Nick Cave says something I’ve often heard from Christians:
Freedom finds itself in captivity. Disorder, randomness, chaos and anarchy are where the imagination goes to die, or so I’ve found.
So it is with matters of faith and the freeness of belief. I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church - that profoundly fallible human institution - that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.
Cave appears to be talking about art–but I’ve heard this deployed in other contexts as well. My question, whenever I hear this is always: Do you mean something like the creative freedom that can be found, say, within the sonnet form? Or do you mean that true freedom can only be found within the rule of the Church? The former I can get with. The latter sounds quite Orwellian to those of us who aren’t Christians. Again, I believe I understand what is meant by most of the people who say this sort of thing. The phrasing, though, makes some of us twitchy.