Religious metaphors are very useful. They appeal to many different types of people, they are almost universally understood, and they  make it very clear that the matter at hand is important. However, despite these many useful attributes, religious themes and phrases can be rhetorically damaging when used in a secular context. I bring up this issue in response to the extensive use of religious phraseology and connotation within the liberty movement. While I feel very strongly about the benefits of liberty and may even be one of the primary offenders when it come to the use of religious lingo, I think this habit is damaging to the movement. It is both overly aggressive and misleading to many people who may have had interest in the movement but shy away from such overly committed language. We should be the most open to those who are unsure of where they stand, and this sort of conversation stands starkly in the way of such connections.

Personally, I am both religious and strongly invested in the ideas of liberty. Things that I know to be true, I tend to refer to in a religious light simply because of habit and inclination toward such language. However, I have noticed that while certain acquaintances respond very well to talk of “converting” people to the side of liberty and helping people “see the light” in terms of pro-liberty ideals, others are very turned off to such language. In fact, many pro-liberty friends of mine are distinctly atheist and find such religious language disconcerting or even offensive. Beyond that, I have even encountered those who agree with me on the base level but are unwilling to put their faith behind what they know to be true rationally, making my own dually rational and faithful belief in liberty strange and daunting to them.

While I will easily concede that passion and commitment are incredibly important to the movement, there are limits. I believe that those limits lie exactly where faith meets rationality. Because, as Penn Jillette so greatly put it “…what makes me a libertarian is what makes me an atheist.” When it gets down to it, we really don’t know what’s best. One of the beautiful things about the liberty movement is that we are willing and ready to admit that. We are open-minded, we are ready to hear all sides, and we really don’t know what we believe yet. All we know is that we believe the answers are still out there somewhere waiting to be found, and we don’t want to commit any ridiculous amount of power to those who claim to have found the answers. Because really, we know they haven’t, and we know we haven’t. One of the primary tenets of classical liberal thought is the open mind, and nothing is so antithetical to this idea as the religious fanatic.

So, while I don’t at all advise going limp on the subject of liberty, I do suggest being careful, treading lightly, and watching that religious language. Because while I do think that the most righteous world is the most free and that the heaven on earth after Revelations is probably rather free, I know most of you don’t share those ideas, and that is perfectly acceptable since faith in Christianity is by no means a prerequisite to libertarianism (though Morgan Freeman has done a nice job of summing up how these two philosophical standpoints can line up rather nicely). While we all have the right to religion, I think it’s very important that the liberty movement remain secular and, as such, shy away from the use of such terminology as would suggest otherwise.