The Reign of the Ledger

Jul 10

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, something about it feels different. The celebrations look the same as the ones we remember from childhood. Depending on how progressive your city is, you may still see American flags, or hear fireworks, yet underneath all of it sits a feeling that the celebration has outlived whatever it was originally for. To be frank, the hollowness you're feeling is built into how we've come to understand the word at the center of the whole holiday: freedom.

Every year, we celebrate a declaration of independence from a distant crown, but independence from something only tells half the story. How different would America look today if we focused on the other half: independence for something? Latin distinguishes between licentia and libertas, but since the language isn't studied with any rigor in our public education system, the conflation of the two is not surprising. Licentia is the freedom to do whatever you're capable of doing, while libertas is the freedom to become what you're actually for. A lion let out of a cage has licentia, but one that hunts well and successfully cares for its pack has something closer to libertas.

Treating freedom as an empty room, cleared of obstruction, waiting for you to decide what goes in it is a modern habit of mind, not an eternal one. By extension, it wasn't always the default setting of Western civilization, but can be traced to a hinge point in the Union of Arras and the Union of Utrecht in the late-16th-century Netherlands. After decades of war over theological and political doctrine, the Dutch provinces arrived at an arrangement that quelled the increasingly brutal violence while simultaneously instilling the idea that one's religious convictions became a matter held apart from public life. Out of that separation came a new communal project that didn't require doctrinal agreement to function: the accumulation of material wealth. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians at the time saw exactly what was happening and warned against it, worried this new arrangement would quietly substitute the pursuit of worldly goods for the pursuit of the transcendent, highest good: God.

In hindsight, they weren't entirely wrong. Though Catholics and Protestants disagreed about the validity of sacraments and the role of Scripture and Tradition, they still largely agreed on the basics of family, civic duty, and personal morality. Eventually, this shared moral framework was used to establish the founding documents of the United States. Regardless of your views on the division of the Church, Martin Luther never set out to build a secular, individualist society, but it's difficult to trace the emergence of "religion-as-private-preference" back to any other single fracture point. We watch it happen constantly with politicians who claim a religious identity while governing in direct opposition to that faith's core teachings, and face no real cost for the contradiction. This is because we've collectively agreed that faith is a costume you can wear into the public square without it constraining anything you do there. If our leaders and celebrities can hold the label of a faith while acting free of its content, why would the rest of us expect our own freedom to carry any more internal weight than that? In our enlightenment, we've become very good at defending the empty room and terrible at deciding what belongs inside it. Press someone today on what they're free for, and the most common honest answer is either nothing in particular, or more likely, "whatever I want."

That loss of identity doesn't stay contained to individual conscience.

Once disconnected from the authentic foundation of faith, we'll always find something else to worship in its place. For the better part of two and a half centuries, that something has been the ledger. GDP, market share, global reach, and material output have become the closest thing we have left to a national religion, and it shows up everywhere in our society: how we treat marriage, raise families, spend our Sundays, and form public policy.

Start with the most literal case of economic opportunity overriding the will to protect life. As the Supreme Court prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, more than two dozen major employers including Amazon, Disney, Meta, and JPMorgan moved to offer travel reimbursement (often $4,000 or more per trip) for employees crossing state lines for an abortion. In a moment of rare honesty, Levi Strauss framed abortion access as essential to "the workplace gains and contributions women have made" and warning that restrictions would "impede diverse hiring pipelines." In this form of accounting, a child is a productivity risk the company has a financial interest in helping her avoid. The arts industry matched this sentiment. Days after Dobbs, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS sent $300,000 to Planned Parenthood and NARAL, funded in part by Broadway Bares, a burlesque fundraiser where performers, who are subject to even less economic stability than their corporate counterparts, offer their bodies on display for monetary donations. Actors' Equity has separately admitted that theirs is "an industry in which it is notoriously difficult to support a family," and in a twist of dark irony, the industry's answer to this instability is not to lobby for expansion of paid leave but to march in step with the corporate culture it claims to challenge, ensuring that the pockets of those profiting from that same instability remain unaffected.

The same logic sits beneath the two-income household, which was once a choice but has become closer to an economic mandate and redefined who can afford a family. A sports-gambling industry that didn't exist legally within the last decade has already taken in $220 billion in wagers, with the NFL reversing a decades-long stance against betting the moment the ad revenue became too large to leave on the table. Sunday, once a day set apart by law as well as custom, has become just another shift on the schedule. A civilization that has neglected the transcendent will degrade so gradually that no single generation will recognize the consequences until it is too late. Every example above is a rational decision at the level of individual choice and a civilizational abdication at the level of a cultural milieu. This abdication is what makes a war like the one currently being waged in the Middle East possible to support without a second thought, because a people already conditioned to trade the eternal for the comfortable won't notice one more transaction.

Nowhere is this more visible than in how American Christians have been trained to fund endless foreign military engagements. Since October 2023, Congress has sent over $16 billion in direct military aid to Israel on top of the $3.8 billion we already send annually with no referendum and no exit ramp. Within the American church, all roads lead to a a dispensational theology referred to as Christian Zionism popularized by figures like Hal Lindsey and metastasized by organizations like the IFCJ. This revisionist theological framework treats a 20th-century nation-state as the covenant people of Scripture and blank-check support for its wars as an article of faith. The fruits of this theology can now be found beneath the rubble of Gaza's Church of Saint Porphyrius and its Holy Family Church, one of the oldest Christian communities on earth, bankrolled into ruin by those who claim to profess the same faith. Washington's Farewell Address warned against exactly this: permanent alliances that outlive the interests that justified them, turning a sovereign people into a standing subsidy for foreign ambitions. His descendants are rediscovering the warning two centuries late with pushback becoming more difficult as billionaire funding and technological alliances grow year over year. A 2025 takeover of Paramount put CBS News under Larry Ellison, a major donor to the Israeli military and close friend of Netanyahu's, who installed self-described "Zionist fanatic" Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief. Weeks later, as a related deal cleared his son to help control TikTok, Netanyahu told a room of influencers the platform was the most consequential purchase happening anywhere in the world right now.

Put in terms of conscience, where does the question lands on each of us individually? James Madison called conscience "the most sacred of all property." Property is something that can be cultivated or squandered, and a conscience left to licentia alone will drift toward whatever is most flattering in the moment because carnal appetite fills a vacuum faster than virtue does. The same is true of a nation's foreign commitments when left unexamined. The classical Christian answer regarding the individual was never to simply add more rules. One can obey every rule, but without a true conversion of heart, he will never be truly free. The answer has been and will always be virtuous formation: the slow shaping of desire itself, so that desire and destiny converge. It doesn't have a single dramatic date you can put fireworks and celebrations over, because virtuous formation must be repeated until it becomes instinct, just as a nation's commitments must be periodically re-examined rather than merely defended out of inertia.

As we wind down our 250th anniversary, the celebrations still deserve their moment. Licentia really is worth having, because the men who signed the Declaration risked their fortunes, reputations, and lives for a people, not the contents of a ledger. If we actually believe the words of that declaration, the least we owe is the willingness to risk something ourselves: friendships, donors, platforms, or paychecks, on behalf of the things a ledger cannot price: family and nation. A people who have forgotten what their own faith is for, or worse, are willing to trade it for the kingdoms of the world, will keep signing away, one reasonable transaction at a time, the very independence their forefathers bled for.

The Reign of the Ledger

That loss of identity doesn't stay contained to individual conscience.

Further reading

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The Reign of the Ledger

That loss of identity doesn't stay contained to individual conscience.

Further reading

The Cost of Not Yet

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