This month’s celebration of America 250 has been a heartwarming and powerful display of patriotism that is increasingly - and regrettably - rare in our time. Parades, fireworks, and performances showcased the common values that have allowed freedom to endure here, like no other place on earth.
Freedom is to be celebrated, but it is also to be protected as well. In our time of an ascendant Democratic Socialist movement, it is critical to reconnect with the gift of freedom and what it takes to ensure it continues to be the dominant feature of the American experience.
The first aspect to appreciate is that freedom is our natural state as humans. God gave us free will and while it is tempered by laws and morality that come largely from biblical truth, the goal of a free society is to maintain an environment of as much responsible freedom as possible.
The second, is that life - or existence - and freedom are interconnected. Both require work, effort, personal responsibility and fortitude. Freedom can therefore be a burden. A beneficial one, but a burden, nonetheless. Just think about how many decisions and responsibilities we make in our lives that spring from our freedom to chart a path for our lives.
In Matthew 11:30, Christ told his followers “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” The etymology of the word yoke is from the root of a word that means “unite.” Oxen would be joined together by a beam to share the load. Christ very deliberately used the yoke as a metaphor for life and His role in it.
He is naturally the stronger of the oxen, leading the team of two in their labor together. This is the relationship Christians endeavor to build with Christ - one in which the heavy burdens of this life are not only shared or given to Christ as a partner in the work of living.
Freedom is a yoke. All of us carry this yoke and are tasked with pulling the heavy load of our own existence as well as the responsibility we bear for others.
The big question for Americans at this time is “Who will bear the burden with us?” or alternatively “Who will be with me in the yoke, pulling beside me as my partner?
Just as John Adams once wrote that our Constitution was created for a moral and religious people and unfit for any other, Americans must internalize that the exceptional nature of what we’ve created together can only be guided by the tolerance, mercy and respect for human dignity laid out in the Bible.
Looking to Christ or God to share the burden in the harness next to us is the best possible way to ensure freedom and human flourishing.
Marxists want our burden to be heavy. They want the yoke to chafe against our skin and exhaust us, leaving us angry, tired and exasperated. People who carry heavy burdens of life without the help of faith or a spouse or children are naturally predisposed to search for relief. They seek out the bold promises of socialism that can often be a salve for these souls. They love the idea of being aided by something far greater than their weary selves.
It is an indisputable fact that freedom requires individual initiative and hard work in order to experience its greatest fruits. Socialism saps that energy and therefore productivity and freedom. It is a false hope that has left a trail of human wreckage in its wake from Marx’s own family to the tens of millions of Soviet subjects and Chinese victims of the Cultural Revolution to modern Cuba and Venezuela.
The Left diminishes marriage and family, faith in God and disparages America precisely because our connection to those things lightens the burden of life allowing us to be freer both spiritually and practically. We are therefore less pliable and less easily coerced into conforming to the agenda of the Left’s cadre of mobilized zealous youth, mob violence and social turmoil.
The Italians have ‘la dolce vita.’ The French speak of ‘art de vivre’ — the art of living. The Irish revel in ‘the good life.’ We talk about the ‘American Spirit.’ That spirit is an almost supernatural bond that we feel living together under the Stars and Stripes. It’s a knowledge that for most people is as ingrained as their DNA that we live in a place where anything is possible because we believe we are guided by God and what John D. Rockefeller called the “supreme worth of the individual.”
None of these have to do with government giving us our rights or providing for us from cradle to grave.
Socialists and Marxists tell us that we all must share the load making the burdens of existence lighter. They tell us government, not God, must be the partner in the yoke. But in actuality we end up bearing the burden alone. For all but a few elites, government is a lame, obese old ox incapable of contributing to the work. We end up dragging it along with us.
History has proven conclusively that this yoke of freedom is too heavy for individuals and societies to bear without the guidance of the faith, morality, ethics, mercy, love and power that come from the Bible.
So, when you hear from Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, or any others espousing the “warmth of collectivism,” know that their yoke is hard and their burden heavy because they are asking you to trust government over God. They want you to submit to their agenda at the expense of plowing the field that defines the work of your life.
Faith, family, and personal responsibility absolutely help carry the yoke of freedom. From rural Louisiana, though, I would add that freedom also travels on public roads, sits behind levees, and depends on schools, hospitals, disaster response, and laws applied fairly.
Government makes a poor savior—and sometimes a questionable farmhand—but it still has legitimate chores. The strongest team is responsible citizens, families, churches, businesses, and limited, accountable government each pulling where it is best equipped. Otherwise, we may win the sermon and still leave the wagon stuck in the mud.