The 18th century philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” It is obvious to see that mankind is not free, if by freedom you mean an absolute absence of constraints and restraint and consequences in one’s existence. It is also true that we are not even born free, as a tabula rasa, which was the comforting illusion chosen by thinkers like Rousseau and Locke as a way of seeking to point to the beginnings of human life as a place to recover some legitimacy for freedom in an age of deep oppressive tyranny on the part of ancien regime governments. While their aim to find a world that was more free of oppressive and corrupt absolute monarchs is one I wholeheartedly support and endorse, their claim that mankind is born free is sadly untrue.

We are not born free. We are born with a particular genetic and epigenetic heritage that reflects our ancestry. The decay to genetic material and the expression of genes in our bodies as a result of the sins of our fathers and mothers is a real constraint on existence that affects us from the very beginning of life. We are born with certain bends in our personality, certain proclivities, certain vulnerabilities, and that will only be exacerbated by the circumstances of our upbringing, and the context in which we are born and in which we live. And whether we struggle against certain aspects of our upbringing or heritage or family baggage or whether we imitate it, we are not free to choose the sort of baggage or proclivities we have, merely to choose what to do about them. Our freedom is therefore partial, but certainly bounded.

Indeed, certain aspects of freedom are in tension or frankly in contradiction to others. In many ways, our freedom from external coercion depends on our internal self-discipline and self-control. The more we fall prey to addictions and bad habits, and the more we are slave to our lusts and our innate drives, whatever they are, the more we will require restraint from outside. If we are free from morals and ethics and concern for others, we will be slave to those elements of order that exist which will seek to protect others from us, and possibly protect us from ourselves. If we wish to be free from external restraint, though, we must have internal restraint, and have the laws of God written on our hearts and minds, so that God’s nature becomes second nature to us, which can only occur through the indwelling presence of the Spirit of God. Likewise, for some, freedom means the desire to do whatever they want when they want with whomever they want. For others, freedom is a liberation from crushing burdens of broken family backgrounds, disastrous personal traumas, or crippling compulsions and addictions. These two types of freedom do not greatly resemble each other, and allowing our lusts and passions to run free often entraps us as a result of the consequences and repercussions of our behavior.

Furthermore, the only price that we can pay to free ourselves from our sins is death, and death marks the end of all of our hopes and dreams. It is little wonder that we seek death as an escape from life only when we have succumbed to despair, and at all other times we are willing to endure a great deal simply to survive, in the hope that our situation may turn around in some fashion. Such freedom as we possess is a gift from God, to which we owe a debt of gratitude and appreciation that cannot be repaid. For we live in a world where others are constantly trying to enslave us through fear, through our lusts and longings, and through our desire to escape unpleasant reality. Yet how often do we think about the sort of freedoms we are really looking for, and what can be done to deliver us from our torments and allow us to live a life full of joy and goodness? Not nearly often enough.