Enjoying and Expanding Liberty

Liberty is the fourth of “the 4-Ls,” and this post is the last of the five-part series that I started on March 9—and it is not completely coincidental that I have written this article in Liberty (Mo.) where my wife and I have lived since 2005.**

The school song of Seinan Gakuin, the large school system in Fukuoka City, Japan, where I served for 36 years (1968~2004) as a university professor and the last eight of those years as Chancellor, contains the Japanese words for Life, Love, and Light, the first three of the 4-Ls.

But I thought/think Liberty needed/needs to be emphasized also. 

In my May 10 post on Light, I linked light to truth—and then truth is linked to Jesus’ words about freedom/liberty in John 8:32: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (CEV). And there are other important words about freedom/liberty in the New Testament.

According to Luke 4:18, in the synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus read these words from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me…To proclaim liberty to the captives…To set at liberty those who are oppressed.” Then Galatians 5:1 says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free” (NKJV).

Since I was emphasizing the 4-Ls at Seinan Gakuin where about 98% of the students and more than half of the faculty and staff were not Christians, I didn’t talk/write a lot about these Bible verses. But I did regularly emphasize the close connection of liberty to the light of truth.

Also, I always talked about liberty being accompanied by responsibility, emphasizing that true liberty doesn’t mean freedom to do as one pleases; it is not a license for self-centeredness. Liberty means we are not enslaved by another person or by the power of any ideology (“ism”).

There is both negative and positive liberty, and both are important. Negative liberty means freedom from, but positive liberty means freedom for—and emphasis on the former should include stress on the importance of the latter.

Serious problems arise when only negative liberty is emphasized and liberty is used in inappropriate ways. For example, liberty is misused when it means “free speech for me but not for thee.”*¹ In this connection, consider these limited and inferior uses of liberty/freedom in the U.S. now.

◈ The “Freedom Caucus” in the U.S. Congress. According to Wikipedia, this U.S. House caucus was formed by Republican Representatives in January 2015 and “is generally considered to be the most conservative and furthest-right Congressional bloc.”

◈ “Freedom Summer” in Florida. As part of what Florida Governor DeSantis calls by that name, his Transportation Department has declared that only the colors red, white and blue can be used to light up bridges across the state. (For what that implies, see this May 23 Washington Post article.)

◈ Liberty University in Virginia. Jerry Falwell’s university changed its name to Liberty Baptist College in 1976 and to Liberty University in 1985. A Washington Post March 2015 article was titled, “Virginia’s Liberty University: A mega-college and Republican presidential stage.”

Liberty, nonetheless, is an important traditional value of the USA. The Declaration of Independence speaks of the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And since 1831 Americans have sung about their nation being the “sweet land of liberty.”  

Even though the scope of those thought to have the unalienable right of liberty in 1776 or 1831—or even in 1942 when the Pledge of Allegiance was officially adopted—was much too narrow, it has increasingly been recognized as meaning liberty and justice for all.*²

On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt delivered what is known as the Four Freedoms speech, declaring that people "everywhere in the world" ought to have freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

These are freedoms that we all should be able to enjoy and seek to expand. And the liberty expressed in those four freedoms is still badly needed in the world today.

Further, we citizens of the USA must work energetically to preserve those (and other) freedoms in the light of the Christian nationalists who are seeking theocracy and of the Republican candidate for President, whose speeches (past and present) evidence racism, xenophobia, and a trend toward authoritarianism (fascism?).

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*¹ My wife and I moved to Liberty about three months after our marriage in 1957 and enrolled as students in William Jewell College, from which we graduated 65 years ago this month. We lived in Liberty again during the 1976-77 academic year. Then we bought our retirement home in Liberty and have never regretted our choice in the least. Somewhat tongue in cheek, I have sometimes said, slightly altering Paul Revere’s famous words, Give me Liberty until my death.

*² These words, harking back to 1798, are the title of the editorial in the March/April 2022 issue of Liberty magazine, a Seventh-day Adventist publication established in 1906. Please take a look at this article if you want to learn more about the context and meaning of those words.

*³ The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The original version was later expanded, but from the beginning, it ended with the words “with Liberty and Justice for all.” For more about this, see my August 30, 2021, blog post about Bellamy (here).

Note: It is also problematic when liberty is conflated with libertarianism. That political philosophy, which over-emphasizes negative liberty, strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government, especially the federal government. 

Edward Bellamy's Vision of a Socialist Utopia

Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892, was the subject of my August 30 blog post. In that article, I mentioned that Bellamy was a democratic socialist—but he was not so to the extent of Edward Bellamy, his cousin who authored a powerful novel about a socialist utopia.

Edward Bellamy’s Bio, Briefly

The fathers of Edward Bellamy (1850~1898) and Francis Bellamy (1855~1931) were brothers. Edward’s father was a Baptist minister, but Edward did not follow his father’s footsteps and did not become a minister as his cousin Francis did.

Edward, rather, became a journalist and then after developing tuberculosis at the age of 25 he became a novelist and wrote three unremarkable novels that were published between 1880 and 1885.

The life of Edward Bellamy changed drastically, though, after his utopian science fiction book Looking Backward, 2000-1887, was published early in 1888. Within a year it sold some 200,000 copies. 

By the end of the century, Looking Backward had sold more copies than any other novel published in America except for Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. It “especially appealed to a generation of intellectuals alienated from the alleged dark side of the Gilded Age” (see here).

