Jewish World Review – Oct. 12, 2010
The Almighty, Liberals and Liberty
By Dennis Prager
In a recent column, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote: “It’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous our (America’s) religiosity is in the world. A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are.” Given Blow’s leftwing politics and his point was that all rich countries except for the United States are secular and that all poor countries are religious, he was obviously not making this point in order to celebrate America’s “anomalous” religiosity. He should have. America’s anomalous religiosity is very much worth celebrating — not because it leads to affluence, but because it is indispensible to liberty. Had Blow made a liberty chart rather than an affluence chart, he might have noted that the freest country in the world — for 234 years — the United States of America, has also been the most G-d-centered.
Yes, I know that the Islamic world has also been G-d-based and that it has not been free. But that is because Allah is not regarded as the source of liberty, as the America’s Judeo-Christian G-d has been, but as the object of submission (“Islam” means “submission”).
Since the inception of the United States (and, indeed, before it in colonial America), liberty, i.e., personal freedom, has been linked to G-d. America was founded on the belief that G-d is the source of liberty. That is why the inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 25): “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” The Declaration of Independence also asserts this link: All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Because the Creator of the world is the source of our freedom, no state, no human being, no government may take it away. If the state were the source of liberty, then obviously the state could take it away.
Both reason and American values therefore make these claims:
1. The more important the state is, the less the liberty.
2. The more important G-d is, the smaller the state.
3. Therefore, the more important G-d is, the more liberty there is.
A proof of the validity of these assertions is that as this country — the country, not the government — becomes more secular, it becomes less free, just as has happened in other Western countries. We have far more laws governing human conduct than ever before in America’s history. And Western Europe has even more, including limitations on as basic a liberty as free speech. So, too, every totalitarian state except Muslim ones (because a religious government is the Muslim ideal) seeks to abolish religion. Stalin, for example, murdered virtually every member of the clergy, and came close to destroying all religion, in the Soviet Union. He understood that a totalitarian state cannot allow a competing allegiance. And in democratic Western Europe, the ever-expanding state is inevitably accompanied by an ever shrinking G-d and religion.
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