When Freedom Dies With God
Thoughts on a powerful quote from Cardinal Robert Sarah
“With the death of God, intellectuals thought that they would achieve autonomy and total human freedom. But the death of God led, in fact, to the death of freedom and obscured a correct concept of the human being. God is the one and only compass that can orient us toward happiness.”
— Cardinal Robert Sarah
Cardinal Sarah is talking about one of the great paradoxes of modern history. And if you’re paying attention, you can see it playing out right now.
When Nietzsche came down from his pedestal to proclaim to us simple minded folk that “God is dead”, he wasn’t just trying to be edgy. He was diagnosing Western culture. The uniting Christian framework that held everything together—meaning, morality, Truth, the very concept of the human person—had dissolved. The Enlightenment intellectuals saw this collapse coming and thought, “Finally! We can be free!”
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The logic seemed sound: Remove the external authority—Scripture, commandments, religious tradition, the Church telling you what to do—and people could finally define their own values, create their own meaning, write their own moral codes. We’d be autonomous. Self-legislating. Masters of our fate, captains of our souls.
Ah ha! Well thank the non-gods for that! Except here’s what actually happened
Without God as the foundation for human dignity, human worth became arbitrary as persons are worth what a secular authority says they’re worth: the elderly are burdensome, the disabled are worthless because they can’t contribute, and an unborn baby is a problematic clump of cells. If there’s no transcendent source that says every person has inherent value, then value gets determined by whoever has power.
Why is slavery wrong? Why is exploitation evil? The civil rights movement appealed to higher moral law. They said every person bears the image of God and therefore has dignity that cannot be violated. Remove that foundation and you’re left with nothing but power politics.
The twentieth century proved this in blood. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China—explicitly atheistic regimes that claimed total authority over human life precisely because there was no higher law above them. No God meant no limit on the state. The body count topped 100 million.
But it doesn’t end with Communism. Look around you and you’ll see many of these same principals everywhere. Communism was simply a test bed or laboratory for the social experiment of godless secularism. Now, in America, abortion is normative, assisted suicide is legal and expanding, the religious are seen as annoyances and obstacles to social progress. We not only kicked God out of schools, we also regulate Him in the public square. And local and state governments are always finding ways to legally injure the Catholic Church, its schools, marginalize its people and “tax” or penalize Catholicism out of existence.
The compass metaphor is perfect.
Without a fixed point—true North—navigation becomes impossible. The intellectuals thought removing God would free humanity to chart its own course. But what it actually did was destroy the only reliable reference point we had.
God isn’t just a nice idea. God is the ground of reality itself. If God is the source and sustainer of being, then moving toward God is moving toward what’s real, what’s true, what we actually are. Trying to find happiness apart from our true nature is like a fish trying to find fulfillment out of water.
True freedom isn’t the absence of constraints. It’s alignment with reality. When we remove the origin of reality (God) from our lives, our homes, our culture, our nations, we aren’t liberated and empowered, we’re suffocated to death.
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