The liberties laid out in the Bill of Rights allow Americans to live in a society most amendable for the cultivation and preservation of those political goods–like justice, order, and peace–without which no other goods could long exist. They will never bring us to the shores of utopia but, like Christian hope, they point toward a world of which we can presently only dream. In the editorial below, Reinhold Niebuhr argues that the world enabled, however much only approximately, by the Bill of Rights does not need the Christian faith, per se, to make it desirable. Human beings recognize such a world for the good that it is. We cannot help it–there are some things we can’t not know. Our human love of liberty finds it origins in God–for His spirit alone, Niebuhr suggests, brings forth true freedom. If this is the case then Christians, above all others, must be first to safeguard such rights against intrusion, even in wartime. While granting that some restrictions on our freedoms are necessary, and to be permitted, in times of national conflict, we must never–we can never–allow liberty to be too greatly curtailed. What Niebuhr had to say about all this 75 years ago, has a lot to commend to us today.
