“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” — Ayn Rand
In the previous issue, we discussed the value of equality among people in the context of how it was invoked during the French Revolution of 1789, under the slogan: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—or Death!” We argued that equality, viewed as an abstract ideal, could not become functional merely through the assertion of human reason’s power to create and uphold it. Moreover, by ignoring the Christian roots of human equality, the revolutionaries made it impossible to promote equality as merely a product of human consciousness.
In what follows, we turn to the concept of liberty—the flagship value of both the French and American revolutions. Our aim is to assess the extent to which liberty was pursued, implemented, and respected in French and American societies of that era, as well as throughout subsequent American history.
The roots of the idea of freedom
As revolutionary France endured ten terrifying years of civil, legal, social, military, and economic chaos, its strategy of “total transformation” drew strong criticism from the British philosopher Edmund Burke. He argued that the various liberties of man and citizen were left at the mercy of “every wild, litigious spirit,” precisely because the revolution had abolished all preexisting laws and social order—as if everything that had come before was corrupt, flawed, and contemptible, and novelty itself had become a virtue. Yet not everything new is necessarily good or superior to what came before.
In a letter to a French friend, Burke wrote: “France has bought poverty by crime! France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue.”[1] The more reasonable approach, historically speaking, would have been to assess the existing state of affairs, preserve what was functional, and then proceed with gradual, partial reforms—step by step. A complete and instantaneous transformation was unprecedented.
Burke reproached the French revolutionaries for scorning the expertise of political and religious thinkers, dismissing all debate, resolutions, and procedures, and resorting instead to brute force to impose every new measure conceived by self-proclaimed amateurs who claimed to have “illumination on all matters.”[2]
The ensuing social chaos—marked by the absence of both genuine equality and freedom—was also fueled by the abolition of religious faith and practice. As the French historian Jacques Madaule[3] observed, the atheistic civil constitution and the coercive policies of the time had opened a deep rift between the revolutionaries and a large part of the French population, who remained, at heart, deeply religious.
The fact that, in the name of human reason, tens of thousands of executions and more than half a million arrests were carried out left a deep mark on history—among both the devout and the atheists. The philosopher Nietzsche, speaking from a stance of what Ion Ianoși called “Christian anti-Christianism,” exclaimed: “[R]eason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection, all these privileges and pageantries of humanity: how dear is the price that they have exacted! How much blood and cruelty is the foundation of all ‘good things’!”[4]
By contrast, America built its image as the “land of liberty” following its own revolution in 1788, establishing the rule of law without demolishing all existing foundations. American democracy became possible because it was grounded in both civil law and Christian morality. In fact, civil law itself was founded on Protestant Christian ethics. The motto “In God we trust,” printed on every dollar bill, stands as a symbol of the nation’s political roots in the faith of its early settlers. Another enduring symbol of America remains the Statue of Liberty, welcoming all who arrive from across the Atlantic.
“In the United States, the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view. (…) In America it may be said that no one renders obedience to man, but to justice and to law,”[5] said Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, the French sociologist who had visited and closely studied American society. Five years after yet another revolution in France—the Paris Commune—Tocqueville admired the peaceful organisation, morality, and civic activism of ordinary Americans, those who had proudly declared themselves “We the People.”
Beyond tending to their own businesses and private affairs, citizens seemed deeply involved in public matters: they debated political measures, gave speeches about the common good, joined community efforts to combat alcohol consumption, and through such participation became more intelligent, more capable, “more enlightened and more powerful than the Indian nations.” Their Christian morality, he noted, was not a heroic one but rather a morality of everyday life—one that fostered equality and mutual respect, encouraging the growth of good impulses and the restraint of bad ones.[6] Comparing the societies and values of his time in France and America, Tocqueville wrote: “I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it. (…) All those of our contemporaries who would establish or secure the independence and the dignity of their fellow-men, must show themselves the friends of equality; and the only worthy means of showing themselves as such, is to be so: upon this depends the success of their holy enterprise. Thus the question is not how to reconstruct aristocratic society, but how to make liberty proceed out of that democratic state of society in which God has placed us.”[7]
Erosion of freedom
Even in America, however, Tocqueville warned of a paradoxical danger: the “tyranny of the majority.” American individualism, he suggested, could easily become excessive, dulling the civic vigilance of citizens amid comfort and prosperity. Over time, the exercise of free will might grow rarer—and less meaningful.[8]
Also paradoxically, as Tocqueville observed, this nation so devoted to freedom and faith pursued a tyrannical policy toward both the Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans.[9] These contradictions and moral inconsistencies eventually demanded a reckoning—a Civil War between North and South—to begin to address them.
