What it means to cry ‘freedom’

For many cinephiles, the word “freedom” brings to mind Mel Gibson’s blue face bellowing the word from horseback during William Wallace’s iconic speech in the 1995 film Braveheart. 

Although there’s no evidence that the actual Scottish military hero yelled anything to his troops before the 1297 Battle of Stirling Bridge against England, the dramatized scene wound up inspiring countless memes and GIFs and marking a particular place in pop-culture history for a bekilted Gibson.

That Braveheart moment struck a chord with the culture — but why? Although Gibson’s version of Wallace is stirring, he never explains to his fighters what he believes freedom to be:

Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live, at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!

For Gibson’s Wallace, freedom was as straightforward as not living under English rule. The English were to be fought and defeated. That was the 13th century. In the 21st century, battles are more ideological, and enemies are more sophisticated. Or are they?

TRUTH AND FREEDOM

The first person to pursue freedom for selfish reasons was Eve in the Garden of Eden. God gave humanity’s original parents everything they could possibly want or need; however, the “father of lies,” skilled at exploiting humanity’s great weakness of pride, convinced Eve she should be “free” to have more, that she deserved to be like God. So, that infamous fruit was eaten, plunging man into the great abyss of original sin.

The kind of freedom Satan promised Eve results only in confusion, chaos, and despair. Satan was and remains the great enemy of humanity and of true freedom.

Satan is not freedom’s only enemy. Today’s culture is also the enemy of freedom whenever it fails to regard truth. This happens when the culture warps the meaning of truth and forces onto man’s collective consciousness the corrupted version of the truth — namely, that freedom means life without limitation.

God endowed humanity with free will. However, as even English writer Virginia Woolf admonished, “To enjoy freedom, we have to control ourselves.” Freedom has limits, and freedom flourishes within those limits.

LAND OF THE FREE?

At 247 years old, the American experiment of freedom in a democratic republic is still nascent compared to other countries throughout history. The fact that all empires rise and fall was on the mind of founding fathers like Benjamin Franklin, to whom is attributed the ominous warning that we have a republic “if [we] can keep it.” 

The Declaration of Independence pronounced the “self-evident” truths that humans have God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it is government’s role to secure these rights — a government that draws its power from the “consent of the governed.” The Bill of Rights spells out some specific applications of these fundamental truths.

Many today, in the U.S. and around the globe, fail to understand the relationship of authentic freedom to truth. “Freedom, if it is not to lead to deceit and self-destruction, must orient itself by the truth,” wrote Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in a 1996 essay in Communio. 

America’s claim to freedom must be similarly situated in truth, as Pope St. John Paul II said in his homily at Baltimore’s Camden Yards in 1995.

“America has always wanted to be a land of the free,” the Pope said. “Today, the challenge facing America is to find freedom’s fulfillment in the truth: the truth that is intrinsic to human life created in God’s image and likeness, the truth that is written on the human heart, the truth that can be known by reason and can therefore form the basis of a profound and universal dialogue among people about the direction they must give to their lives and their activities.”

Later, John Paul II said: “Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”

And “doing what we ought” — that which is morally good, consistent with truth — constitutes not only the proper exercise of freedom, but its nurturing as well.

“The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes,” states the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just” (1733).

FALSE ‘TRUTHS’

Yet the very notion of truth is often corrupted. Media maven Oprah Winfrey often employed the phrase “speaking your truth.” Truth, however, is not subjective, but objective. There is no “your truth” and “my truth.” An individual “truth” is merely a personal opinion and can be incorrect. If each person defines his or her own version of “truth,” then each person likewise defines “freedom” however he or she wishes.

As a result, some people believe women should be free to eliminate the unborn human life within them, or that young people should be free to surgically alter their bodies if they “identify” as a different gender. Such ideas pervert reality and deny truth. 

In Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II quoted the words of Christ, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Reflecting on this, the Pope went on:

These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world. (12)

In other words, as the Catechism states, “Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude” (1731).

ACTING FREELY

Catholics today may experience a form of white martyrdom when defending themselves against those who think obedience to religious and moral truths is contrary to human freedom. This calls for courage. As the poet Robert Frost once said in an interview, “Freedom consists in being bold.”

St. Paul reminds the early Christians, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery… For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another” (Gal. 5:1, 13).

When culture goes on a destructive course, Christians must stand firm in faith. This means to be bold in instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, and most of all in loving and serving others. People of faith must pray, catechize at any opportunity, forgive injuries, and bear wrongs patiently — and do so boldly.

Defending freedom and truth is important because doing so defends Christ, who is freedom and truth itself — and Christians must defend Him until, like Gibson’s Wallace in Braveheart, they’re blue in the face.