Freedom: Letter from the Editor
Growing up in Middle America, I celebrated July 4th like a high holiday. An early morning parade, a family barbecue: the day always ended with an exploding sky of fireworks, accompanied by singing as fervent as worship. “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”
My own children, having grown up in Canada, still stumble over the words of the American anthem. Their only boast is of “the True North strong and free.” Either way, it’s not difficult to see that in both countries, not everyone has been free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Both national stories have been blighted with the oppression of peoples.
When deciding on Imprint’s 2020 theme, our team liked the idea of exploring freedom in the pages that follow. I, on the other hand, balked. I saw stars and stripes and remembered standing as a small child, at my church’s vacation Bible school, pledging allegiance to the American flag. In American history, patriotism and Christian faith have been conflated in complicated, often troubling ways. Still, despite these objections, we realized that this theme was sure to generate the kind of vigorous conversation that Imprint is interested to start: conversations that carefully read culture; conversations that scrutinize prevailing values; sustained conversations that propose living the upside-down way of Jesus.
Culturally, the consensus about freedom differs wildly from Christian notions of freedom. As Charles Taylor describes in A Secular Age, ours is an “age of authenticity.” Freedom has come to mean unfettered self-expression, the absence of constraints, and the multiplication of choice. We want to be free to be upwardly mobile, professionally ambitious, personally happy. We want to be free to define and redefine every aspect of our own identities, which we see as fluid and subject to reinvention. Every commitment, whether to a job, a friendship, a life partner, a church, is contingent and disposable. Freedom, as it’s now construed, promises the ultimate consumer lifestyle.
Christians, on the other hand, see themselves paradoxically as both bound and free: freed from the restless pursuit of empty pleasures, bound to “love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.” We are entirely “free” to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Christ. This can mean joyfully embracing the obligations of domes- tic life, which Martyn Wendell Jones illumines in his essay, “A Haunted World.” This freedom can entail the hard, long work of forgiveness—as our series of letters between mothers and daughters explores. Freedom for the Christian is never simply about rights; it’s also always about responsibilities. It’s not simply about freedom from (the power and penalty of sin, for example) but freedom for. We’ve needed this reminder in the time of pandemic, where love for neighbour is a daily, self-sacrificing act.
The Christian gospel is plotted on a strangely inverse arc of freedom. The God-Man Jesus Christ surrendered his kingly prerogative to assume human flesh. His was the freedom to rule, and yet he freely chose to die a torturous death on a Roman cross. But as Biblical writers firmly insist, Jesus’s crucifixion was not his humiliation or his ignominy. It was his exaltation—his defeat of every power and principality that would seduce humanity with the fatal freedom of self-rule.
In Galatians 5:13, the Apostle Paul writes, “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” We hope this issue helps you imagine a world of this kind of freedom. We hope it inspires you to imagine this kind of love.
— Jen Michel