What Freedom Is For

Happy July 4th! From morning Creed with a preschooler to Saint Gregory of Nyssa, one Orthodox dad reflects on why Christian liberty has a shape, and why America is still worth thanking God for

“There is such a thing as a true American: an honest, forthright, normal person for whom Holy Orthodoxy is quite natural; and the harvest of these true Americans is only beginning.” - Fr. Seraphim Rose

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The other morning I did a very normal thing for our household: I taught my four-year-old pieces of the Creed on the way to preschool, coffee in the tumbler, work not yet cracked, the day not yet started. Gregory can say things far above his pay grade with total confidence, which is one of the better features of being four.

And somewhere in the middle of reviewing our catechism about the Creed, the Fourth of July landed on me differently than it used to.

Age has a way of sanding off the taste for fashionable contempt. I have less and less patience for the habit of speaking about America as though serious people are required to sneer. The country has sins—any grown man knows that. A nation large enough to do real good has power enough to do real damage. That is what power does in fallen hands.

Still, common sense exists and we can determine a few things about America from what we do know. People do not cross oceans, learn new languages and accents, and rebuild from nothing because they were promised fewer possibilities, fewer freedoms. My ancestors didn’t. My wife didn’t. Polina came here from Russia, and living with someone who knows the difference between America as a theory and America as a gift has a way of clearing the head. Gratitude does what arguments can’t. It makes you notice what has been sitting in front of you the whole time.

So, plainly: America is worth thanking God for.

Romans 12:18 says: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Elsewhere, Saint Paul tells the Church to pray for kings and all in authority, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence” (1 Timothy 2:1-2). We are not commanded to idolize the state. We are commanded to seek peace in our lives—and to pray for peace in the civil order, because peace gives households, parishes, and ordinary work enough room to breathe. A decent political order does not save souls. But can make it easier for souls to repent, worship, marry, raise children, and bury their dead without chaos swallowing the whole effort.

That room matters. But what is the room for?

Saint Gregory of Nyssa, in his Dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection, he writes that “liberty is the coming up to a state which owns no master and is self-regulating,” and then the line worth turning over a few times: “everything that is free will be united with virtue; for virtue is a thing that has no master, that is, is free.”

Freedom is not the prize. Rather, Freedom is the room in which virtue becomes possible—the space to choose the good and do the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a person whose will is aligned with God’s.

Strip out that purpose and freedom stops being freedom. It becomes autonomy, which is just a dignified word for drift.

I don’t mind the modern talk of liberty, and I favor non-coercion—but liberty is frequently libertinism unmoored from virtue. Too often it means nothing sturdier than preference—appetite without discipline, choice without judgment. Paul never allows the move. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he says, then immediately: “Do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh” (Galatians 5:1, 13).

Christian freedom has a shape. It bends toward holiness.

But holiness cannot be coerced; you cannot decree the people into virtue. Faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17), and hearing requires the Word be preached, received, obeyed. Coercion can produce compliance. It cannot produce virtue, and it cannot produce worship. Christ stands at the door and knocks (Revelation 3:20). He does not kick it in.

I cannot talk about religious liberty as an abstraction; I feel the weight of this as a convert, and I value religious freedom because I am its beneficiary. I entered the Church in a country where I could do so openly—no harassment in the street, no visit from agents of the state who had suddenly developed a tender concern for my soul. By contrast, my wife and her mother were baptized by an Orthodox priest in secret in an apartment in the late Soviet Union out of fear of persecution.

So when I say America leaves room, this is what I mean. Room for work, worship, family, for building a home, for seeking opportunities for advancement, personal, professional, familial, cultural. Saint Paul tells the Thessalonians to “aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). The quiet life is not a lesser Christian life. For most of us it is where ordinary, daily sanctifications either grows or shrinks.

But a quiet and peaceable life has minimal conditions. It needs enough order that a father can teach his son the Creed in the morning without bombs going off and the freedom to do so without a knock on the front door. Collectively, enough liberty that a parish can worship without asking permission of men who treat religion as a hobby with incense, and enough order that the churches are not targeted by authorities.

No amount of liberty or order will automatically grant virtue. Plenty of people waste peace. Plenty use freedom to become softer, greedier, more distracted. Which is exactly why gratitude and self-government belong together. “All things are lawful for me,” Saint Paul says, “but I will not be dominated by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12).

It’s a principle I think is true: A free people who cannot govern their appetites will eventually beg to be governed by someone else.

I know the pattern in myself. A man can receive a gift and turn it into one more reason to clench his jaw by lunchtime. It is almost as if gratitude has to become a discipline. “In everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) is not a Hallmark greeting card throwaway line, it’s about keeping gifts in perspective and ambition from turning ugly.

The same lesson keeps arriving in my own family’s life through ordinary things—bed shopping, car repairs, baby gear, the unromantic objects that run a household. They force the larger questions. What kind of home are we making? What still belongs to a leaner chapter we never closed? The physical world will not let you stay abstract for long. The Word became flesh (John 1:14). Grace comes in water, bread, oil, spoken words. Children learn by repetition long before analysis, which is why hearing Gregory recite the Creed matters to me. It is funny. It is also inheritance.

And inheritance is where patriotism turns serious or embarrassing. I have no interest left in patriotism as costume. I want the harder thing—gratitude strong enough to tell the truth, to admit sin without collapsing into contempt. A mature patriotism can say America has been foolish and unjust, and also that she has handed many of us something rare: enough liberty to seek God openly, enough peace to build a household, enough freedom that a Russian immigrant turned American citizen wife can love this country with tears in her eyes and teach her husband to see it clearly.

So the Fourth means less to me now as a pageant and more as a question. What are we doing with the freedom we’ve been given? Are we spending it on reverence, work, family, mercy, self-command—or on drift? Faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and so is civic gratitude that never reaches practice.

Tonight I am thankful for plain things. A wife who helped me see this country with clearer eyes. Children who will receive whatever I manage to embody. Work to do, a home to tend, a parish to belong to. The freedom to worship without asking permission, to order a household under Christ, to repent and to build.

Freedom was never the finish line. What it is for—what it has always been for—is virtue.

P.S. Happy 250th birthday, America!