(Curiously, while I have known of the latter books for most of my life, I don’t remember ever hearing of Bellamy’s book until August of this year.)

Bellamy published Equality, a sequel to Looking Backward, in 1897, but it was a disappointment. The following year, less than two months after his 48^th birthday, Bellamy died in his home state of Massachusetts.

Edward Bellamy’s Book, Briefly

Even though, as indicated, I had not heard of Bellamy’s highly successful book before this past summer, I bought a Kindle copy (for 99 cents!) in early September and read it with great interest, in spite of some of it being rather pedantic.

The novel narrates the story of a young Bostonian named Julian West, who falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep in 1887 and wakes up 113 years later in a radically changed Boston.

West is discovered in his underground sleeping chamber by a Dr. Leete, who along with his lovely daughter Edith explain and introduce West to the city, and the American society, of the year 2000. To his great amazement, the country, indeed, has become a socialist utopia.

Spark Notes (here) provides a detailed summary and analysis of the book—and even the full text of the novel—so I will make only the following brief comment about its content.

From Dr. Leete’s explanation, it becomes clear that Boston and the entire U.S. has become a utopia by the choices made through the years by the general public and not at all because of government control and/or coercion. It was, truly, the result of democratic socialism.

So, What About It?

I found Bellamy’s novel so intriguing because it was written at the very time that unchecked capitalism and “robber barons” such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were causing such suffering by exploitation of the working people of the country.

The year Looking Backward was published was also the very time Walter Rauschenbusch was beginning to develop the Social Gospel—and his biographers say that the young pastor of the church in Hell’s Kitchen read Bellamy’s book.

A 2019 article titled “When Christian Evangelicals Loved Socialism” states, “Rauschenbusch never became an overt political activist allied with any socialist group. But he was sympathetic to the goals of socialists, if not always their methods.”

At the present time, the progressives in the Democratic Party are often vilified as being socialists, but perhaps they are merely seeking what Edward Bellamy and Walter Rauschenbusch envisioned; that is, a society in which the needs of all people are adequately met.

Why don’t we all want, and work for, such a society?

What about the Pledge of Allegiance—and Its Author?

Perhaps few of you know the name Francis Bellamy, but all of you USAmericans know well the Pledge of Allegiance, which he wrote in 1892. Bellamy died 90 years ago on August 28. 

Bellamy’s Beliefs

Francis Bellamy was born in May 1855, the son of a Baptist minister in New York. After graduating from the University of Rochester and further study at Rochester Theological Seminary, in 1879 Francis was ordained as a minister and became pastor of First Baptist Church of Little Falls, New York.

Before his 30^th birthday, Bellamy moved to Boston, becoming pastor of Dearborn Street Baptist Church. After serving five years there, in 1890 he accepted a call to Boston’s Bethany Baptist Church. But the next year, under pressure, he resigned from that pastorate and left the ministry.

There was tension in the church because of Pastor Bellamy’s political views. In 1889 the Society of Christian Socialists was founded in Boston, and Bellamy was elected to serve as the Society’s vice president. He also wrote for their newspaper, The Dawn.

In the May 1890 issue of that paper, Bellamy urged pastors to become Christian Socialists, defining Christian socialism as “the science of the Golden Rule applied to economic relations.”**

It must be noted that the last decades of the 19^th century was the time of the “robber barons,” a pejorative term typically applied to businessmen who used abusive practices to amass their wealth.” It was a time of bad working conditions for many, child labor, and other exploitative practices.

Provisions such as Social Security and laws restricting the employment and abuse of child workers were not enacted until the 1930s, after Bellamy’s death—but had he lived a few years longer, he no doubt would have been delighted with such “socialistic” advances.

Bellamy’s Pledge

After leaving the pastorate, Bellamy took a job with Youth’s Companion, a Boston-based family magazine with half a million subscribers.

As part of the promotion of the World’s Columbian Exposition to be held in October 1892 in commemoration of the 400^th anniversary of Columbus reaching the Americas—and to bolster the schoolhouse flag movement that Youth’s Companion fervently supported, Bellamy wrote this pledge:

I pledge Allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.

Over thirty years later, my flag was changed to the flag of the United States of America. That change was made largely to make it clear to immigrant children what flag they were saluting.

The words under God were not added until 1954, sixty-two years after the Pledge was written by an ordained minister without those words. As Baptist historian (and Thinking Friend) Bruce Gourley has explained, Bellamy’s text “intentionally reflected the Baptist heritage of church-state separation.”

Bellamy’s Pledge Now

As I have written previously, as a Christian I am not a fan of any Pledge of Allegiance to a flag or a nation. (You can read what I wrote about that in my 7/5/14 blog post, which has had nearly 1,200 “pageviews.”)

Apart from that, how can we USAmericans affirm that our country is “indivisible.” There seems to be greater polarity (political divisiveness) now than at any time since the Civil War, which ended 27 years before Bellamy wrote the Pledge.

Inexplicably, last week all 212 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act legislation.

So, not only is there great division among lawmakers, there also seems to be opposition to providing “Liberty and Justice for all.” Among other things, liberty and justice for all surely must make it possible for full voting rights for all citizens.

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** Content in the last two paragraphs was taken from Brian Kaylor, “The Baptist Socialist Who Left God Out of the Pledge” (Word&Way, Aug. 24, 2020).