In Grand Rapids, Acton Makes Liberty Larger Than the Self – Religion & Liberty Online

At Acton, I learned that faith and freedom were not rival loyalties after all. A few weeks into the Acton Institute’s Emerging Leaders Program in Grand Rapids, I wrote something on LinkedIn that captured my state of mind more honestly than I knew at the time: “I Am in Grand Rapids, Caught Between the Architecture of Ideas and the Reality of Nigeria.”

That was true. It was just incomplete.

Before I went to Grand Rapids, I did not think faith and liberty were enemies. I simply did not think they belonged together. Liberty belonged, in my mind, to economics, public policy, civil society, markets, rights, and restraints on state power. Faith belonged to worship, moral conviction, church life, and private devotion. They could respect each other from a distance. I did not yet see why they needed each other.

There was another problem, too. Much of the liberty I had encountered before the Acton Institute was real and valuable but often too small. It defended the individual against coercion, which mattered deeply to me. It gave me language for resisting arbitrary power and for explaining why human beings need room to build, exchange, associate, and flourish. Yet it often seemed to end with the self: my autonomy, my choice, my space, my freedom from interference. That was not false. It was just incomplete.

Classical liberal ideas had already changed my life. They gave me one of the clearest intellectual breakthroughs I had known in my short time on earth. They helped me think more carefully about power, markets, bureaucracy, entrepreneurship, and why societies become poorer when government tries to control too much. But as I tried to apply those ideas, especially in the Nigerian setting, I kept running into a difficulty. A liberty centered on the self could explain what power must not do to me. It could not fully explain what freedom was for, what sort of person freedom required, or what institutions could form such people.

The religious world around me did not make the question easier. In Nigerian public life, religion often appears less as a companion to liberty than as a language of authority. It can command, rebuke, mobilize, and settle arguments by pressure. It can bless political ambition, demand conformity, or treat liberty as something suspiciously secular. Even where faith and liberty are not openly in conflict, they often seem to speak past each other.

That was the tension I carried to Grand Rapids.

The Acton Institute says its mission is to promote “a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.” I had read phrases like that before, but in Grand Rapids I had to decide whether it was merely elegant language or a serious intellectual claim.

What changed me was not one lecture or one dramatic moment. It was the steady pressure of an argument that became harder to dismiss the more I listened, read, and argued with it. Acton did not ask me to abandon liberty for faith. It asked me to consider whether liberty can survive without a moral and religious account of the person.

Lord Acton gave me the first part of the correction. In “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” he writes, “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” The line is often quoted, but what struck me was what follows: Liberty is needed “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.” Liberty is the highest political end, but politics is not the highest end of man. That distinction helped me see both the greatness and the limit of political freedom. The state must be restrained because human beings have ends higher than the state can define.

That mattered to me because I had often defended liberty as protection from power. Acton helped me see it as protection for something as well: the moral, spiritual, familial, commercial, and civic life that politics cannot rightly absorb. Freedom is not emptiness. It is space for human responsibility.

Abraham Kuyper pushed the point further. His idea of sphere sovereignty gave language to something I had seen across Nigeria without having a name for it. Human life does not unfold through one institution alone. Families, churches, schools, businesses, and civic associations all carry real responsibilities. Kuyper writes that there is “a domain of the personal, of the domestic, of the scientific, of the social, and of the ecclesiastical life,” each of which “obeys its own law of life and each subject to its own head.”

That sentence mattered because it challenged two thin visions at once. It challenged the state that wants to organize all of life. It also challenged the version of liberty that imagines society as little more than individuals making choices. The person is not alone before the state. He is formed, protected, and corrected by institutions the state did not create and should not swallow.

This was especially clarifying as an African.

In many of our societies, government is expected to do far more than government can rightly do. It is asked to provide, rescue, discipline, direct, and morally redeem. When it fails, as it often does, citizens demand even more from it. Meanwhile, families weaken, churches become politically loud but socially thin, schools produce credentials without character, and civic associations struggle to command trust. In that environment, liberty is easily misunderstood. It sounds either like selfishness or like disorder.

Kuyper gave me a better way to think. Liberty is not the destruction of authority. It is the proper ordering of authority. The state has its task, but so do the family, the church, the school, the market, and the voluntary association. A healthy society does not wait for politics to do the work of every sphere.

Michael Novak helped me see why the moral life of liberty matters so much. Writing on democratic capitalism, he argued that “without certain virtues in the people, neither a capitalist economy nor a free polity will long endure.” Then he added a line that has stayed with me: “The first meaning of ‘self-government’ is self-control.”

That was the missing half of freedom for me.

Before Acton, I had often heard liberty defended as freedom from interference. Novak did not make me reject that. He made me see its insufficiency. A people may win rights, markets, and elections, then lose the habits required to use them well. They may gain freedom from external control while remaining governed by appetite, resentment, vanity, or fear. Self-government cannot begin and end with constitutions. It has to reach the person.

That insight changed the way I thought about faith.

I had treated faith as adjacent to liberty, perhaps useful in private life but not central to the argument. In Grand Rapids that view became harder to hold. If liberty requires moral formation, then faith is not decorative. It is one of the places where people learn that they are not self-created, that dignity does not come from the state, that freedom is ordered to goods higher than preference, and that responsibility cannot be separated from liberty.

This does not mean that every expression of religion serves freedom well. I had seen too much in Nigeria to believe that. Religion can sanctify domination. It can bless coercion. It can make people outsource conscience to authority. It can mistake noise for conviction and control for moral seriousness. But that is precisely why the distinction matters. The question is not whether religion exists in public life. The question is what kind of religion forms that life.

Does it produce people capable of self-government? Does it teach that the human person has dignity before the state recognizes it? Does it restrain power or merely seek to possess it? Does it form conscience or merely demand obedience?

Acton gave me a way to ask those questions without separating faith from liberty or collapsing one into the other. Faith without freedom can become coercive. Liberty without moral truth can become shallow and self-consuming. The first cannot form a soul properly. The second cannot sustain a society for long.

That was the deeper lesson of Grand Rapids.

It corrected my earlier assumption that faith and liberty could at best coexist politely. It also corrected the smaller liberty I had absorbed, the kind that could defend the self but could not fully form it. I began to see that freedom is larger than the self because the human person is larger than preference. Man is not merely a chooser, consumer, voter, or unit of policy. He is a moral being, embedded in institutions, accountable to truths he did not invent.

This realization did not make the work easier. In some ways, it made it harder. It is one thing to see the relationship between faith and liberty in Grand Rapids, surrounded by serious conversation, books, seminars, and intellectual hospitality. It is another to ask what it means in Nigeria, where religious language can be powerful but underformed, where government is asked to carry impossible burdens, and where freedom is often treated either as dangerous or as permission to serve the self.

But the trip removed one false division from my mind.

I no longer think faith belongs in one room and liberty in another. I think they meet in one of the most urgent questions any society can ask: What kind of person does freedom require, and who will help form him?

That was what I found in Grand Rapids. Not a contradiction but a correction. Liberty is bigger than the self. And if it is to endure, it needs more than rights, markets, and limits on government. It needs families, churches, schools, and communities strong enough to teach free people how to remain worthy of freedom.