A.W.R. Hawkins

A.W.R. Hawkins is the Senior Opinion Editor and writer for the Alliance Defending Freedom. The Alliance Defending Freedom is an institution defending rights of conscience and religious liberty, partnering with more than 300 ministries and organizations, and thousands of Christian attorneys. The Alliance is based in Arizona.

In twenty-first century America, we are taught that liberty is a word that can mean different things to different people. Like a "Stretch Armstrong" toy of days gone by, it can be pushed and pulled first one way then another to become whatever we need it to be at the moment.

Therefore, some define liberty as the freedom to be anything one wants it to be while others define it as the freedom to express whatever one wants to express. Still others see it as the freedom to be left alone. And these are simply three among myriad of the most contemporary definitions.

Perhaps the only shared commonality in all these definitions is the idea that liberty is broad: it's a big tent beneath which everyone can relax in the shade and frame liberty on their own terms.

Because of this, one word we rarely associate with liberty is order - for order, by its very nature, seems to communicate constraint, and constraint, denotatively, communicates limitations.

So how can constraint and an indefinable, ethereal liberty ever be compatible? The simple answer is - they can't. Either we have an ordered liberty, such as our Founding Fathers intended, or we have some variant of a free-for-all, where you "do your thing," and I do mine, and no one is the worse for it (or so the purveyors of such liberty claim).

Experience has taught us better than this. But we ignore experience when it is to our selfish-benefit to do so. As a consequence, we find ourselves, both as individuals and as a society, completely cut off from our past. And this divorce from the past has left us ignorant - so ignorant, in fact, that we have yet to learn to be ashamed over it.

We teeter on the edge of an abyss, and instead of crying, we sing songs and clap hands and can't wait for the next adventure to start.

It is madness.

Russell Kirk would have seen such an approach to thinking about liberty and order for what it is - an attempt to turn the world upon its head and a far cry from what order or liberty truly mean. An honest reader can see this plainly enough by taking the time to digest The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays (ISI Books, George A. Panichas, editor.)

Through those essays, Kirk reminds us that liberty rests on order and that it's an order that cannot be divorced "from revelation, from right reason, from poetic vision, from much study, [or] from the experience of the species" if it is to be the type of order Founders like John Adams envisioned. Kirk contended that a diminishment of such order leaves us rudderless in this world, "at the mercy of will and appetite."

Sounds familiar doesn't it?

Because we have reached a point proving Kirk prophetic, our way forward is actually behind us. We must look back to and for the order that once sustained the liberty our nation has cherished.

And here we run into a problem, for we live in a time when looking back is not only unpopular, but even ridiculed. Today's mottos and mantras - like "forward" and "change" - do not inculcate a high opinion of the past. In fact, they indicate a flight from it. But we must know where we've been if we are to understand where we are going. And we must understand how we've been if we are to grasp how we ought to be.

Therefore, it behooves us to examine the order that was, and to embrace it, so that it might again be recognized as the order that is.

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Kirk maintained that the order that framed our liberty at America's founding had a strong spiritual component and that this not only provided integrity to liberty but even fashioned the culture of our nation:

Culture arises from the cult; and . . . when belief in the cult has been wretchedly enfeebled, the culture will decay swiftly. The material order rests upon the spiritual order" (italics added).

This is a point that many want to avoid because to see the link between the material and the spiritual is to justifying examining the spiritual in an increasingly secularized world.

But Kirk said this must be done. And it must be done with the understanding that a serious examination of the spiritual component of order includes a serious look at the moral component as well.

Kirk put his finger on this after taking deep and inquiring looks at the national landscape in 1990, when he wrote, "What especially ails modern civilization is the loss of religious vision out of which culture arises and flourishes."

John Adams understood this and took pains to set it before the founding generation and their progeny. In 1798, he made it clear that the Constitution, the cornerstone of our founding documents:

. . . was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams' point and Kirk's points are one and the same - the document set forth an ordered liberty for a people who understood (and understand) liberty is complimented by constraint, and both are underpinned by a recognition of the permanent and by faith in our Creator.

These are basic, foundational principles to which we must return if we would be free.

Sadly, in the twenty-first century, our ignorance has left us feeling intelligent, so we presume that our time is the best time, and perhaps - as crazy as it sounds - that our time is the only time.

We dismiss our forebears and their customs as "Victorian" and march triumphant into the next scene like little children playing war, but without understanding what war is or the toll it takes on the those committed to it. In so doing, we turn our backs on the very foundation upon which this house - this national house - has been built.

Kirk emphasized that we must grasp, rather than abandon that foundation if our society is to continue as it has been. For,

. . . if we ignore the subtle wisdom of the classical past and the British past, we are left with a thin evanescent culture, a mere film upon the surface of the deep well of the past.

This is something that we will still treat as culture, although it is not. Rather, it is a mean and meager imitation of the real.

The solution is to accept the fact that order is a critical component of all that has been passed down to us by that great generation of patriots that "mutually pledged" to each other "[their] lives, [their] fortunes, and [their] sacred honor."

