By Rev. Dr. Maxwell Grant
Even when we don’t have a big national anniversary coming up, we Americans talk a lot about freedom. It’s stitched into our history and is fundamental to our self-understanding. When I was younger, the bumper sticker reminding us that “Freedom isn’t Free” seemed to be everywhere for a while.
But for all our enthusiasm, most of us don’t seem to know as much about it as we may think. Suprisingly, what we’ve meant by freedom hasn’t always been what we sometimes assume today.
For much of our history, freedom wasn’t mainly about being left alone. It was about becoming the kind of people who could live well together. It was freedom for responsibility.
You can hear that early on. When the signers of the Mayflower Compact promised to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic,” they weren’t declaring rugged independence. They were making a promise to one another. They chose to bind themselves together so that their shared life would have shape and stability.
That word — covenant — matters.
A key concept for the early Congregationalists, covenant was not just a deal you could walk away from when it stopped benefiting you. It was a promise that formed you while you kept it. It asked something of you. And in asking something, it gave something: direction, trust, belonging.
In early New England, many Congregational churches were organized with this in mind. That meant decisions were made locally, by gathered communities, rather than imposed from afar. People debated. They voted. They held one another accountable. Conscience mattered deeply — but so did the community. You were free, yes. But you were free within promises you had chosen.
Those habits spilled over into civic life. The town meeting wasn’t just a procedural necessity; it was a school for self-government. Neighbors showed up. They argued. They listened (all too often, imperfectly). And they made decisions together. Freedom wasn’t passive. It required participation and a certain moral maturity.
This helps explain a line from John Adams that still has the power to startle people. He wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Don’t misunderstand: he wasn’t calling for forced belief. Adams was recognizing a simple truth: a free society assumes citizens who can govern themselves. If we lack self-restraint, patience, and a sense of responsibility to one another, even the most eloquent and inspiring written document won’t be able save us.
Such a view may sound old-fashioned, but to me, it feels surprisingly relevant.
Today, we often think of freedom as the absence of limits — the ability to define ourselves without interference. Any talk of moral formation can sound like control. Any boundary can feel like a threat.
But what if the older instinct was wiser?
Think about it personally. A musician becomes truly “free” to improvise only after years of discipline. A marriage grows deeper not by avoiding promises, but by keeping them. In the same way, a society’s freedom matures when its people have been formed by commitments — in families, congregations, schools, and neighborhoods — that teach patience, honesty, and care for the common good, not to mention the need to keep listening, even when the voices and the perspectives are all too familiar.
It’s about hanging in. Hanging on.
Freedom, in other words, doesn’t shrink when it has moral shape. It grows up.
The covenant tradition of early New England reminds us that liberty and responsibility belong together. Promises don’t suffocate freedom; they sustain it. They create the trust that allows disagreement without collapse. They restrain power so that the strong do not overwhelm the weak. They make room for neighbors to live side by side.
We don’t have to share all, or even much of the theology of the seventeenth century to see the wisdom in that.
A people committed only to autonomy will struggle to remain free. A people formed for responsibility just might.
Freedom for responsibility. Freedom deepened — not diminished — by moral formation.
That vision may be demanding. But it is also hopeful.
And it is still very much worth recovering.
Rev. Dr. Maxwell Grant has been the Senior Minister of Second Congregational Church since 2012. He is also the Board Chair of the Congregational Library and Archive in Boston, and the Moderator of the Fairfield West Association of the United Church of Christ.
