There is a profound difference between liberty and power. When you have power, you certainly experience it as freedom. You can do what you want to do. Liberty, by contrast, protects people against power. Liberty is what grants you freedom of action even when you are not in control. The anti-woke right spoke the language of liberty when its freedom was under threat, but now we know the terrible truth: The movement was about power all along.
Some other things I did
My Easter Sunday column was a reflection about two kinds of churches:
When I talk to Christians who are struggling with their faith, one of the first things I ask them is, “Were you raised in a fear-the-world church or a love-your-neighbor church?”
Most churchgoers instantly know what I’m talking about. The culture of the church of fear is unmistakable. You’re taught to view the secular world as a threat. Secular friends are dangerous. Secular education is perilous. Secular ideas are bankrupt. And you’re always taught to prepare for the coming persecution, when “they” are going to try to destroy the church.
The love-your-neighbor church is fundamentally different. It’s so different that it can sometimes feel like a different faith entirely. The distinction begins with the initial posture toward the world — not as a threat to be engaged, but as a community that we should love and serve.
More:
To be raised in a fear-the-world church is to experience a Christianity that declares with its words that the Resurrection is real, but seems incredulous about the possibility of a resurrection within its heart. If Christians truly can declare: “Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?” then why is there such pervasive fear?
Another way to describe a love-your-neighbor church is to say that it embraces a resurrection faith. Its aim is to follow Christ’s consistent pattern of moving to the suffering, the alienated and the sick, all to bring life from death.
We cannot, of course, exercise Christ’s literal power over death. We cannot declare, as Christ did to Lazarus, “Come forth,” and watch our loved ones walk out of the tomb. But we can try to heal, to care for the physical needs of suffering people, and we can be instruments of grace to those dying from different kinds of deaths — spiritual, emotional and social.
Last Friday, I joined a podcast discussion with my Opinion colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle to address the Trump administration’s attack on our constitutional rights. Here was my summary of the stakes:
I don’t think folks understand how completely the Trump administration is demolishing the Bill of Rights here. Because when you really dive into the legal doctrines, the first thing you have to know is that the protections of the Bill of Rights as a general matter accrue to persons, not just citizens. If you’re a human being in the country, you enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights. So this sort of argument that, well, this is awful for this undocumented immigrant, but I’m an American citizen and this couldn’t happen to me — it’s just completely wrong. Trump is already talking about bringing American citizens that may have committed particularly heinous crimes and sending them to this El Salvadoran prison.
And so when you have a human being taken from the United States against a court order, sent to a prison — and this prison, by the way, would violate cruel and unusual punishment standards in the United States — and then what he’s saying is, well, now he’s in a foreign country. This is all just a matter of foreign policy, and you can’t make me do anything. Of course, you can’t enter an injunction order against El Salvador.
So think this through: If human beings — you’re one of them, if you’re listening to this podcast right now — if human beings, who are covered by the Bill of Rights, can now be whisked away from the United States of America, dumped into an inhumane prison, and then an American government just washed their hands of it, now it is not a matter for the courts to intervene because it’s a matter of foreign policy. You’ve just hacked the Bill of Rights. There’s just no other way around it.
