Freedom, to be sustainable, requires not just Liberty in the abstract. What Os Guinness calls "the golden triangle" includes also Virtue and "Faith in something." Without these, Freedom cannot be maintained.
In his 2014 book, 'A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future,' Guinness delves deep into quotes from the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, plus also great thinkers from Western history - all to underscore the point that free peoples typically do not remain free forever.
Yet the audacious hope of the men who won the War of Independence against Great Britain in the late 18th century, then went on to turn 13 colonies into what is now the world's declining yet still pre-eminent superpower, was that this free people would remain free forever.
Their ambition was not based on nothing, however. Students of Polybius, Cicero, Augustine, and others - the great men of renown who constituted the United States in the first place did so after careful study of what had caused other great empires and peoples to both rise and fail in maintaining their civilizations and societies.
As Guinness points out, in our day we have almost entirely divorced our ideas of liberty from their requisite partners - faith and virtue. Those are now thoroughly private matters, and liberty has been accordingly redefined to the point that any reminder of an objective standard of good character is shouted down because we are infringing on someone else's freedom in the abstract.
Yet freedom cannot only exist in a negative sense, as freedom from unreasonable searches and seizure, or freedom from infringements on our 1st and 2nd Amendment rights exemplify. There is also a positive kind of freedom which is to and for something - freedom to do what one ought and must as a fulfillment of duty to God and our fellow man.
In our obsession with negative liberty, Guinness argues, we have lost sight of the sense in which our freedom is to do more than just whatever we want, but also to do what we must. In so doing, anyone telling us we must do something is said to be infringing on our freedom to do what we want because in our abandonment of faith and virtue we do not want to do what we ought.
Yet here again, to the extent that faith and virtue have become private matters, the American Republic has been deprived of public faith and virtue. And the results are nothing short of catastrophic. Thus we waiver somewhere between Thomas Cole's third and fourth paintings in his 1833-1836 series The Course of Empire - transitioning now from The Culmination to Destruction as many previous great empires throughout history have.
As the recent Supreme Court ruling which overturned Roe v. Wade, plus the subsequent response from angry Leftists and ambivalent establishment conservatives demonstrates, we are now in a full-blown crisis in the U.S. due to a rejection of duty. Men no longer have the duty to be men. Women no longer have the duty to be women. In fact, we have flown so far and fast from our duties that we want to be liberated from even the claim that there is any such thing as men and women.
Yet it is tragic how we suddenly believe again that there is such a thing as women. And the ball is in the court of the Pro Life movement to argue whether mothers who seek to get an abortion in states where that will be illegal should be prosecuted. And it would be funny if it were not so sad that the Left finishes Pride Month in the U.S. screeching at the sky again about women's rights after having just denied emphatically that they even know what a woman is.
This is all to say that Guinness is right. If we want to endure in Culmination and not end in Destruction we must repent, rekindle, and revive Christian faith and virtue in this country. Otherwise we are doomed, plain and simple.
