil, but as slaves of God.” (1 Pt. 2:16) So many Americans it would now seem have adopted a quite distorted sense of religious liberty as being the supremacy of individual conscience, an attitude which when widely diffused produces subjectivism, moral relativism, and ultimately religious and social anarchy. Imagine what President Washington would have thought of ‘abortion rights,’ ‘gay marriage,’ or ‘transgenderism.’ I daresay that he would never have considered such abuses as legitimate fruits of freedom.

Freedom is somewhat like a loaded gun with no safety. One needs to aim carefully and sparingly and to select targets prudently lest disaster ensues. Similarly, what passes for freedom today more closely resembles diabolical disorientation ~ men passing as women and vice versa, marriage and family redefined, surrogacy and IVF lauded even as epic scourges of drug and pornography addiction abound, child trafficking and blatant war crimes committed with impunity using our tax dollars. Our elected authorities become silent as the grave on such matters of grave importance because they hold a false notion of freedom un-tethered from responsibility. The false assumption that humans are capable of unilaterally deciding what is good and what is evil began when the ‘rights of man’ were allowed to eclipse the ‘rights of God.’ But it is the role and sacred duty of Religion to defend first the rights of God. This is where the modern concept of religious liberty is failing.