Americans are failing to accomplish the important task of maintaining their freedom, Os Guinness argues in his new book, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future.

Guinness was born in China to medical missionaries and raised in England. He holds a doctorate degree from Oriel College, Oxford, has been a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and the Brooking’s Institution, and is the author of over 25 books.

In an interview with The Christian Post, Guinness talks about his new book, immigration, the role of religion in a free society, “ordered liberty,” and why the tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements have more in common than you might think.

The following is an edited transcript of that interview:

CP: What was your main purpose for writing this book?

Guinness: I think the deepest issue in America is the crisis of freedom. I’m a strong believer in St. Augustine’s idea that you judge a nation by what it loves supremely. And there’s no question that, over many centuries, what Americans love supremely is freedom. So I think you can judge the health of a nation by the health of freedoms today.

CP: Throughout the book you talk about “ordered liberty,” which sounds a bit like an oxymoron. What do you mean by that?

Guinness: The greatest enemy of freedom is freedom. Now the reason for that paradox is that freedom requires an order, or a framework, and the only appropriate framework for freedom is self-restraint, and yet self-restraint is precisely what freedom undermines when it flourishes. You’ve really got to consider, what is ordered freedom — in other words, a framework of freedom? Put differently, freedom is not just negative, freedom from, it is positive too, which means freedom to be or freedom for, but that means you need to know who you’re supposed to be. So in a Christian understanding, Jesus says you will know the truth and the truth will set you free — that is ordered freedom.

CP: Your argument, as I understand it, is that Americans have become complacent and taken their liberty for granted, and thus have not done the important work of sustaining their freedom. By and large, I can travel where I want, buy what I want, do what I want (especially in the privacy of my home). I don’t feel like I’m losing my freedom. Why should I be concerned?

Guinness: Well, let’s go back. The framers understood well that freedom in society never, ever lasts. Free societies don’t have a good track record. So they studied the Greeks and the Romans — Polybius, Cicero and others — after a while freedom didn’t last, and, they wanted to set up a system that could make freedom sustainable, possibly forever. But Americans have abandoned that system, and, I would say that modern American freedom, which is largely libertarian and negative, the freedom from only, is quite simply unsustainable. So you can see today in a lot of areas that you’ve got a radical relativism underlying a lot of things and it’s creating social chaos in this country.

CP: Can you give an example?

Guinness: You have a relational chaos. You’ve got to the point now where any possible relationship is legitimate, so long as you have consenting adults. You can clearly see behind the so-called LBGT coalition, you can see people like polyamorists, polygamists, and even supporters of incest and sex with animals all lining up and saying, “we too.” And there is literally no moral or legal grounds from which to deny that claim today, in a day when freedom has become so totally relativistic. The result of that, of course, would be extraordinary confusion in the harvest of social dysfunctions in the future.

CP: You write that the tea party movement and Occupy Wall Street movement are more similar than people realize and that they both speak to different aspects of the crisis you are talking about. Could you explain that?

Guinness: The tea party movement, dangering on things like the massive deficit, is really referring to the crisis of the republic, as the framers set it up. Whereas, the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its stress on the savage inequities between the rich and the poor, or the one-percenters and the 99 percenters, is focusing on the crisis of democracy. American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking. You can see that the extremely wealthy are at a distance from most Americans like you’ve never seen in American history before. So I think both of the movements, with all their failures and flaws, are incredibly revealing.

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