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Christian Network

For some time now their has been a hue and cry from certain quarters here against the Patriot Act and its primary architect, Attorney General John Ashcroft. For those unfamiliar with it this act that was conceived late in 2001, while the wreckage of the World Trade Center was still smoldering, and is designed to give the U.S. government wider powers in the ongoing war against terrorism. Among other things, it authorizes the government to conduct greater domestic surveillance, have more latitude in detaining persons suspected to be involved with terrorism, and disseminate information about individuals who sympathize with terrorists. Left of center groups across the country have accused Ashcroft and the Bush administration of attempting to dismantle the Bill of Rights. Some have gone so far as to label the Attorney General a Fascist.

Forgetting, for the moment, that Ashcroft is an Evangelical Christian, and that many of his critics use his faith against him, it may be more important to take a look at what the word "freedom" has come to mean in America. Today Americans demand their right to a kind of liberty that might more accurately be described as license. In fact that is exactly what it would have been called by the more religiously conservative citizens of an earlier era. Without moral absolutes to restrain them our freedoms have become an obscene parody of the real thing.

In the word’s best sense, freedom, with its implication of the innate dignity of the individual, was a concept that grew in the sunlight of a Judeo-Christian worldview. No other religious tradition of the past or the present has held up the value of the individual based on the proposition that all men are made in the image of their Creator. When a nation is guided by the kind of liberty derived from the teachings of God that nation prospers in every way. For most of our history we Americans have known such liberty and it has made us a great nation. But we are pursuing a very different kind of liberty these days.

From the "right" to create and disseminate pornography to the "right" to end a human life in the womb, the sort of freedom many of my countrymen are championing today is that which conforms to the most base and selfish desires of the human heart. We want what we want when we want it and if that hurts others, and completely disregards the idea of an ultimate moral law, so be it. Choice is everything. Freedom in this country has come to mean the absolute sovereignty of the individual to make choices based primarily on desire, not responsibility. Collectively, we are a nation dying from the choices we have made during the last 35 years. Radical self-centeredness has, to a large degree, become the national zeitgeist . American society today does not have too little or too much freedom as much as the wrong kind of freedom.

So what does this have to do with the Patriot Act? At one time submission to legitimate authority was bound up in the principles of Scripture. As a Judeo-Christian culture, or at least a culture heavily influenced by that worldview, we generally accepted that human authority was ultimately God-given because we derived our understanding of such authority from the Bible. If our government did not ask us to do anything in blatant contradiction to the Mosaic code we accepted that such a government was established by the God of that code. We prayed for our leaders to be sensitive to the leading of our common God and then we obeyed them. Not so in 2003.

Today a large percentage of Americans are guided by the creed of extreme individualism and absolute self-sovereignty. It is a secular creed befitting an increasingly secularized nation. For the person who has made this view their god it seems completely legitimate to constantly fight any perceived encroachment on his or her right to do whatever he or she wants to do. If government exists to enable human beings to be their own masters, with little or no responsibility to their fellows or to God, than that government needs to be given as little authority as possible. This is the spirit behind Americans who attack the Patriot Act, an act that was designed to balance the legitimate civil liberties of all of us with the government’s responsibility to protect us from the greatest threat to this country since the end of the Cold War.

In the "demonization" of the Patriot Act we are simply seeing how far the people of the United States have fallen from the religious ideals that guided them so well for so long.