By Daniel B. Gallagher

There will be a lot of talk about freedom during this 250th anniversary of our nation. Intellectual elites are already debating whether the Constitution envisions limitations upon citizens' freedom, and if so, what those limitations are. The Bill of Rights ostensibly places limits on government, while subsequent interpretations of the First Amendment place limits on – for example – freedom of speech, curbing obscenity, incitement to violence, and defamation.

Running up to this Semiquincentennial celebration, some have even been questioning whether the political project of liberalism itself presents a false conception of human freedom. If Patrick Deneen's 2018 Why Liberalism Failed didn't make us uncomfortable enough with the Lockean ideas underlying the American founding, his Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, published five years later, made us really squirm. "Liberalism has failed," Deneen writes, "not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself." In other words, liberalism "has failed because it has succeeded."

If there is any hope for a counter-case to Deneen's "postliberalism," it must rely on a robust conception of the relationship between freedom and truth. To put it simply, it's not entirely correct to say that the role of truth is to "limit" freedom, as if the main consequence of a moral imperative against killing, for example, is that it narrows the range of permissible actions towards other human beings; or that the immorality of sexual acts outside of marriage simply restricts what we can do with our bodies and what we can do with the bodies of others.

The recent activities of ICE have provoked vigorous debate over the Fourth Amendment, which acknowledges our right "to be secure. . .against unreasonable searches and seizures." The primary purpose of that Amendment is to limit the power of government, but it also implies limits to a citizen's right to resist the actions of law enforcement. If the search is reasonable, the one being searched is obliged to comply.

These are crucial issues, but they can easily cloud our perception of a deeper relationship between freedom and truth. That is why recent popes have reminded us that truth, properly understood, doesn't narrow our horizons, but broadens them. To say that freedom – be it political or moral – is "bound" by truth does not so much mean that the human will is intrinsically dangerous apart from truth, but rather that the human will is fundamentally ordered to an end, and that end cannot be achieved if not chosen freely.

The difference is subtle but critical. In the moral life, it is the difference between acting only to avoid evil and acting wholly to achieve the good. In political life, it is the difference between refraining from breaking the law and placing oneself wholeheartedly at the service of the common good.

The difference is even more important when we place the relationship between freedom and truth within the context of Christian faith, which, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, allows us to perceive the "'grammar' written on human hearts by the divine Creator." Faith empowers us to understand better that:

the norms of the natural law should not be viewed as externally imposed decrees, as restraints upon human freedom. Rather, they should be welcomed as a call to carry out faithfully the universal divine plan inscribed in the nature of human beings.

The liberating force of truth is all the more apparent if we contrast a democratic republic with an authoritarian state. The real problem for Chavismo in Venezuela, for example, has not been human freedom, but truth. And Chavez's successor, Nicolás Maduro, learned as well (as had Mao, Stalin, Fidel, and other socialist leaders) that you can detain political prisoners, but you cannot deprive them of their will. Figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Viktor Frankl, Yeonmi Park, Jimmy Lai, and scores of others prove this again and again.

What you can do is substitu...