“Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1) was the third most cited Bible verse during the American Revolution. It was quoted so often that historians call it “the American motto.”
What’s striking is how quickly American patriots collapsed Christian freedom and civic freedom into one idea. “Standing fast for liberty” soon meant picking up a rifle. Paul’s verse stopped being about what kind of people we should be and became justification for what we were already doing.
One preacher who resisted this was a Baptist named Isaac Backus, who rightly pointed out that Massachusetts patriots were demanding freedom from British taxation while simultaneously taxing Baptists to fund the state’s official Congregational church. You cannot claim Paul’s liberty for yourself, he said, and deny it to your neighbor.
Christian freedom, it turns out, is not about what we’re released from. It’s about who we’re released toward. For Paul and Backus both, the answer was the same: our neighbors.
