c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “You have time for a walk,” I tell an out-of-town visitor. Worsening weather suggests now or never.

As she assembles boots and coat, I ask if she would like company. I’m guessing she would like time alone _ I would, if I were the guest _ but I don’t want her to get lost.

“Well, all right,” she says. I assess her response, conclude she’s just being polite, and encourage her to go alone. “Yes, I would like some time alone,” before a day of business meetings, she says.

Am I making this unnecessarily complicated? No, I don’t think so. Freedom is always complicated. For it is never enough for oneself to be free; freedom is a context, a setting for interactions. The other’s freedom is as important as mine. When the other is oppressed, my own freedom is diminished.

To do my part in nurturing a context of freedom, I must try to imagine the other’s situation and to imagine the impact of my behavior on her freedom. Freedom imposed is just another form of oppression. So is freedom hemmed in by a projection of my own needs onto the other.

Promoting freedom, then, requires more humility, imagination, self-awareness and other-awareness than we normally give to relationships. It is easier to assume that I know best and the other will benefit from whatever I do in the name of freedom. My efforts might have a patina of generosity but, in fact, be quite self-serving, aiming to make my world safer or richer at the expense of the other’s liberty.

True freedom includes the freedom to be wrong, the freedom to live differently, to believe differently, to govern one’s home differently, to have different values. I cannot take my own moral, political or economic inventory and then judge the other wrong and therefore unworthy of freedom. As long as my own freedom isn’t impaired, it doesn’t matter if the other offends me.

It is especially unseemly to do that judging and freedom-depriving in the name of God. It can be difficult to sort out the partisan fervor projected onto God by the partisans who wrote the Old Testament and to see the God behind it all, but one thing is clear: Our God sees the “yoke” and “bar” of the oppressor and is offended. Our God values freedom, and not just the freedom of the chosen tribe, as the Old Testament sometimes conveys, but the freedom of all humanity, as Jesus manifested.

God had a preferred way for the Hebrew tribe to live, but they erred grievously when they sought to impose that way on others. They were to be a “beacon,” not a bludgeon. Jesus took that even further by refusing to give rules, structure or allocations of power. He taught and served in a way that left people free to disagree, to be wrong, to take a different path. The disciples weren’t issued weapons for compelling people to do it their way; they were given something to say and encouragement to move on if not heard.

Political and religious movements that claim to be serving God by imposing certain values on others are rarely doing more than imposing a yoke of oppression. That certainly seems to be the case now, as one ascendant group draws firm moral conclusions based on a projection of their own beliefs and interests and sets out to compel others to live by their values.

Even if they were correct in calling their values “biblical” and “Christian” _ which any serious reading of Scripture would dispute _ they have no right to force those values on anyone else. Freedom requires humility, imagination and awareness, not noisy and firm opinions.

MO/PH RNS END

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)