Staying inside the laws of God

OPINION:

One thing I’ve learned by living in the reality of rural America as opposed to the concrete and neon of Washington or New York City is that freedom can be deceiving. Or maybe better said, freedom is often the opposite of what it appears to be.

For example, when I drive through the ranches of Kansas and see cattle roaming freely in the fields, they are always surrounded by a fence. Or when I walk through the neighborhoods of small towns in Oklahoma and see dogs relaxing on a front porch, I can always assume Fido has been disciplined to stay home and within a set of boundaries. Or when I pass a small country school and see children playing with abandon during recess, their freedom is always contingent upon a barrier between them and the highway. 

At first blush, all of this suggests the opposite of freedom. Surely, the nearby nature preserve would offer more freedom to cows than a fenced-in pasture, wouldn’t it? And a dog would seem to have more liberty, not less, if he could just roam the city streets, right? And the children on the playground? Well, clearly, they would be better off if they didn’t have to worry about those dastardly fences. 

But, we intuitively know that tearing down all these boundaries will end in less freedom rather than more and that without some confinement, the resulting chaos will lead to cows, dogs and children getting killed. 

G.K. Chesterton once said that if you get rid of the big laws of God, you won’t get liberty, but rather thousands upon thousands of little laws that rush in to fill the vacuum. What Chesterton was warning of was quite clear; If we arrogantly refuse to live by the 10 simple laws given to us by God (and frankly, Jesus summarized them in just two), we will get reams upon reams of little laws imposed on us by someone else. When we pridefully tear down the fences of God, we always end up with the prison walls of man. Refuse to live within the Ten Commandments (or the two), and you will be confined, down to the point where you will literally be told which pronouns to use and how to use the bathroom.

In case you missed it, this is not freedom. It is fascism, pure and simple, and fascism is always fueled by our hubris. If there is any lesson of history that holds fast, it is this: The seeds of pride will invariably bear the fruit of tyranny. Or, as C.S. Lewis told us, “pride is the complete anti-God state of mind” and, as such, it always lends itself to power and control rather than liberty and love.

As we enter the first days of June — an entire month that is now set aside for the celebration of “pride” — maybe we would all do well to ask ourselves what exactly it is that we are so proud of and whether or not such pride is actually accruing to our benefit or our demise. Maybe it would be wise to look around and take notice of whether or not our pride is lending itself to more freedom or less. 
  
Is it possible that in our prideful attempts to be free of the boundaries of God, we’ve broken down the fences that defined and protected that freedom in the first place?  

Is it possible that as we parade through our streets shouting that “we’re loud and we’re proud,” we’re coming closer and closer to the gates of Auschwitz than we are to the shores of a land once known as America? 

Are we a flock known for our obedience and humility? Or have we become a bunch of proud sheep, so eager to be free of our shepherd’s boundaries that we have encaged ourselves with a pack of wolves that are now having us for lunch? 

Prideful people will always find a reason to jump the fence, but the meek know there is greater liberty inside rather than outside the laws of God. It’s not about our rights but rather his reign. The first shall be last and the last shall be first and we’d all enjoy more freedom if we’d stop being prideful and just stay in the pen. 

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery).