In an age where secular philosophies often position faith and freedom as opposing forces, the relationship between religious belief and genuine liberty deserves careful examination. This exploration challenges the modern assumption that liberty flourishes best in the absence of religious constraints, proposing instead that true freedom emerges not from the rejection of divine authority, but from its voluntary embrace.

By examining both philosophical foundations and empirical evidence, we can uncover whether faith serves as liberty’s foundation or its foe—a question with profound implications for how we structure our societies and understand the nature of human freedom itself.

Does Faith Lead To Liberty?

Does faith lead to the social virtue of liberty? Yes, “man, by assenting to matters of faith, is raised above his nature,” as said Thomas Aquinas. Man’s natural state is self-sovereignty – impulse, savagery, and law unto himself. By “assenting to matters of faith”, as Aquinas put it in his Summa Theologica, man accepts God as sovereign.

The sovereign is the authority, or law maker, to which a member of a society yields in order to gain his liberty, and liberty is one’s freedom of physical action within the limits of the law prescribed by the sovereign – in this case, the law of God. Without faith in God, there is no sovereign. Without the sovereign, there can be no liberty, by definition, because without the sovereign, that authority and law maker, we are instead a law unto ourselves and considered to be self-sovereign creatures of passion. Therefore, we can safely say that, yes, faith does lead to the social virtue of liberty.

As the determination of whether faith does-or-does-not lead to liberty is merely a matter of semantics, rather than searching for quantitative data on the link between liberty and faith, let us consider a study on the impact of religious liberty:

According to the study, descriptive evidence suggests that countries with higher levels of religious liberty benefit economically in a variety of ways, such as greater relative levels of economic development that result in better economic institutions, leading to more personal economic freedom, particularly property rights.

Further, “increases in religious freedom are associated with robust increases in measures of human flourishing, even after controlling for time-invariant characteristics across space and time and a wide array of time-varying country-specific factors, such as economic activity and institutional quality.”

In fact, “countries that experienced the greatest growth in religious liberty between 2006 and 2018 also experienced the greatest growth in human flourishing.” A slightly modified version of the study’s Figure 1 can be found below, which provides “motivating evidence on the link between religious liberty and human flourishing.”

Yes, faith does lead to liberty.

Final Thoughts

The relationship between faith and liberty reveals itself not merely through abstract philosophy, but through tangible human outcomes. When we accept that liberty requires a sovereign authority beyond our own impulses, and that faith provides this framework through divine law, we begin to understand why societies that protect religious freedom consistently demonstrate greater human flourishing.

The evidence speaks clearly: where faith is allowed to flourish freely, so too does human dignity, economic prosperity, and social cohesion. This isn’t coincidental—it reflects the fundamental truth that when individuals voluntarily submit to a higher moral authority, they paradoxically gain greater freedom than those who remain enslaved to their own passions.

As we navigate an increasingly secular age, these insights remind us that faith and liberty are not opposing forces to be balanced, but complementary virtues that strengthen one another. The question is not whether we can have liberty without faith, but whether what we call “liberty” in faith‘s absence is truly freedom at all, or merely a sophisticated form of bondage to our basest nature.

Perhaps Aquinas understood something profound: that in rising above our nature through faith, we don’t lose our freedom—we finally discover it.

Thanks for reading!