Freedom to Be Bound: The Paradox of Religious Liberty
Three lessons from Exodus 5—history’s first recorded demands for religious liberty.
At its core, religious liberty is a paradox. While liberty (Latin libertas) suggests a lack of constraint, religious implies the opposite. The Latin root of the word, religare, means “to bind fast.” Lactantius, the fourth-century Christian philosopher, taught that religion means “we are tied to God and bound to Him [religati].”
The literal sense of religious liberty, then, is the freedom to be bound, or more precisely, freedom from one set of constraints in order to be bound to another. It is a tethered liberty—liberty that involves an allegiance. At its root, it is not freedom from constraint but freedom for the purpose of constraint. It is the freedom to honor one’s highest loyalties and fulfill one’s deepest moral obligations.
In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance, James Madison expounded on the political implications of the religious liberty paradox. Because man’s ultimate duty is to God, Madison wrote, every other obligation becomes relativized. So, even when man enters society and submits himself to civil government, he does so “with a reservation of his duty”—a “saving of his allegiance”—to God.
Religious liberty, in the Madisonian sense, is a reservation of one’s ultimate allegiance. It is freedom to do not what one wants but what one ought. It is never self-referential, never liberty for its own sake. Religious liberty has a telos. Being bound to a higher sovereign (religio) necessarily requires freedom from lesser authorities (libertas). This is the essence of religious liberty: freedom for the sake of something more deeply binding.
The paradox is vividly illustrated in the fifth chapter of the book of Exodus. This biblical passage, recounting Moses and Aaron’s initial appearance before Pharaoh, contains history’s first recorded demands for religious liberty.
Moses, having been called by God to deliver the Israelites from slavery, stands before Egypt’s king and says: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” Pharaoh refuses, and Moses reasserts the demand, though phrased differently: “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” This time, Pharaoh not only refuses but retaliates against the Israelites, increasing their workload and punishments.
Two aspects of Moses’s demands deserve attention. First, the demands for freedom are specifically tied to religious obligation: “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to [God] in the wilderness,’” or later, “that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.” These are not demands for political liberty as such. Moses does not say, “Let my people go, that they may establish their own form of government.” This is not a Jeffersonian call for national independence. While national sovereignty is in Israel’s future, here in Exodus 5, freedom isn’t justified on those grounds. Rather, it is tethered to religious worship.
Second, in Exodus 5, the conception of religious liberty is corporate, not individual. Moses demands that an entire people be set free in order to worship in the way God has commanded. Properly conceived, religion is always a corporate enterprise. It binds a people together, binds them to their God, and commits them to a particular way of life. Religious liberty is congruent to these ends. It is more than simply an individual right to religious self-expression. Rather, libertas for the sake of religio means the freedom to bind oneself to a community and to a set of obligations that are larger than and beyond oneself.
Thus far, we have treated Moses’s demands monolithically, but they are not the same. Reflecting on their differences yields further insights.
Rewind a couple of chapters. In Exodus 3, God gives Moses precise instructions on how to approach Pharaoh and what to say: “You and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God’” (3:18).
Yet Moses fudges things a bit. When he goes to Pharaoh in Exodus 5, he doesn’t take the elders of Israel with him; only his brother Aaron accompanies him. His opening demand identifies the deity as “The Lord, the God of Israel” rather than “the God of the Hebrews.” The phrase “Let my people go” is a Mosaic innovation. And he initially portrays the religious obligation as absolute and unlimited rather than a simple three-day journey.
By contrast, Moses’s second demand hews more closely to God’s instructions. And herein lies a puzzle. Moses’s second demand seems far more modest than his first one. It begins with “please.” It seeks a time-limited religious accommodation. And Moses even appends “lest [God] fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword,” perhaps appealing to Pharaoh’s self-interest in productive labor. Yet it is the second demand that sets Pharaoh off. Pharaoh responds to Moses’s first demand with a simple, almost bored refusal. He responds to the second with furious retaliation.
