Q. As I’ve been talking with friends and family about Amendment G, I’m running into a common response: We should be free to do what we want. How can I answer this response?
This is obviously a timely question, referring as it does to Amendment G, which will be on the ballot this November and, if approved, would legalize abortion in South Dakota through all three trimesters of pregnancy without any regulations or oversight.
But it is a perennial question as well, addressing an idea which, for many Americans, is at the heart of what our country has always been about—freedom.
The early 20th century British convert G.K. Chesterton once described the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church.” Taking that idea one step further, we could fairly say that the “central doctrine” of our country is freedom.
In many ways, to be an American means to celebrate freedom. Just consider the formal name for the Fourth of July: Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate our freedom from English rule and the birth of our own (independent) country. The idea of freedom is deeply woven into the DNA, so to speak, of our country; it’s hard to avoid the celebration of freedom.
But what, exactly, do we mean by freedom? For most of us (as the questioner indicates), the definition that comes to mind when we think about freedom is usually something like, “the ability to do what I want.” In other words, to be free means I can choose what I want to do, when I want to do it, with the typical caveat that it can’t be something that harms someone else (I’m not free to take your money, for instance). To use more precise language, it means we have the right to self-determination: I, alone, can determine the course of my own life; no one else can determine it for me.
This sense of freedom is sometimes described as “freedom from coercion,” meaning that to be free means that I am free from any limitations on my actions (again, on the condition that I do no harm to others in the process). And it is definitely one dimension of freedom, and it is the dimension with which we are most familiar.
“Freedom from coercion” is not, however, the only dimension of what it means to be free. In fact, it is not the most important dimension of freedom. For when we look to not only God’s word as found in the Bible and in the teachings of the Church, but even when we look more deeply at the nature of human experience, we see there is another, deeper dimension of human freedom, one we too often neglect: It is the interior freedom to excel, to thrive, to “be all that we can be.” It is the kind of freedom possessed by those who “do human” well: just as there is a certain freedom experienced by the professional athlete when they are “in the zone,” so, too, is there a freedom we experience when we are “in the zone” of being human, of thriving as a human being. Or think of a high-performance sports car, when it is finely tuned with a full tank of gas, it is capable of excellence as a car.
So, too, are we as human beings when we “do human well.” And how do we know how to “do human” well? In the same way that we know how to ensure our car “does car” well: by paying attention to what the manufacturer tells us! While in the case of our car, it is the car maker; in the case of us, it is our God. To “do human well,” we have to be attentive to what God has revealed to us about how we are to live.
So yes, I am “free” to do something wrong, harmful or evil, whether that be to myself or to others. But that sort of “freedom” is a false freedom, because evil enslaves us. The more I do what is wrong, the less I become truly free, truly human, truly excellent as a person, a citizen, a neighbor, as a Catholic.
God’s teachings are not a limitation on human freedom, but are actually its condition. If we want to be truly free, we need to follow his commandments, because like the owner’s manual for our cars, God’s teachings hold the key to our perfection, to our thriving, to our fulfillment … to our freedom.
