I’ve come to truly believe that most confuse freedom with nihilism, across all political spectrums.
Freedom, through liberty, as termed in the 18th century, is important to appreciate, to understand the colonial breakaway and founding of the United States. We look back at it now with a quarter of a millennium of distorted filters, revisions, and agendas.
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This Easter weekend usually features a broadcast airing of Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments. In the nearly four hours of dialogue, the most consequential line, the meaning of the entire film, from Moses is, “Freedom comes from the Laws of God.”
From our 21st-century vantage, this may seem difficult or even impossible to accept. It has both religious and philosophical implications. If the former is a bridge too far for you, focus on the latter, as a philosopher would.
When we view freedom through a purely secular lens, it rapidly decays into a demand for absolute individual license—the nihilistic notion that freedom is simply the ability to satisfy any impulse, regardless of duty or order. This modern obsession with “doing whatever one pleases’ is not liberty; it is the elevation of the ego above the natural and divine hierarchy.
We must recover the classical Christian understanding: true freedom is not the license to do as one pleases, but the power to do what one ought. As Pope John Paul II elucidated, freedom finds its ultimate purpose in the voluntary acceptance of Christ. Once the will is firmly set upon Him, the chaos of human appetites is replaced by a divine order, and the tension between individual liberty and moral responsibility is resolved.
In this light, the Founders’ vision becomes clear: they did not seek a vacuum of authority, but a structure of liberty that acknowledged the sovereignty of God. To pursue freedom without this foundation is not to be free at all—it is merely to be adrift in a sea of our own appetites, waiting for the inevitable collapse of the society that allows such license to persist.
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