The Heavy Burden of Freedom

I was recently leading a discussion with a group of young adults. We were talking about the Sabbath, about what it is, what it isn’t, etc. We were looking at the story from the twelfth chapter of Matthew’s gospel where Jesus healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath. We looked at his confrontation with the religious leaders, and pondered his famous words, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

In general terms, I suppose I was sort of steering them toward the idea that Jesus was liberating the people present from the crippling burden of rules for their own sake, offering them the expansive freedom to engage in that which brings life and wholeness and healing. I was imagining that this would sound like good news to them as it surely did to me when I was their age. Down with stuffy religious rules and up with freedom! Yes, this certainly would have scratched my itch in my late teens and early twenties. But it met with a lukewarm (at best) response for the Gen Zers of 2024.

The reasons became clear as the meeting moved on. These young adults have quite literally grown up in a different world than I did. Freedom is their norm, their default, the very air they breathe, and it has been from the day they were born. It is one of the few remaining moral imperatives of our post-Christian age. Choose your own path, your own identity, your own profile, your own career, your own ethic, your own ______. Stay in relationships as long as they meet your needs (but no longer). You do you. Nobody has the right to tell you what to do. Freedom is often described and portrayed in terms bordering on the sacred.

And many young adults are increasingly finding it heavy. They stated this plainly. I had been talking about how many people in Jesus’ time experienced the Law (around the Sabbath or any other thing) to be a crippling burden  and that Jesus was all about lifting burdens from the backs of heavy-laden people. One young woman looked at me shyly and said, in as many words, “That’s how freedom feels to me. Like a heavy burden.” The pressure to define yourself, choose everything constantly was not liberation but slavery. I sat with that for a few moments. I thought about my own young adult kids and about being puzzled when they occasionally say things like, “I wish someone would just tell me what to do” or “I wish the rules for life were just clear” or “I wish there weren’t so many options” or “I feel overwhelmed by this pressure to always be creating and defining myself online.” Yeah. I suppose freedom really can come to feel like slavery.

Freya India is a young woman whose writing I regularly find very insightful. Her Substack called GIRLS contains much that many of us older folks should read if we are hoping to understand Gen Z and why they seem to be struggling to launch in so many ways. She recently wrote a piece called “The Age of Abandonment.” It’s a sprawling, at times rambling diagnosis for much of what troubles her generation. The whole thing is worth reading and reflecting on, not least her thesis that the “freedom” of people in my generation to just walk away from marriages whenever we got tired of them has had catastrophic effects upon our kids sense of belonging and security in the world.

But I was struck in particular by this paragraph:

And I suppose what I wonder is, what did we expect? These things have consequences. Throughout history our ancestors built customs and institutions to bind us together and then, one by one, we kicked them down. We killed God, we mocked marriage, we attacked the family, we uprooted neighbourhoods, we debunked every last myth and story. And we kept going and going, until we got here, with our sad little divorce parties. Until we got here, with a generation huddled, heartbroken, fearful of love, fearful of life, kicking away at anything that reaches out to help. We lifted the burden from adults, told parents to do what makes them happy, forgetting that those structures weren’t just limits on adult freedom; they were foundations for children to stand on, to step off from, on which they depended. We shattered them and now we wonder why a generation is falling apart. Welcome to the age of abandonment.

Is there more that could and should be said about a hugely complex cultural moment and how younger generations are navigating it? Certainly. But I couldn’t help but read this paragraph in light of my experience with the young adults group the other night. Where I saw the blessed relaxation of repressive rules, they hungered for clarity, for someone to just tell them how the world worked. Where I saw Jesus saying, “Don’t worry about all those stuffy strict parameters about not working on this or that day, they longed for permission to switch off, to have days that weren’t just about the constant hustle. Where I saw expansive liberty, they wanted fixed guardrails, some things they didn’t have to choose or invent or decide for themselves. Where I saw freedom, they felt a heavy burden.

I think Freya India is right. We have spent a long time, at least in the West, kicking things down in the name of freedom and authenticity and God knows what else. We have forgotten, as she so eloquently puts it, that structures are not mere limits against which freedom pushes, but foundations for the young to launch from. Our kids are, in many ways, reaping the slavery that our freedoms have sown.