So Flagg’s highlighting of Carl’s five forms of American liberty led me to this thought: Maybe the whole approach is too individualistic. That might mean America is too individualistic. I certainly agree with the thought expressed by Flagg and in the thread that Carl didn’t quite sell progressivism as devotion to national social justice as a form of liberty. And he may not have created a safe space for Lincolnism: courageous devotion to the proposition that all men are created equal. That’s the difference between Jefferson and Lincoln when it comes to tolerance for risky or genuinely liberal behavior in pursuit of justice. And what about heroes of the Civil Rights movement, who owed something to theology of the Social Gospel, surely a form of progressivism?

Then it hit me! Where’s religious liberty? As I said before, the half-truth that Locke taught is that each of us is a free person. That means we can’t be reduced to a part, a part of a political community or a part of nature. Speaking of “natural rights” always drives us in the direction of the irony that, by nature, we’re given a freedom not given to all the other species to free ourselves from nature. Nature, from that view, is no respecter of persons.

So Locke is Christian in respecting the transpolitical and, in a way, supernatural freedom of each of us to have a personal identity. That freedom is, as Madison said so eloquently, freedom of conscience, a freedom to discover our duties to our Creator. The best interpretation of the Constitution of 1787’s silence on God is the refusal to use the Creator as a political tool. Strictly speaking, there is no American civil theology, despite what the young Lincoln said.

But that Lockean rejection of civil theology is an insufficient understanding of religious liberty, even from an American view. As our Constitution says, due to the art of deliberative compromise, the freedom is not the freedom of the isolated conscience, but freedom of religion. Religion is an organized body of thought and action, a relational, loving, judgmental community of believers who share the truth in common. Religious freedom is freedom of the church to perform its evangelical mission. The church differs from the political community in nature in being a respecter of persons. We don’t surrender our personal identities in our loving relationship with the personal God and our fellow creatures made in his image.

Now the view of the French Revolution dissolves the church on behalf of civil theology. And all that’s left is the individual and the state. Sure, the individual has freedom of conscience. But no one can develop a conscientious point of view–a spirit of resistance to the claims of the state–all alone.

The argument over religious freedom today–concerning, for example, the contraceptive mandate and the ability of the church to teach and act according to what marriage is as a sacrament–will be resolved in the Obama-ish progressive (or, more accurately, left-libertarian) direction unless freedom of religion is understood as a relational freedom, a characteristic of the free and relational person. It’s a freedom of knowing and loving that’s embodied in an institution. (It goes without saying that by church I also mean synagogue and so forth.)

So many Christians today embrace libertarian means for non-libertarian relational ends: They think it’s best if government and employers get out of the insurance business altogether. And then, of course, there’s the burgeoning community of home schoolers. Everyone who wants to protect the true educational diversity displayed by our religious schools at all levels fights against the coercion of bureaucratic standardization.