How Does the Essential Freedom of the Human Spirit
Differ from Political Freedom?

Political freedom is something granted by a human government to its citizens. Essential freedom is something granted by an “Eternal Government” to its human beings. This is a big difference.

Political freedom is created by human beings. It is the gift of a human creation—the governments that we humans create. But our essential freedom is provided by the Profound Reality that we confront in every event of our lives. We typically flee from this freedom and get stuck to the places to which we have fled. Nevertheless, the miracle of being restored to our essential freedom remains a possibility. We don’t have to create or achieve this essential freedom. We don’t have to do anything to have it. We only have to surrender to the essential freedom as given to us in the events of our lives.

Essential Freedom

Essential freedom comes to us as a package deal with an essential trust in Profound Reality and an essential type of love (the agape that Paul says is the greatest gift). Ultimate Trust, Total Affirmation, and Complete Freedom come to us as an enigmatic wind—blowing through our fragile lives. Christians have called this package-deal “Holy Spirit.”

“Holy Spirit” is Christian vocabulary, but Christians do not own the real Holy Spirit. This Trust, Love, and Freedom is our human essence—accessible to persons practicing an other-than-Christian religion, or no religion at all.

In order to manifest our essential or Holy Spirit freedom we have to relinquish our flight from freedom—our fatalistic excuses; our compulsive addictions; our clinging to self-justifying moralisms, beliefs, delusory safety, and raw cowardice.

To understand the reality of Spirit freedom we need a deeper view of the word “Reality.” This capitalized word “Realty” or “Profound Reality” points to the Eternal Governing of all events. Such Governing is providing to humans their limited, but real freedom. Such freedom is itself awesome and downright terrifying because it entails uncaused choices, raw responses of our primal “response-ability.” The only justification for our free deeds is freedom itself. To manifest this essential freedom, we have to embrace forgiveness for all our un-freedom, and for all the consequences of our unfree deeds and even of our free deeds. To live in such an obedience of free responses to Reality requires trust in the forgiveness of Reality before, during ,and after each action.

Living within this Eternal Governance is opening to the reality of a perpetual fresh start on the other side of all our choices that were well or poorly conceived, well or poorly enacted. We never arrive at a state different than the one indicated by this phrase: “sinners saved by grace.” Such humility is the nature of the obedience of being our Spirit freedom.

Political Freedom

A human government does not grant Spirit freedom, and a human government cannot prevent Spirit freedom no matter how hard it strives to oppose it. So what sort of freedom can a human government grant? It can grant freedom to participate in the processes of governing, freedom of participation in the fruits of social living, and the freedom to quest for truth and to live by the truth we find.

Government can grant us the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government can grant us the right to own property that is our very own. Government can grant us the right to share in common properties such a air, water, parks, streets, buildings, transportation systems, economic systems, healthy environments, safety, protection from harm, etc. All these granted rights or freedoms are limited by definitions that protect such rights for other people and that promote the stability of the society to grant rights to anyone. “Justice” is a word that is used to indicate appropriate distribution of these freedoms to all people.

So how is the Eternally-Granted Freedom related to
these Human-Government-Granted Freedoms

Citizens of a democratic government are entrusted to use their Eternally-granted Spirit freedom to create and maintain the human-government-granted freedoms. The imperfections in the citizens access to their essential freedom limits the success of the democratic vision. Also, those citizens who choose to see themselves as elites who rule over rather than with and on behalf of all the other citizens, limit democracy or openly oppose democracy in favor of a more authoritarian, or even totalitarian form of society.

So democracy is always a work in progress. Democracy is never complete, even when a democracy has moved from democracy for male property owners to an inclusion of black former slaves; an inclusion of women voters; and on safety-nets for the struggling, the old, and the disabled. More democracy can also be about who is empowered politically and who is and is not given economic opportunities.

The idea that society must be a monopoly-game competition in which there are huge winners and big-time losers is an anti-democratic notion. A fully democratic society of citizen freedoms will manifest a balance between cooperation and competition, between empathy and personal striving, between personal power and personal benevolence.

Such an understanding of a perpetually improving, freedom-granting democracy is more revolutionary than our typical pessimism can easily embrace.

Pampering aristocracies while controlling commoners is not the only possibility for a sociological mode for human societies. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were beginners—escaping from total tyranny to a bare beginning of democracy for a some white, Protestant, male, property owners—a freedom that did not trickle-down, but had to to be fought for on behalf of both slaves and women, and it is still being fought for descendants of both these two groups and many other groups.

The expansion of democracy is a battle not yet over, and a fuller democracy is strongly opposed by powerful authoritarian forces. No one can openly watch the current news without seeing that a fight needs to be won for Muslims, for Hispanic immigrants, and for a huge number of unemployed, underemployed, and underpaid citizens. How can we revere the earlier victories for democracy and still let the U.S nation coast into a reactionary-white-nationalist authoritarianism?

So how is our Eternally-granted Spirit freedom related to our government-granted political freedom? It takes the exercise of our Spirit freedom to insist upon a political freedom for ourselves and for all others who neighbor us. If this sounds like Biblical scripture, it is because it is. Such activism is part of what was once called “being the people of God.”

How a practitioner of Christianity can combine their so-called Christianity with being in a hate group is just plain weird. If we do not want for all human beings the political freedom we want for ourselves, we have lost sight of the fact that God-and-neighbor is a hyphenated phrase in Christian scripture. If we do not care for the neighbors we see, we do not care trust, obey, or care for the unseen Profound Reality that is confronting us in the provision of these neighbors. So-called Christians who claim that their religion is separate from their politics have overlooked the very essence of Christian faith.