Libertarian Holiness

If you want to promote holiness, you will tend to promote self-control. Perhaps for those undergoing some kind of transition time, while they come to naturally see things through God's eyes. Certainly receiving the Spirit from God can help you be holy, but maybe that Spirit sometimes is a voice that tells you to do something that is unnatural to you at first.

It is best for your nature to be calmed by God so that you lack the desires to sin. But much of life is lived in a state of being possessed by those desires. We don't want the desires to give birth in the world, because we love the world, something God loves. By loving the world, we shape ourselves more into being like God. So we practice self-control, because it's the best thing that we can do sometimes.

A message that exerts energy toward you controlling yourself can be socialized into a social group exerting energy toward you controlling yourself, and that isn't far from a social group controlling you.

So, (a theory:) the stronger the social group, the more it has to downplay holiness (especially in the form of good behavior) or else it risks becoming controlling of its members. Being called to moral excellence, a life well-lived, as soon as possible, puts pressure on a group to control its members so that it can look like there is moral excellence, and the group has to feel like it's pursuing moral excellence, because that's the best thing it can pursue. So, terrified of that controllingness, we downplay moral excellence, to protect ourselves from control.

If this threat is real, what can we do? Maybe the thing to do if you want to develop a movement that is not controlling of its members, but does emphasize holiness or any other high commitment to God, involving the will, is to be as libertarian as possible, where it counts.

Interpersonal libertarianism is the freedom that people have from each other in direct personal relationships. ("Social libertarianism" is the term I would prefer, but I think that already has a meaning of "political libertarianism on so-called 'social' issues".) That's the most important dimension. Then, freedom in the structures that are closest to the interpersonal (church, family, friend group) are a close second in importance. Then, freedom in the other social structures, as they bear on the question of how other people might try to manufacture or engineer who a person is.

This isn't necessarily freedom from the need to help other people, but rather, freedom from them trying to control you in the name of making you a better person. Ideally, you help other people not because you are obligated to, but because you love them and love helping them. But the sheer quantity of service that may be required in the world may exceed the amount that can be provided by those who love without obligation or something like it. The responsibility to help flows from the person or situation that needs help and still calls to us, even if we are free from interpersonal control. The responsibility is a fact, and we can proclaim the truth of that fact, but some are tempted to try to control people to make them act in accordance with the fact.

I think there is a difference between telling people the moral truth and saying things that you hope will change people's minds and get them to do the right thing. I don't see a problem with speaking the moral truth, no matter how strict. But trying to change the world (i.e. other people) with words, I'm not as sure of. I know I have done things that could have the effect of the latter myself, although generally I do not desire to change other people, at least not instinctually. But I think I trust the former more now. So I want to speak the moral truth and design ways for people to act on the moral truth, rather than exerting my will to change other people to do what's right.

People like thickness in their relationships. With interpersonal libertarianism, human relationships may thin out to enable freedom, but your relationship with God should become thicker. You can't control God.

("Connectional" -- "grabby", involved, well-being mixed up with others', attached, emotionally close.)

Jesus was (I think) more interpersonally libertarian than interpersonally authoritarian or "connectional". He was holy, and grew in wisdom when he was young. He was oriented first toward the Father, and secondarily toward people.

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Is it possible to love God if someone forces you to? God doesn't seem to think so, or else he would force us to love him. So this is a reason to practice a libertarian form of holiness culture.

So no matter how urgent it is to bring people to a state of holiness -- you can't really "bring them" to it, they have to come themselves. And yet it is important for you to do your job of anti-temptation in keeping with the urgency of reality.

Could there be a forceful anti-temptation? Could you force moral values on people such that they will come to love them for themselves? We do this with children. I suspect that often this tactic only teaches people to love the good as children, and prevents them from developing a mature love of the good. There may be a tradeoff, where you can get people to buy into a religion as children, seemingly successfully, through applying that force, but inhibit them from really becoming mature, thus, really fully loving God with all of their beings. (Maybe we hope that children grow up later on in their adult years, once given their liberty?) But on the other hand, the libertarian way can seem to not get enough people to buy into religion at all, though the ones who do, really do so.

I hope that some of the failure of libertarian religion comes from it not being practiced energetically, and that it's possible for those pursuing libertarian holiness to have something like the force and urgency of authoritarians (the energy and sense of necessity of their force and urgency, for example, or an endemically libertarian urgency), without being authoritarian. People could practice libertarian religion with libertarian actions and attitudes toward people, with the spirit of those who believe that inner character (their own and other people's) is of life and death importance.