Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License
By Brad Littlejohn.
B&H Academic, 2025.
Paperback, 192 pages, $22.99.Reviewed by Andrew Fowler.
Freedom could be Modernity’s most overused yet least understood word. In an American context, freedom evokes self-governance, an individual’s will to pursue happiness, free speech, religious liberty, a market-based economy strewn with endless options, or even the ability to choose one’s own gender.
In short, freedom is autonomy from oppressive authority and societal restraints.
Yet are we freer today? And have those presumed liberties bred a healthier, amiable nation? Quite the contrary: Americans have increasingly become more polarized, lonely, and anxious, symptoms compounded by economic, cultural, and political strife. The pandemic exacerbated or even ignited these troubling trends. Society, as a whole, feels unmoored.
While external forces have certainly contributed to these concerning indicators, so has a misunderstanding of freedom, as Brad Littlejohn argues in Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. Freedom is not following one’s own heart limitlessly, but through limitation since it “makes free action possible.” Littlejohn—like the apostle Paul nearly two thousand years before—provides a concise remedy, explaining that true freedom is found in submitting to Jesus Christ. Only then can one have the “capacity of meaningful action,” because, as Littlejohn writes, “[w]e will all serve somebody or something. It is only a question of whom and how.”
Bondage, then, is inevitable, which is paradoxical as Littlejohn rightly notes—we can be slaves to Christ or slaves to our insatiable appetites. Yet the Christian life is not easy, unlike scrolling through memes: Jesus offers not the road to comfort, but the road to Calvary.
Though Call to Freedom is a quick read, it is rich in theological, philosophical, and historical research, briefly synthesizing the varying perspectives on freedom from Ancient Greece, the early Church, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, to the present. His definition of freedom draws heavily from Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian, which argues, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Ultimately, service to others based on faith in Christ is where true freedom lies.
The opening pages reveal this core thesis, which provides a proper lens for the rest of the book. Additionally, he maps the book’s trajectory, preparing the reader on how spiritual, moral, and political freedom inform each other, offering “what Christian freedom means today, how we get it wrong, and how it is under threat.”
Misunderstanding freedom, however, is an ancient phenomenon. To Littlejohn (and, indeed, Christians), the roots trace to man’s fallen nature after eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve’s urge to seek “godlike freedom” from any “impediment to the freedom of self-realization” cast them and their descendants from the Garden of Eden, and eventually led to Christ’s heroic sacrifice, which reforged the relationship between God and Man.
Sin sowed universal disorder. Forgetfulness, futility, and fear continue to mask our full comprehension of freedom, Littlejohn argues. For the non-Christian, the Book of Genesis may bear no weight on the concept of freedom, at least from a surface-level reading. Yet Littlejohn demonstrates that ancient philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, wrestled with this question and offered a similar lesson: to avoid a reckless life, a just person must have self-control over his or her own passions.
However, as Littlejohn distinguishes, this self-mastery only goes so far, and “the apostle Paul’s understanding of human bondage to sin was much more radical.” Even Augustine criticized the ancient philosophers for being “incurvatus in se (curved in upon themselves) and thus unable to experience the true moral freedom that consists in living as we are truly meant to live: for others.”
Freedom, then, is not hyper-individualism and independence from the rest of the world. We do not exist in a vacuum, and “at some point, [our freedom] will always bump up against the limit of others’ freedom in ways both trivial and profound,” Littlejohn notes. Nevertheless, he stresses that the basis for “outward liberty,” the ability to perform any meaningful action, is derived from a person’s “inner freedom.” Both, therefore, must work in tandem.
In effect, there must be internal and external law and order oriented toward the common good; yet this “[c]orporate liberty can require the limitation of individual liberty.” Indeed, this rings true, even in the example of traffic laws Littlejohn provides. Ultimately, their intention is to protect life, thus protecting everyone’s ability to co-exist. Civil laws, then, can “promote the work of the church, which helps work such inward renewal, and it can try to protect at least an outward public recognition of the moral Lawgiver so as to ensure an outward conformity with public morality.”
Even several of America’s Founding Fathers recognized that the U.S. Constitution was “designed for a moral and religious people,” and “[i]t is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” A society cannot sustain itself if “[e]veryone did what was right in his own eyes,” as proclaimed in the Book of Judges. There would be no cohesion.
But Called to Freedom is not a strictly conservative book in an ideological sense because Christianity dwells above the political left and right fray—as it should. Littlejohn criticizes Democrats and Republicans for being “locked in a joint conspiracy to expand ‘freedom’ and multiply ‘rights,’ with scarce a thought given to securing the moral, cultural, and political conditions within which these terms can have any meaning or durability.” Moreover, he finds fault with the free market and endless consumerism. Human beings are meant for more than to shop and satisfy every impulse. To Littlejohn, this has led “more and more of us” to a state of “childishness,” since it is “not conducive to the profound self-denial and deferred gratification required by marriage and childbearing; little wonder, then, that so many developed societies are facing demographic collapse.”
Coupled with rapidly developing technological advancements, like artificial intelligence, Littlejohn holds a glaring mirror to the smartphone generation:
We find that we have simply forged new chains for ourselves: unable to discipline our own impulses to swipe and click, unable to maintain boundaries around our own time and sanity, unable to remember after thirty minutes of web-browsing what we were even looking for and why, we learn again the hard way that freedom is actually constituted by limits, limits that technology relentlessly devours.
Instead of illuminating our minds, technology has sullied our endlessly “doom-scrolling” faces.
How then can we unshackle ourselves from personal glorification and awaken from modernity’s balming technological, therapeutic soma? How can we achieve true freedom? For Littlejohn, freedom is “experienced above all in the conformity of the soul to reality, the fit between our wills and our world, that moment when everything clicks into place and we find ourselves able to be and to do what it is we feel meant to be and to do.” In short, freedom begins when we find our vocation: working with God.
This requires discernment, contemplating as Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane before his passion—my will versus thy will. In the end, Christ chose the latter freely for “[n]o one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again,” as he states in John’s Gospel. This self-sacrificial love converted Paul on the road to Damascus from persecuting Christians to evangelizing Jews and Gentiles alike.
Littlejohn’s call to “cultivate anew” freedom’s proper meaning—where we are “most truly ourselves within the body of Christ” and “our individual freedom is experienced within a community”—is the twenty-first-century edition of Paul’s preaching. Human frailty, self-absorption, and the urge for “godlike” knowledge still remain relevant as ever.
Called to Freedom, then, is a convicting read, a reminder that if Christians truly believe Christ is resurrected, then our lives must forever change. Our hearts must be joyfully directed toward God because, in Him, we can be free from sin, free to love well, and free to live a noble life. If so, Littlejohn concludes, we can “take that freedom out into the world, reordering our political communities, our markets, and our technologies to discern and serve God’s creative purposes.”
It is a much-needed message, and one desperately worth heeding.
Andrew Fowler is the Editor of RealClearReligion and Communications Specialist at Yankee Institute, a Connecticut-based public policy organization.
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