Yet even then, the outcome was more an amelioration than a resolution. In President Abraham Lincoln’s vision, the end of slavery represented a hope rather than a full deliverance—the hope that freed slaves might one day share with the harshly exploited laborers of the North: the hope of being able, freely and by their own will, to change their hard lives. It was the hope of seizing their chance at happiness, as promised by the famous phrase enshrined in the Constitution—“the pursuit of happiness.”
The Protestant ethic of the Puritans who emigrated from England and the Netherlands was, in Max Weber’s view, a defining trait of nineteenth-century American society. It translated into effective social and economic norms for the United States—unlike the ongoing turbulence of revolutionary France. The Protestants’ rational asceticism, the German sociologist argued, guided them toward valuing work, professional dignity, temperance and modesty, charity, and moral restraint. Yet, as Weber also noted, Protestant asceticism itself “was in turn influenced in its development and its character by the totality of social conditions, especially economic.”[10] Over time, under the growing pressure of economic interests, religious experience deteriorated, and its influence on social relations waned.
Weber said that “the modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character.”[11] Originally, concern for material needs was compared to a light cloak resting on the shoulders of the Puritan Christian—something that could be set aside at any time if it became too burdensome.[12] Their freedom was guaranteed by the divine, and the freedom of his world was an extension of Christian principles. In other words, this was the Protestant ascetic way of being in the world without becoming of the world. Gradually, however, that light cloak hardened into a steel shell, Weber said.
Present and future threats to freedom
As industrialisation accelerated and consumer society took shape, American Protestants—ever more absorbed in the machinery of production and consumption, in wealth accumulation and perpetual business expansion—became increasingly worldly. In many ways, Tocqueville’s prediction was coming true. One evident reason for the decline of Christian principles in managing life was the failure to recognise their formative role in enabling purposeful and effective action.
Weber was already voicing concern as early as 1920 about the unchecked pursuit of profit in the “land of freedom,” when it began to stray beyond the bounds of religious morality. His fears proved well founded three decades later. The gradual detachment from the Christian intellectual tradition and Protestant values was captured in the concept of “the lonely crowd,” developed in the 1950s by three American sociologists.[13] They described how entire populations were abandoning the traditions in which they had been raised—family life, community life, honest work, weekly rest, church attendance, and so on. This shift was fueled by technological progress and labor market dynamics: commuting, the migration of the workforce from one state to another, often across great distances. New forms of socialisation emerged, new lifestyles, and an orientation either toward the self or toward others—but no longer toward tradition.[14]
At the same time, this departure from familiar traditions and their values also meant uprootedness. The “lonely crowd” was the crowd of great urban centres, where no one interacts with anyone in a meaningful or profound way, and where the constant rush and lack of leisure time isolate people from one another. Loneliness also stems from the moral rupture that occurs when individuals abandon the sound principles of the communities they come from, yielding instead to the permissive ethics of the metropolis. In this way, the individual becomes estranged from themselves and from their own identity, and their chances of fulfilling their potential as a free human being diminishes, as their values shift suddenly and profoundly.
In this process, the idea proves true that democracy is the most permissive form of government—because it allows both human freedom and dignity, as well as human depravity, to flourish, as Anglican theologian and priest John Stott said.[15]
If we accept that Protestant morality exerts a significant positive influence not only on prosperity but also on freedom, it becomes necessary to look toward the future—to identify the directions in which secularisation or the overt secularism[16] of contemporary American society, as well as of most traditional Protestant communities, might be heading.
