Last Call for Liberty by Os Guinness

Author:Os Guinness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: freedom;liberty;sustainable;justice;common good;virtue;character;American Revolution;French Revolution;liberalism;conservatism;libertarianism;politics;culture wars;religious liberty;Alexis de Tocqueville;Christian tradition;judeo Christian;American freedom;land of the free;house divided;conservative;liberal;libertarian;American experiment;history;civics;American republic;constitutional republic;democracy;American politics;political
ISBN: 9780830873371
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2018-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Enough, then, of the current liberal Left hypocrisy of celebrating diversity but flattening real differences and insisting on uniformity! The human challenge is not to remove all differences but to recognize and respect genuine diversity, to give it space, and to know how we are to live with our deepest differences with the maximum freedom and justice for all. In Rabbi Sacks’s happy term, there is a “dignity of difference,” and that dignity should be respected.

Not surprisingly, the fifth and final factor in the sea change is exhaustion. After fifty years of the American culture wars, during which religion has festered as a constant source of controversy, many Americans simply wish that the whole messy business would simply go away. “A plague on both your houses,” they say. “We are understandably tired of the issue.”

In his “Memorial and Remonstrance” in 1785, James Madison declared that “it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens.”17 Because of this profound sea change, America today is well past the first experiments on liberties that have been central for three hundred years. All who have a “prudent jealousy” for America’s “first liberty” should make it their “first duty” to examine the activists’ proposals with great care, and where they are wrong to resist them with courage.

The totalitarian overtones of the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners, no-exemptions approach of some of the activists on the Left should be troubling to freedom-loving people. In their view, all dissent is to be crushed as discrimination, all conscientious objection is to be ripped away as a fig leaf to cover bigotry, and all civil disobedience in the mode of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King is to be rejected as hateful. Will the legal bulldozer of the progressive Left soon be turned against religious advocacy in public life, against religious and home schooling, against religious nonprofit activity and status, against religious speech that is deemed incorrect, and even against churches, synagogues, and mosques? Any compulsion may be unfortunate, they say, but in the chilling words of a New Mexico Supreme Court ruling against religious freedom and a small business owner, compulsion is “the price of citizenship.”18

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