True Freedom: What We Owe One Another by Rev Tim Boeve

How patriotism, conscience, and spiritual responsibility call us to protect freedom for everyone.

Preface

Freedom is one of the most cherished words in American life—and one of the most contested. Rev Tim Boeve looks beyond freedom as private permission or national mythology. In this guest reflection he draws from the Declaration of Independence, scripture, history, and the voices of contemporary public figures, and asks what freedom requires of us where we are now. The gratitude we feel for what we've inherited beckons responsibility for one another’s dignity, safety, belonging, and human expression for all.

We just watched a film depicting Eleanor Roosevelt’s deeply humanitarian leadership in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, it became a foundational bill of rights for people around the world. May the United States remember now what the world affirmed then.

--Colleen Akiko

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True Freedom: What We Owe One Another

My hope is to say something about freedom that is relevant to this moment—and also to all times and places.

Patriotism and the Promise of Liberty

While thinking about this subject over breakfast, I read a Fourth of July column by former CBS News anchor Dan Rather. He described patriotism as a deep love of country joined to civic duty and a commitment to foundational ideals, especially freedom and liberty. He also made an essential distinction: patriotism does not belong to one political party, one region, one voting bloc, or one president.

That understanding matters. The signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago was an act of enormous courage. Fifty-six delegates placed their names beneath a claim that challenged monarchy and inherited rank: human beings possess rights that no ruler may rightfully take away.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has called the Declaration an astonishingly radical document because it asserted, in a world long organized around wealth and status at birth, that no man was born better than another. Yet the document’s promise was larger than the men who signed it—and far larger than the society they were prepared to create.

We can recognize the limitations and contradictions of the founders without denying the magnitude of what they began. They were people of their time. But the principle they set down was capable of judging their time—and ours.

The Promise Was Incomplete

The Declaration proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but the political freedom its signers sought did not include enslaved Black people, women, or Indigenous peoples. Thomas Jefferson himself enslaved human beings while writing words that would eventually be used to challenge slavery, exclusion, and second-class citizenship.

Their language of equality may have been shaped, at least in part, by religious ideas familiar to them. Genesis says that human beings are created in the image of God. In Galatians, Paul writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one. Even so, the nation required a Civil War, constitutional amendments, sustained organizing, protest movements, legislation, and generations of sacrifice to extend its stated ideals more fully.

We can recognize the limitations and contradictions of the founders without denying the magnitude of what they began. They were people of their time. But the principle they set down was capable of judging their time—and ours.

Freedom is not only something we inherit. It is something we practice and protect.

Freedom Can Move Backward

The rights won through struggle are not self-maintaining. The freedoms of people across race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and identity can be weakened when fear, resentment, or power goes unchallenged.

Many Americans felt deep pride when the country elected its first Black president. Yet history does not move forward in a straight line. Progress can be followed by backlash. The moral arc described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. bends toward justice only because people take hold of it and bend with courage, discipline, and love.

Those of us who seek to live by faith and conscience must therefore ask what this moment requires. What actions can we take? What letters can we write? What communities can we strengthen? What leaders committed to justice can we support?

Freedom is not only something we inherit. It is something we practice and protect.

No One Is Free Alone

The familiar claim that no one is free unless everyone is free expresses a difficult truth: liberty is both individual and collective. When one group is oppressed, everyone else’s freedom becomes more fragile and morally incomplete.

Across spiritual and ethical traditions, freedom is inseparable from how we treat people made vulnerable. In the Christian Gospel of Matthew, Jesus identifies himself with those who are hungry, thirsty, estranged, unclothed, sick, and imprisoned. Other traditions likewise teach compassion, hospitality, shared responsibility, and reverence for human dignity. The measure is not what we profess, but how we respond. In our own time, that circle of care must include LGBTQ+ people and all others whose dignity, safety, or equality is threatened.

To honor freedom, then, is to care for people who have less access to it. It is to feed the hungry, tend the sick, welcome the stranger, house the unhoused, visit the imprisoned, and make room for those pushed to the margins.

...domination violates the deep pattern of life.

The Seed of Freedom

There is also an impulse toward freedom at the core of human life. Perhaps that is why we delight in birds in flight, animals running freely, and children absorbed in carefree play. The old song “Born Free” gave language to this intuition: freedom feels like a birthright, a movement of the heart toward life.

That desire has animated social movements across generations. It is one reason caring people cannot remain indifferent to oppression—whether human or animal. Something in us recognizes that domination violates the deep pattern of life.

Freedom separated from responsibility easily becomes license. Privilege without conscience becomes another form of captivity.

Freedom Under Unequal Conditions

Many of us were born into conditions that allowed the seed of freedom to grow: safety, medical care, loving families, education, and opportunities to create and thrive. Many others are born into circumstances that constrict freedom from the beginning.

Poverty, violence, racism, abandonment, addiction, and untreated trauma can narrow a person’s sense of possibility. Our prisons are filled with people whose early lives offered little room to become, create, or belong. Incarceration then removes what little freedom remained.

And yet inner freedom can emerge even in confinement. People behind bars have discovered dignity, spiritual awakening, accountability, purpose, and love in places designed to restrict nearly every choice. That does not excuse injustice or erase harm. It does reveal how persistent the human longing for freedom can be.

At the same time, some people with enormous privilege use their freedom not to widen possibility for others, but to accumulate more than they need and exploit those with less power. Freedom separated from responsibility easily becomes license. Privilege without conscience becomes another form of captivity.

Love tells the truth. Love refuses exclusion. Love remains present long enough to repair what is broken.

Patriotism Without Pretending

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered another vision of patriotism in remarks marking the nation’s 250th birthday. He argued that love of country does not require pretending the country is flawless. Patriotism can be expressed through righteous dissent, marches, protests, and the refusal to abandon the nation’s unfinished promise.

That is the kind of patriotism this moment asks of us: not blind praise, and not cynical rejection, but committed love. Love tells the truth. Love refuses exclusion. Love remains present long enough to repair what is broken.

A New Dawning of Freedom

May we use the freedom we cherish to work for the freedom of all people. May we help build an America in which every person is treated with equality and justice; the hungry are fed; the sick are cared for; the unclothed are clothed; the unhoused are housed; the isolated are welcomed into community; and everyone has a place of belonging.

And may the dimmed hopes of so many brighten with a new dawning of true freedom for everyone.

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About Rev. Tim Boeve

Tim is an ecumenical minister presently serving at Olympic Valley Chapel in North Lake Tahoe. He was also a director in the nonprofit sector and chaplain for Sonoma Raceway in Northern California before moving to Mexico in 2018. Offering an open, personable style and non-dogmatic approach, Tim is most keenly interested in evolving his own spiritual growth and nurturing that impulse in others.

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Postlude

Freedom becomes real through practice. This week, let's consider one concrete way to widen another person’s freedom: make a call, write a letter, support a trusted community organization, welcome someone who feels outside the circle, or listen with a heart wide open. The work does not have to be grand to be faithful. As Mother Teresa once said . . .

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

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Source Notes

Dan Rather and Team Steady, “America,” July 4, 2026: https://steady.substack.com/p/america

Heather Cox Richardson, “July 3, 2026”: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-3-2026

Office of the Mayor of New York City, “Mayor Mamdani Delivers Address Marking America’s 250th Birthday,” July 3, 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/remarks-as-prepared--mayor-mamdani-delivers-address-marking-amer