Two views of freedom and God

Islam and the western world have very different definitions of freedom, says Rebecca Bynum in a recent issue of the New English Review.

Freedom : True and False

"Freedom is a word invoked constantly in America as a descriptive term for self-government and the concept of sovereignty of the people...

Less understood is the fact that the mujahadeen are also fighting for freedom, but a freedom very differently defined. According to the Muslim philisopher Sayyid Qutb,

This din [religion] is a universal declaration of the freedom of man from slavery to other men and to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude. It is a declaration that the sovereignty belongs only to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds. It challenges all such systems based on the sovereignty of man, i.e., where man attempts to usurp the attribute of Divine sovereignty. Any system in which final decisions are refered to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are men, deifies human beings by designating others than Allah as lords over men. (Milestones p. 47)

In Islamic terms, the western concept of political sovereignty resting with the people is a form of idolatry....

One way to look at this is to see it as a contrast between permissive freedom and prescriptive freedom.

In one definition, freedom means the absence of restraints, the ability to choose rightly or wrongly or anywhere in between. In the other, freedom means the ability to live in a certain prescribed way, most particularly the absence of any restraints which would keep one from following that prescribed way and steering others toward it. Thus concepts like Constitutional restrictions against government involvement in religion are good only when they permit Islam to exist in an otherwise hostile environment, but bad when they prevent Islam from dominating an environment over which it has the opportunity to exert control.

Of course, Islam is not the only religious tradition to make this argument. Some occasional readers of this blog will no doubt remember, more clearly than I, the long-running philosophical and theological arguments over whether human beings should have the freedom to choose "wrongly", which consumed so many reams of paper -- and occasionally consumed human lives -- during the European Enlightenment. These arguments continue in some forums to this day.

Another way to see this difference is to see it as a clash of priorities.

The "permissive freedom" worldview places the highest value on individuals' power of making choices, and the benefits that individuals can derive from those choicess. Restrictions on those choices are justified in terms of what effect one person's actions have on another person, not on the basis of obedience to a certain pattern of behavior. Such systems can be either exploitative, in which people with secular authority seek to expand their own freedom and benefits at the expense of others, or egalitarian, in which there's an attempt to establish an set of commonly-accepted rules that protect the freedom of all in the society.

The "prescriptive freedom" worldview, by contrast, places the highest value on obedience, whether or not individuals choose it voluntarily, and whether or not they benefit from it. (There's a secular mode of this worldview, as well as a theistic one, but it's outside the scope of this essay.) Therefore the Islamist Qutb disavows all "system[s] in which final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority [is] men." Note that even the arch-theist does not expect God/Allah to personally and visibly intervene in every controversy. Hence the careful wording which logically steers the reader toward an endorsement of systems run by human beings who attribute their source of authority to some source other than men, i.e., rule by clergy. (In practice, the latter effectively means "rule according to the wishes of the religious faction currently in power" -- but, again, that's outside the scope of this essay.)

Does this mean that all who believe in the western version of permissive freedom are therefore obliged to disavow belief in God or in any sense of right or wrong that has more than temporal (and, hence, temporary) authority? And that anyone who believes, truly believes, in a God with moral standards must advocate theocratic absolutism and seek to compel others' obedience to those moral standards in order to properly honor that God, on pain of being labelled a hypocrite?

Theocrats like Qutb would argue that this is the case.

However, one of the key concepts of post-Enlightenment Christianity is that a belief in permissive freedom in secular government and a belief in a moral God are not mutually contradictory. That the creator's endowment of human beings with free will was not an unfortunate accident, but an intentional part of the design. Obedience to principles of right and wrong is desired, of course, but it's even more important that human beings have the opportunity to accept that obedience without compulsion. Only obedience from a person who could have done otherwise truly honors God. Otherwise, it has no value.

To put this in terms of priorities, obedience to God's will is placed at the top of the list, but the human freedom to make moral and spiritual choices is, itself, part of that will. Thus secular governments are, by God's will, limited to regulating only secular matters. To do more, to compel obedience in religious matters, would be to blasphemously assert an authority which God himself chose not to exert.

If the creator had intended human beings to have no choices other than the right one, there would have been no serpent in the garden of Eden, nor any tree from which humans could pluck the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

And thus it is that Christians can endorse both a permissive definition of freedom, in the secular world, and obedience to God. One is necessary in order for the second to have any value.