Why? Why does the seemingly more modest demand infuriate Pharaoh so?
The answer lies, I believe, in Moses’s verbal pivot from the “God of Israel” to the “God of the Hebrews.” The latter implies a bolder political claim, even a radical one.
To understand why, put yourself in the ancient Egyptian mind. Pharaoh was the god-king—the living embodiment of Egypt’s gods, maintainer of cosmic order, the source and summit of civic and spiritual life. No surprise, then, that Moses’s initial appeal to “the Lord, the God of Israel” landed flat. There was no such deity in the Egyptian pantheon. At best, Moses was relying on some foreign, local god with no power in Egypt. It was perfectly rational for Pharaoh to respond as he did: “I do not know this god. I do not answer to him.” One can imagine a dismissive wave of the pharaonic hand.
But when Moses says—as God had instructed him to say—that “the God of the Hebrews has met with us,” that was something different. In the original language, the key word here, “Hebrews,” is Ivri. The literal sense is the “people from beyond” or the “people who cross over.” This is not some local deity, Moses is suddenly saying. This is a God who crosses jurisdictional boundaries, who watches over His people wherever they may be found. A God unconstrained by geographic limits must stand above the local Egyptian pantheon. Moses’s second demand is positing a different kind of God—a God of gods, a God over all.
Pharaoh is going to learn this lesson the hard way through the experience of the plagues, each of which is designed to reverse some aspect of Egyptian cosmology and demonstrate the supremacy of Israel’s God. As Moses’s father-in-law Jethro will later proclaim, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Ex. 18:11).
Yet before any of this occurs, here in Exodus 5, Pharaoh instantly grasps the implications of Moses’s second demand. A localized and distant “God of Israel” is one thing. But a transcendent and present “God of the Hebrews” is quite another. Pharaoh’s reaction is angry, swift, and punitive.
This brings us to a third lesson this passage teaches: by its very nature, religious liberty limits the power of the sovereign. Pharaoh thought of his own power as both divinely ordained and absolute, subject only to the geographical limits over which he could extend it. Yet in Exodus 5, Moses proclaims a God who transcends all of that. When Moses says, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us,” he is not simply upending the foundations of Egyptian political order. He is forever reframing the way human beings will think about political order at all. If indeed there is a God who stands above every human authority, then that God is worthy of one’s ultimate allegiance—an allegiance higher and more fundamental than human authority can ever command.
It would have been easy for Pharaoh to permit Israel a short religious festival. Yet to grant this specific demand meant conceding a more general principle: it meant accepting inherent limits on pharaonic authority. It meant relativizing his rule. This, Pharaoh was unwilling to do. As the rest of Exodus unfolds, it’s clear this was God’s plan all along: Pharaoh’s recalcitrance becomes the very opening God needs to demonstrate his cosmic supremacy.
Pharaoh may be the first ruler in history to bristle at divine limits on his earthly power, but he will not be the last. Nearly every king, Caesar, governor, and legislator after him will chafe at the demand for religious liberty in much the same way. In a sense, every contest over religious liberty is downstream of the showdown between Moses and Pharaoh in Exodus 5.
This brings us back to Madison. What is remarkable about the United States—what is perhaps most distinctive about our constitutional republic—is that the very men who, at the founding moment, held political authority not only acknowledged limits to that authority but actually locked them in. Constitutional protection of religious liberty supplies the paradigmatic example.
Attend to Madison’s reasoning in Memorial and Remonstrance and it is impossible not to hear the Mosaic echo: “[Religious] duty is precedent … to the claims of Civil Society,” Madison asserts, because religious man is bound to something that transcends political authority. In Madison’s telling, we owe ultimate allegiance to a “Universal Sovereign.”
Pharaoh was presented with this same argument and couldn’t accept it. America’s founders, by contrast, made it a cornerstone of our system of government.
This is wonderful. I learned so much. You've given readers a lot to think about and evoke a sense of reflection and wisdom that is hard to balance. Thank you!