Just because you can...
You can trade your sister for a monkey
You can blow balloons up with your nose
You can offer cheese to all your teachers
And then gladly hand it to them with your toes.
… Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should…
I hope you find this absurd little song quote as entertaining as I do! It is from a song called “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” It’s written by the duo Oddwalk, who use it as part of their (hysterically funny and very effective) ministry to youth. (You should take a minute… well, five… to listen to that recording, which they did in 2021, mid-pandemic.)
But I think part of the reason it’s so effective is because it needles us adults as well as the kids.
This is on my mind because it’s now an election year, and if the word “freedom” hasn’t begun being thrown around yet (usually with a flag undulating in the background), it’s only a matter of time. And I think for us as Christians, it’s important to do a reality check about what freedom is, and what it isn’t, before the political noise gets too loud.
In the American lexicon, “freedom” seems to mean “I have the right to do whatever I want, and nobody has the right to tell me otherwise.”
Let’s be clear: this value is applied profoundly unequally no matter what space on the political spectrum one inhabits. Some on the left want unfettered sexual freedom while regulating many other things for the well-being of society; some on the right think nobody should regulate corporations or environment or, really, anything except a limited number of moral questions like abortion and same sex marriage.
The trouble for us as Christians, seeking to express our faith politically, is that this definition of “freedom” is a worldly one. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus Christ or with Christian faith and living.
NOTHING.
In “New Seeds of Contemplation,” Thomas Merton says:
“It should be accepted as a most elementary human and moral truth that no man can live a fully sane and decent life unless he is able to say “no” on occasion to his natural bodily appetites. No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiosity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person. He has renounced his spiritual freedom and become the servant of bodily impulse. Therefore his mind and will are not fully his own. They are under the power of his appetites.”
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
In other words, self-gratification is not freedom. It makes us prisoner within a set of chains just as, if not more, constricting than anything the U.S. government could throw at us.
This has clear implications for our personal lives, but I think it’s important, in an age where the word “freedom” has been misused so profoundly for political purposes, that followers of Jesus examine how that principle applies to our national structure and identity.
We in the U.S. have a tendency to focus politically on our secular RIGHTS, and to get those mixed up with our faith.
Pardon me for a Captain Obvious moment, but it seems like we need the reminder:
Having the RIGHT to do something doesn’t make it actually, well, RIGHT.
(i.e.: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!”)
For instance: during the pandemic, there was a lot of static about how it was an infringement on personal rights to require masks. One man I encountered in a store went so far as to spit the word “Communist.”
To me, as a parent of a child who nearly died of a respiratory virus as a baby, this attitude was a huge slap in the face.
When people refused to follow masking requirements, their behavior communicated, “My convenience and comfort and political opinions are, in fact, more important than the life of your daughter.”
Not very pro-life.
Now, I’m certain they weren’t thinking in those terms. But see, that was the problem. As best I can tell, they weren’t thinking that their actions had any connection to their spiritual life at all. They were knee-jerk reacting based on politics and never seeing the conflict with tenets of their faith.
Because if they had, surely they’d have realized that to be a follower of Jesus is to pick up crosses that are unpleasant and hard to bear (really, barring PTSD or severe claustrophobia, does a mask even register on the scale of “hard” things?), and to place the good of the other before our own comfort, convenience, and personal preference. Let alone political opinions.
To be a follower of Jesus IS, by definition, to curtail one’s personal freedom.
In the coming year, whatever our political color, we will be assaulted by manipulative ads, mailers, and emails filled with ALL CAPS IN BOLD FACE followed by italics and underlined (mercifully, Substack won’t even let me do that, but you’ve all seen them), all of which are meant to manipulate us.
We will hear a lot of people telling flat-out, bold-faced lies about stolen elections. And a lot of other people letting them get away with it.
Maybe those people have the RIGHT to say such things. But that does not make it RIGHT. And more importantly, it doesn’t make it right to defend them… or to support them.
Just because you CAN, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.