(Switching gears here; we’re talking about political freedom now, not the metaphysical variety.)

There’s been an interesting debate recently, swirling around some of President Bush’s more exuberant comments about political freedom being a “gift from the Almighty.” The reference comes from a recent David Brooks column (not accessible to us proles who don’t subscribe to the Times), the implication being that Bush’s confidence in the policies he’s pursued is rooted in a conviction that a providentially-ordered history is on his side.

This belief has met with a storm of criticism from some of the more thoughtful conservative pundits and bloggers (Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher), with Ramesh Ponnuru offering something of a defense.

The issue I take it has two parts. Bush, allegedly, believes that there is something of an innate telos toward freedom in the created order in virtue of God’s creative and providential care. The second part is that his policies have a good long-run chance of success precisely because they are aligned with the “grain of the universe” so to speak. It might be helpful to point out that these two claims are detachable. Even if there is an inherent tendency toward freedom in human nature, it doesn’t follow that the best way to promote that tendency is the way Bush has chosen. In fact, it seems to me that there are good reasons to think otherwise, since going to war with and invading other countries requires coercion on a massive scale.

But regarding the first claim – whether political liberty is part of what God wills for his creatures – I come at this from a slightly different angle. My take is that political liberty follows from human fallenness. Precisely because human beings are frail, selfish, limited in knowledge, prone to self-assertion, and vulnerable, liberty is necessary to create a sphere within which people are protected from the impositions of others. As fallen creatures we are prone to mistake our partial visions of the good with the Good itself and to be insufficiently modest in trying to get our fellow creatures to go along with them. If people weren’t sinners, political liberty as we know it would be superfluous because everybody would spontaneously do the right thing. Because our own knowledge is limited and our motives are suspect, the political order should limit the extent to which we can enforce our preferences on others. So, I guess I’m something of a post-lapsarian about freedom.

It should be obvious that this is a more modest version of liberalism than the kind of progressive optimistic Whiggery criticized by some of the conservatives cited above. In fact, Christopher Insole, whose book on theology and political liberalism helped me clarify some of these ideas, expressly distinguishes a liberalism of human frailty from what he calls “crusading liberalism.” This is Whiggish liberalism that identifies the triumph of freedom with a single kind of political and economic order that will spread by means of inevitable historical progress.

So you might say that the institutions that foster political liberty are a means of protecting vulnerable human selves from each other. This view doesn’t identify liberalism with any kind of utopia or “end of history,” and it recognizes that liberty can be embodied in a diversity of forms. It is also respectful of historically developed institutions that have acheived a measure of freedom and stability and would be wary of rashly overturning them in the name of some revolutionary project. Certainly I think any Christian would say that God wills the flourishing of human beings in this good but fallen world, and to the extent that the institutions of liberty contribute to that by creating spaces for human flourishing we can indeed say that God wants us to be free.