Political Freedom Between Right and Rights


Published January 15, 2025

Mere Orthodoxy


“It is time for our people to distinguish more accurately than they seem to do between liberty and licentiousness. The late revolution would lose much of its glory, as well as utility, if our conduct should confirm the tory maxim, ‘That men are incapable of governing themselves.’”
—John Jay (1786)

Freedom and the Pursuit of Happiness

“Freedom” is the universal language of contemporary politics, especially in modern America. Indeed, Americans are almost tempted to believe that they invented it—the first nation to build their constitution on the ideal of freedom, a luminous example of liberty to all the other nations of the earth. It is right there in our Declaration of Independence, where we proclaimed the “self-evident” truth that the Creator had endowed every people with the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that the sole purpose of government was to secure such rights. But much depends on how we understand such “rights” and such “happiness.” Is happiness a subjective feeling, produced by a set of personal preferences that differ from one person to another? Or is something more holistic and objective, rooted in human nature and perfected by virtue, that the ancients called eudaimonia?

If the former, then the task of government is to secure individual rights in the plural, a sphere within which we demand to be left alone, free to set and pursue our own purposes. If the latter, then it seems the task of government will include the use of law to protect and promote a life of virtue, ordered toward right (in the singular). Within the politics of rights, political freedom has little to do with the moral freedom of individuals and communities, but within the politics of right, in which constraint and freedom are not opposed, the two will be closely connected. 

From the former standpoint, which dominates our world today, the liberty to pursue happiness must necessarily be as flexible and open-ended as possible; it is the liberty of a wide-open playing field stocked with recreational supplies of every description and cans of spray-paint, so each participant can mark out his own lines and goals as the whim takes him. A government tasked with upholding such liberty will find itself in the position of a referee called upon to manage a baseball game, a football game, and a soccer match simultaneously—with a few golfers thrown in for good measure. No wonder our contemporary politics feels like chaos! From the latter standpoint, however, political freedom will be more like the freedom that a well-coached football team enjoys: the freedom to run an amazing touchdown play not only by practicing excellence within the rules of the game but by submitting to the guidance of their coach and quarterback. A team on which every player was free to pursue his own purposes would be a team free only to lose!

Click here to continue reading the rest of this excerpt from the new book, Called to Freedom.


Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs.  His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.

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