"Liberty will ever be more free and secure in proportion as license is kept in restraint."

Pope Leo XIII

Secularists condemn Christianity as the foe of all liberty, most especially in the realm of intellectual and social liberties.  They believe that the West will only be free when all vestiges of Christianity are removed from our culture. 

The secularists are wrong.  The abandonment of Christianity as a basis for our laws will eventually destroy our liberties.   It is precisely because the West embraced Christianity that we have enjoyed freedom so consistently and extensively throughout history.
 
A delicate balance between authority and liberty is necessary for the proper functioning of a society.  Too much liberty leads to anarchy, while too much authority leads to tyranny.  The excess of either leads to a backlash toward the other.  

Liberty increases or decreases depending on how a society views the nature of man and the value of human life.   The hallmark of all pagan cultures throughout history has been the lack of belief in the inherent dignity of human life.  Man in the eyes of a socialist or a communist state is merely a means of support for the State and little more.   On the other hand, Christian societies view man as an eternal soul uniquely created in the image and likeness of God with a free will.  Every human life is to be valued.  The state exists to serve man.  

The state’s estimation of itself in relation to man is like a sliding scale.  The less human life is valued the greater the state becomes and vice versa.  Since Christianity presumes the inherent value of every human life, no man-made laws can compete with the liberty that Christian based laws provide.  Thus, only Christianity guarantees a proper balance between liberty and authority. 

Rome was one of the first civilizations to guarantee its citizens’ rights.  It did not, however, recognize any inherent rights to human life outside man’s role as a citizen.  All rights came from the state and resulted from the subjective benevolence of the rulers.   Man existed for the State--not the other way around.  Rome sanctioned slavery and infanticide.  A contempt for human life was seen in the public games where the destruction of human beings became amusement. 

It would take a radical new way of thinking to confer upon human beings the dignity that would elevate the life of every man above the state.  Christianity transformed man from a slave of the state to a uniquely created individual who was created in the image of God.  Christianity rescued man from the meaningless repetitive drudgery of daily life and gave him a personal destiny, not simply a tribal, cultural or national destiny.  His actions now had eternal consequences, and the State was no longer the ultimate authority. Instead there now existed a higher authority under which he was no longer a slave, but rather a child of God.   Man suddenly had not only a purpose for living but also for dying. 

Death was no longer man’s sad end and enemy.  The belief in eternal life gave the West a courage which was unmatched at the time.  It ennobled the West to do battle with all those who would destroy liberty.  The belief in the eternal life of the soul cannot be separated from the will to fight to the death for liberty.     

In Christianity man was endowed with “free will”.  Even his Creator would not tread on man’s free will-- even unto his own destruction.  

Christianity was also the great equalizer among classes, races, and yes, even the sexes.  It brought an equality like no other man-made, social or intellectual idea ever could or will.   The king of the land was no more important in the eyes of God than a slave.   

The West seems to have come full circle since the pre-Christian pagan days of Rome.  Our lawmakers and governments of the West have now largely dispensed with Christianity as the influence of laws, and work at a frenzied pace to create new laws to make society more fair, free and less objectionable.  These secular laws, too often, not only strip us of our liberties but deny the inherent dignity of human life. 

“Choice”, unfortunately, is the operative word rather than liberty or freedom.  The West is less concerned about liberty than “license”.  License is a laxity and an abandonment to all moderation.  License sanctions all “choices” and must silence those that seek to inhibit their exercise.   Liberty does not and cannot derive from license.   It is a false freedom since it robs the moderate of their liberty, lessens the dignity of human life and creates a slave of the licentious.  

Licentiousness has become the false freedom of the West.  So many of our laws are based upon justifying our hypersexuality and comforting the licentious.  We legalize prostitution in order to elevate and dignify the woman and the “profession”.  We enshrine fruitless sex as a right and call it  “reproductive freedom”.  Strip clubs and pornography are an exercise of the “freedom of expression”. 

None of these so called freedoms elevate man, rather they destroy his dignity.  They make man an object for use by another.  We mistakenly believe that we love our fellow man and dignify him by legalizing and protecting his favorite sin.  Instead we have simply dignified sin and degraded and demeaned man.          

The ultimate in the denial of liberty is the denial of life. The West has killed millions upon millions of its own offspring through abortion under the banner of “choice”.  Many nations have also passed laws that take the life of its elderly and disabled.  Secular governments  will soon realize the financial incentive for eliminating those that “drain” society and the right to die will fast become the duty to die. China recently made headlines by harvesting organs from living human beings who were imprisoned.      

In the name of tolerance the secular governments probe the minds of citizens to ensure the absence of intolerant thoughts.  Should one express a thought that is subjectively determined to be intolerant-- punishment awaits.  Homosexual intolerance is the ultimate secular mortal sin.   Many “enlightened” countries of the West have justified the forced silencing of their people so that homosexuals won’t be made to feel uncomfortable about their “choices”.  This however liberates sin and not man.  It also results in the loss of human dignity and liberty.

Liberty is also lost when we cannot raise our children in a manner that is in keeping with God's laws.  We are no longer free when we are at war with our culture to retain innocence and purity in our children.  Our hard earned money is taken in the name of public education where birth control is passed out to children without their parents knowledge or consent and they are force fed deviant ideas in the name of tolerance.  

The subjectivism and relativism embodied in the secular laws of the West are flawed and cannot produce true fairness, liberty, and equality.  When we make way for the practice of every sin then man's dignity and liberty is lost.  We have become pagan by dignifying sin and demeaning human life.