One noteworthy phenomenon is the rise of unaffiliated believers—a relatively recent development that has drawn the attention of theologians.[17] It reflects both the disorientation of the devout and a rejection of institutionalised faith, or even disappointment with the churches they once attended. Unaffiliated Christians reject the church’s mediation between themselves and the divine, separating religious values from ecclesiastical structures and practices. This is undoubtedly a sign of crisis within Christianity in general—and Protestantism in particular—but also an expression of a longing for spiritual freedom.[18]
Meanwhile, in the economic sphere, some speak of a new, fully secularised “holy alliance”—a supposed partnership between “major financial institutions” and “transnational private capital”—alongside the crippling indebtedness of both poor and wealthy nations alike.[19] These are signs of looming, perhaps inevitable, economic crises and of a growing lack of material freedom.
A view considered by some in the Western world to be “redemptive” suggests that Eastern, non-Christian, vaguely deist spirituality—often with Buddhist undertones—could merge with the “science of the future” to deliver humanity from its material and spiritual crisis. This proposed new morality, less religious than “spiritual” and metaphysical in nature, aims to reconcile physics and metaphysics into a unified worldview. Such a spiritual–Eastern ethic would be based not on human reason, but on human experience, intuition, and the world of dreams.[20]
These considerations recall the vision of the Dalai Lama, presented in his 2005 book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, for which he received the Templeton Prize. The Dalai Lama suggests that humanity’s spiritual and material crises can be alleviated by cultivating the virtues already present in the human heart—qualities that can transform our attitudes. The motivation for this transformation lies in the simple observation that it benefits the well-being of those who practice it. Science, together with personal experience, is what can aid this process, the Buddhist leader says. Religion, he says, cannot, since there is no universally accepted faith. The Dalai Lama’s moral project, therefore, aims to have universal validity.[21]
In our view, this concept seems to stem from wishful thinking—a utopian attempt to unite what cannot be united: Eastern virtues such as wisdom, detachment from the world, and asceticism with Western ones like comfort, efficiency, and prosperity. It also implicitly assumes the existence of a universal psychological makeup shared by all humankind. Once again, the search for solutions turns not to reason but to the nonrational within us—intuition, empathy, and the dreamlike imagination taking the lead.
Given all this, we cannot help but ask: Why does humanity, in times of crisis, tend to choose extreme solutions—to swing sharply in one direction or another—following the invisible rhythm of a “pendulum” that seems to sweep through our history?
Some authors foresee a worsening of human relations in the future, fueled by deepening economic crises. One may wonder what will become of our freedom when the natural tendency will be for humans to turn against their fellow man. Discussing today’s political, social, and military upheavals triggered by the global resource crisis, several analysts warn: “Whether our successors might call these regimes ‘capitalist,’ ‘socialist,’ ‘fascist,’ or whatever, malice would be their ultimately defining character trait. It is of course impossible to predict what human beings will do when confronted by such a threat.”[22]
Which of the three possible directions seems most plausible when we consider the complex tendencies shaping humanity’s spiritual and material life? The atheistic path, in the spirit of the French Revolution, which sees freedom as emancipation from all religious belief? The Weberian path, which holds that liberty and prosperity were fostered by Christian (Protestant) morality? Or the path of a new, “spiritual” morality—rooted in nonrational experience and the science of the future—that envisions equal freedom for all people across the globe?
In this context, Ellen White’s warning about a potentially dark future for the New World becomes particularly relevant: she cautioned that the abandonment of Protestant morality and principles would lead to a general social collapse. Without the foundation of faith, she said, even civil laws would cease to be respected—resulting inevitably in economic disaster, chaos, and, ultimately, the disappearance of freedom.[23] The link between civil law and the Law of God, as Max Weber also conceived it, is found precisely in Christian morality.
In our contemporary world, several schools of thought have sought to separate morality from religion and faith, proposing instead that legal norms be grounded in a strictly secular morality.[24] Yet, in light of the bleak forecasts of global crises and social conflict, it is striking that an atheist thinker like Ayn Rand and a Christian author like Ellen White each envisioned remarkably similar scenarios—depicting nearly the same grim realities of a future dominated by brute force, an all-powerful, arbitrary government, and the subjugation of citizens.
The true measure of these two perspectives, however, lies in which of them goes beyond merely describing the problem to also proposing a solution.