This book is tremendously helpful for Christians trying to make sense of liberty in all its forms. No, the reader is not handed pre-packaged answers to be deployed in the next public outrage about this or that infringed freedom. Rather, we are taught to think more carefully about how freedom works, what its truest sources are, why different freedoms are so often in conflict with one another. “Freedom is not merely a spiritual reality or a worldly ideal; it is not merely inward or outward,” writes Littlejohn in the conclusion. “Freedom, rather, is experienced above all in the conformity of the soul to reality.”

I can still remember the gnawing anxiety, like mice scratching away in the walls of my mind. It was around Christmas, 2021, and our provincial government had announced mandatory vaccine passports for all church attendants. I was a lay leader in my local church, and like most churches ours was filled with people with strongly held views all along the spectrum.

Churches, like the broader social fabric, seemed to be stretched to the very breaking point. Indeed, I had every reason to expect this latest government mandate, after a year and a half of government restrictions, might be the last straw and lead to a catastrophic split in our congregation and leadership. I came to my own firm convictions and made them as clear as I could. But thankfully the government relented shortly before the deadline for implementation. We avoided a direct collision with the iceberg, but we—like so many churches—did not escape unscathed.

And what was the issue at stake? We could describe it in various ways, but much of it came down to different views on freedom and liberty. What is the extent of the liberty that Christians enjoy in our modern democratic system, and to what extent does the government have the right to curtail that liberty for the common good? Verses, including Romans 13, were tossed around by all sides as these questions were fiercely debated.

Some emphasized the freedom to be in public without fear of infection, while others emphasized the freedom to medical autonomy and to dissent from what felt like a manufactured consensus by those in the media and authority. This raises the following question: If freedom is such a slippery concept that each side wields it against the other, is it really a helpful term?

How can we get clarity on what freedom is, and isn’t?

Called to Freedom

Enter Brad Littlejohn and his helpful little book, Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. Coming in under 200 pages, this narrow volume is free from fluff and filler and punches well above its weight. Indeed, the book manages to touch upon and make connections between numerous aspects of freedom: spiritual freedom, moral freedom, political freedom, technology and freedom, economic freedom, and religious liberty. This broad scope is one of the things I most appreciated about the book. Littlejohn seeks to orient thoughtful Christians to the realities and tensions of freedom in the modern world.

Early in the book, the author defines freedom broadly as “the capacity for meaningful action” and then introduces a mental framework that helps guide all the subsequent discussions about freedom. This framework maps freedom in three dimensions, or along three axes: Negative vs Positive liberty; Individual vs Corporate liberty; and Inward vs Outward liberty. Negative liberty is the liberty of noninterference, the freedom to be left alone. Isaiah Berlin famously drew this distinction by speaking of the “freedom from” something in contrast to the “freedom to.”

Positive liberty then is the freedom to achieve some meaningful goal, and may include severe limitations, such as the limitation of countless hours of practice in order to achieve the freedom of true excellence in some endeavour, or the freedom of a good marriage which is only possible for those who say no to all other possible spouses. Like each of the three dimensions of liberty, this one exists in a tension. Finally, we have inward liberty—the freedom of the mind—and outward liberty, which is the public expression of our inner beliefs and desires. “If inward liberty cannot last long without at least some outward liberty,” writes Littlejohn, “authentic outward liberty cannot exist at all in the absence of inner freedom.”

Spiritual and Moral Freedom

These careful distinctions provide categories for the rest of the book to draw upon. Chapter two explores spiritual freedom as the only source of true freedom.

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