We’re coming into a season where many different candidates (from the school board to the White House) will be appealing to our rights, freedoms, and entitlements. When we hear the soaring speeches and watch the balloons fall at the national conventions, we’ll be tempted to get a little teary-eyed at the thought of spreading freedom across the world.
The liberty offered by democracy is a great gift that’s worth celebrating. But the radically individualistic freedom we glorify in America doesn’t always foster the things Christians should be seeking. I’ve been reading Don Carson’s book Christ and Culture Revisited, and last night I stumbled across this call to keep democracy in its proper perspective:
It is the form of government least unaccountable to the people and least likely to brutalize its citizens without some eventual accounting. It is a form of government most likely to foster personal freedoms, including, usually, freedoms for Christians to practice and propagate their faith.
But it has also proved proficient at throwing off a sense of obligation to God the Creator, let alone the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is another way of saying that it is proficient at fostering idolatry.
Its freedoms, so many of which are enormously praiseworthy for political, religious, personal, and artistic reasons, include the freedom to be hedonists, to pursue a life revolving around entertainment, to become inured against responsible family life, communal interaction, and self-denying service in the endless worship of massive egos, passive fads, and this-worldly glitter.
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The democratic tradition in the West has fostered a great deal of freedom from Scripture, God, tradition, and assorted moral constraints; it encourages freedom toward doing your own thing, hedonism, self-centeredness, and consumerism. By contrast, the Bible encourages freedom from self-centeredness, idolatry, greed, and all sin and freedom toward living our lives as those who bear God’s image and who have been transformed by his grace, such that our greatest joy becomes doing his will.