The prodigal nation: Too many Americans live a life of false freedom and debauchery
OPINION:
On July 4, 2024, America will enter its 249th year as a free and independent nation. We will do it while grappling with a pervasive effort by Democrats to redefine the values that have been the hallmarks of our strength and success.
At this time, millions are searching for meaning in America. Millions are lost in the cold wilderness of this new idea of freedom, far from the warm hearth of the nation’s promise.
There’s a lesson for us as we begin the new year from one of the most important parables of the New Testament, known far beyond the Christian Church, as “the Prodigal Son.” It is not only a lesson about forgiveness but also a commentary on the responsibility that comes with freedom conferred upon man by God and law.
One of the greatest of all biblical teachings is that God wants us to be free. Freedom, however, requires guardrails to protect humanity from enslavement, which is antithetical to God’s plan.
On the surface, it seems like a contradiction, but freedom always requires limits. Freedom does not mean, as liberalism would suggest, that one lives for oneself at the expense of others. Nor does it mean you live totally for the benefit of the state’s objectives.
The late Pope Benedict XVI, in his extraordinary work “Jesus of Nazareth,” provided a window into the great American dilemma as we face what he called “radical freedom.”
Benedict wrote of the prodigal son, “Is it difficult for us to see clearly reflected here the spirit of the modern rebellion against God and God’s law?”
When socialist Democrats today clamor for new rights and justify their erosion of traditional morals, they consistently do it as part of a call for more freedom.
In discussing the dangers of freedom without limits, Benedict wrote that the prodigal son “dissipates his very essence” by leaving his father’s home to live a life of false freedom and debauchery.
“Those who understand freedom as that radically arbitrary license to do just what they want and have their own way are living a lie. … A false autonomy thus leads to slavery.”
The prodigal son wanted freedom so badly that he ended up being a slave, eating from a trough. Americans who pervert their freedom to destroy life, desecrate the body, or otherwise equate freedom with total moral relativism or radical consumerism ultimately strip away their own agency and that of others.
In our time of political demigods, digital lords and desperate attempts to replace the divine with the earthly, we’ve traded real freedom for spiritual anarchy. The results are plain.
America’s rise in drug abuse, mental illness, financial stress, divorce, fatherless households, rudderless, lonely youth, welfare dependency, crime, depression and other societal conditions can be tied to our slow revolt against traditional American values in the name of more freedom.
As we have seen through history, freedom without duty or moral or ethical standards is a false kind of empowerment that separates us from God and the ability to truly flourish as a nation.
America in 2024 is on a pilgrimage toward what Benedict called the truth of existence.
We have the ability to come back to the Father, of course, but in a secular sense, back to real freedom that doesn’t peddle the false power of frivolous individualism. This freedom comes with responsibility, standards and norms beyond which lies an abyss that today is dangerously close.
The more people who fall into that abyss, the more government or authoritarian forces will ultimately justify greater restrictions on freedom.
Make no mistake: America, like the son who returns home, we too can regain our true freedom and stave off despotism.
Our Founding Fathers understood man’s nature through their own study of the Bible, history and philosophy. They knew the risks associated with creating a republic and the challenges that self-governance would present.
They knew distortions of freedom, equality and democracy would lead to pain and servitude.
When they wrote of freedom, they knew that it wasn’t the unbridled state of nature but about a community held together by a set of obligations and commitments to one another expressed through law, good governance, morality and biblical truth.
The prodigal nation can return home to the safety and security of the house built for it by both God and man. Like the father in Christ’s parable, there can again be unity, forgiveness and celebration at that homecoming for a great nation.
We can again embrace our differences, humility, hard work, the necessity of family, the sanctity of the human person and the real freedom that comes from those ideals.
Our discourse may be rife with reckless defeatism. But what the parable teaches us is that for people and for the nation, there is always time to realize we’ve traded away our very essence. We have the power to find our way home.
America can rise again. Make 2024 the year it happens.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax and is a columnist for The Washington Times.
