INSIDE AMERICA

Man and the Infinite
Freedom Is the Capacity for Another

By Lorenzo Albacete

The world today is caught in a great, dangerous theological conflict about the meaning of freedom. Actually, the “ideological” wars of the 20th century were wars of religion as well as wars about religion, since ideologies are the product of a religious sense pursuing a “bad infinity,” as David Schindler calls it. In these ideologies, the totalitarian State replaced the power of religious institutions, demanding that total allegiance due to a divine Power. The battle for freedom against Nazism and Communism was therefore above all a battle for religious freedom. Ideology, however, can disguise itself under the mask of religious freedom. Such is the case with the secularism that reduces reason to rationalism in order to eliminate totally the social power of religious ideals. In recent times, many American Christians have concluded that this is what has happened in the United States.
Most American Christians had accepted the Constitutional requirement of religious freedom as compatible with their faith. American Catholics became its defenders before the rest of the Catholic world. Now cracks are beginning to appear in this consensus. For many Christians, Supreme Court decisions since Roe vs Wade have raised the issue of whether the Supreme Court’s decisions are due to a corruption of the ideal of religious freedom, or whether it was implicit in the original conception of religious liberty assured by the Constitution. For example, the recent Supreme Court’s decision on the unconstitutionality of legal restrictions of consensual sexual behavior between adults has scared many Christians who see, up ahead, the inclusion of homosexual union in the legal definition of marriage in the name of religious freedom. Now, it becomes increasingly clear that this conflict about the Western, liberal system of separation between religious and political authority is under attack at the international level as well, as a result of the challenges posed by militant Islam. In a new book (Terror and Liberalism, WW Norton, 2003), Paul Berman reviews the theology of the influential Egyptian Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966, hanged by Nasser). As Berman writes of Qutb’s views: his criticism of the United States “was not a political criticism. This was theological–though Qutb, or perhaps his translator, preferred the word ‘ideological.’” According to Qutb, “the truly dangerous element in American life was not capitalism, or foreign policy, or racism, or the exploitation of women. The truly dangerous part lay in the separation of Church and State.” “Freedom in a liberal society seemed to Qutb no freedom at all. That kind of freedom of the hideous schizophrenia–the giant error that places the material world over here, and God over there. In a liberal society religion has been reduced to a set of rituals and a private morality quite as if the individual human heart were the final arbiter of moral behavior. But the human heart is not the final arbiter. The final arbiter is God.”
According to Qutb, the origin of this danger was not Christian capitulation to secularist ideology, but is the Christian faith, its theological deformation of the teachings of and about Jesus. “Christianity had adopted a false relation to the material world. Christianity had fled from daily life into the spirit. Christianity had accepted what Qutb calls a ‘desolate separation’ between this Church and society.”
This is of course obviously not true. Christianity moves in the opposite direction. It is an Incarnational religion in which the divine is present through the human–at least Catholic Christianity. It is not surprising, in fact, that religious freedom was a highly debated topic in Catholic social doctrine. Moreover, how readily Protestantism accepted the principle depended on a view of religious freedom that was not the secularist “freedom from religion,” against which many American Protestants are struggling politically today. Still, Qutb is right in locating the issue of religious freedom and faith in the area of the encounter between divine power and the desires of the human heart. Indeed, the key question is: Are finite human freedom and infinite, divine freedom compatible? Doesn’t this imply some kind of equality? Islam absolutely rejects this equality. Human freedom is a submission to God’s will manifested in all aspects of human life. God is not bound by the separation between divine and human authority.
Radically separating faith from reason, grace from the desires of a human heart wounded by sin, and salvation from human action, Protestant theology finds it difficult to answer the Islamic and secularist challenges.
What is the Catholic position? “This is man’s choice: either he conceives of himself as free from the whole universe and dependent only on God, or free from God and therefore the slave of every circumstance.” “Freedom is the capacity for the infinite, the thirst for God. Freedom, then, is love, because it is the capacity for something that is not us: it is Another.” (At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Chapter 8, pp 86; 96)