As we learn from that generation of patriots - through books and through study - we interact with them. We interact with their ideas, their convictions, and their intentions, and we understand that society is no cold, static thing but a vibrant community of people tied together by the ordered liberty that overarches and undergirds all.

Think of an expansive house, magnificent to behold, made of fine brick and elegant fixtures. From the outside, one can see the door of rich wood and the plush curtains hanging behind the glass. Just from outward appearances, the home seems large enough to house 10 bedrooms, with kitchens, and dens, and playrooms beside.

How great a home it must be!

Now think of how quickly your amazement would turn to bewilderment, and perhaps even fear, if you stepped inside the front door - into what you expected to be a foyer - only to see you'd stepped inside a shell that wasn't really a house at all. Rather, it was just a faade - just the frame of a home no one had finished, an outward representation of something that had no core.

What a let-down (to coin a popular phrase). Here you were expecting magnificent rooms divided one from another by walls and doors and hallways. But instead you've stepped into a hollow structure that might not be able to stand when the April winds blow.

Interior walls would have ordered the house, by dividing one room from another, and would have also provided structural integrity, just as moral and spiritual order provides integrity to the liberty we enjoy. Yet without the walls, the home is just a setting for chaos and a container of space.

Such a house is our country, when order is neglected. Its traditions still appear in history books and on cornerstones of courthouses in small towns with enough regularity to give us the luster of greatness, but in reality we are a shell of what we appear to be because we lack the integrity that only order can give.

As the sixteenth century Anglican Priest Richard Hooker said, "Without order there is no living in public society, because the want thereof is the mother of confusion."

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So where do we go from here?

Kirk pointed to the historical insights of Christopher Dawson, indicating that "the recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order" have proven to be "the indispensable conditions of human recovery." Dawson held that these

. . . can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture that has existed at every age and on every level of human development.

This means our evanescent culture cannot be fixed by correcting voting patterns or social habits, just as our hollow home cannot be strengthened by adding shutters or a coat of exterior paint. Instead, we must get down to the root and there begin mending the spiritual and moral decline that has brought us to this point.

Kirk made this point by drawing on lessons he'd learned from his study of Edmund Burke:

Mere sweeping innovation is not reform. Once immemorial moral habits are broken by the rash Utopian, once the old checks upon will and appetite are discarded, the inescapable sinfulness of human nature asserts itself: and those who aspired to usurp the throne of God find that they have contrived a terrestrial Hell.

In other words, to pursue liberty in any way other than pursuing it at its spiritual and moral root is to pursue a pseudo-liberty that will not be any stronger (nor any deeper) than the various kinds of liberty currently offered to the American people. It is to pursue a plastic liberty rather than the real thing.

And in embracing these various types of plastic liberty, we deceive ourselves into thinking we are free when, in fact, we are being more and more enslaved to inward and unchecked passions.

Kirk put it this way:

It appears to me that our culture labors in an advanced state of decadence; that what many people mistake for the triumph of our civilization actually consists of powers that are disintegrating our culture; that the vaunted "democratic freedom" of liberal society in reality is servitude to appetites and illusions which attack religious belief; which destroy community through excessive centralization and urbanization; which efface life-giving tradition and custom.

Pay attention to Kirk's words. He was indicating that we are prone to deceive ourselves into thinking we are expanding liberty when we are actually killing it. And now, decades after he wrote those words, we dangle over an abyss yet smugly assume doing as we please in all cases at all times must be the essence of liberty. As a result, our appetites drive us to and fro as they see fit.

We are like the man in the iron cage from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress - we have thrown the reins of our lives upon the necks of our lusts, allowing them to lead us here and there at their whim.

This is not the behavior of men, it is the behavior of animals.

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A story from the American Civil War is instructive here. It is the story of a young mother who rushed out to see General Robert E. Lee as he was passing through her town during the war.

Standing by the road, she held her infant son up in her hands as Lee halted upon his horse, Traveller. She then asked Lee to bless her son, but he demurred. Instead, he looked at the mother and said, "Teach him to deny himself."

In other words, there will be no quick remedy today, ma'am. There will be no magic formula. Rather, the boy will succeed as others before him have - through discipline, rigor, and self-control.

This is where Kirk brings us as well: to a place where effort is required, and part of that effort is reigning in or denying ourselves.

He quotes Burke to make this point:

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.

There is an order intrinsic to liberty, and without that order it is not that we experience diminished liberty. Rather, it's that we experience a cheap imitation, which is really no liberty at all.

This order goes beyond the physical to the metaphysical: beyond the temporal to the permanent. As such, retrieving it requires looking back - and reaching back - rather than continuing to run headlong down the road.

Remember what Dawson taught us:

This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development.

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Liberty is the fruit of an ordered soul. And as Kirk so ably put it:

"Order" implies the obedience of a nation to the laws of God, and the obedience of individuals to just authority. Without order, justice rarely can be enforced, and freedom cannot be maintained. *