I must confess that I hold a deeply unpopular opinion.

I thoroughly enjoyed the ending to LOST.

Get mad at me all you want but I will proudly stand firm as an apologist for this show. Yes, it wasn’t perfect. Yes, like all other LOST fans, I would’ve loved to know where the numbers came from or where Sawyer (best character by the way) got his endless lexicon of nicknames.

But the mysteries weren’t the main reason I watched the show, the characters were.

And it’s among LOST’s many diverse characters that I was first exposed to a man important to today’s discussion: John Locke.

Yes, surprisingly, before Locke was a depressed island version of Mr. Clean (love you, Terry O’Quinn) he was a highly influential philosopher whose contributions to Western civilization are seen in how we view freedom today. 

It all begins with the Enlightenment. 

Let’s go for a moment to Europe in the late 17th century. The Renaissance has happened. Arts, culture, and learning have flourished. Overseas colonies are bringing in massive amounts of revenue. All is well!

Except not really.

One century earlier, the growing corruption of the institutional church resulted in the Protestant Reformation which completely fractured the once unified Western Church. The result? The primary governing force for morality and meaning had proven unable to bear the weight of its mission. 

Thus, an existential and philosophical vacuum was created.

Understandably, many began to turn away from the Church’s traditional teaching on how to live. (And to the credit of the Church’s critics, the Church honestly hadn’t done much justice to the Way of Jesus.) These men and women then began to take other approaches to what made a meaningful and prosperous life.

Notable thinkers arose at this time like Voltaire, Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, our man for today, John Locke.

Locke was a philosopher who thought a lot about what made a society healthy and successful. To him, a big part of this was the individual’s liberty. For Locke, “The natural [state] of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth.”

Reading that we get an inkling of how this Western idea of freedom developed. 

There’s a lot of truth bound up in it- oppression in governments, social structures, families, and so on, is certainly no good. But, somewhere along the way, the application of Locke’s philosophy (and others like him) sent our view of freedom somewhat askew.

The Enlightenment got its name because it was viewed as a time of great illumination. A time when the darkness of Europe’s religious and dogmatic past was pushed back and redefined.

Faith began to lose credibility and, in its place, reason took the throne.

Now I’m not discounting reason, it’s a great gift from God after all. Yet in the Enlightenment’s elevation of it came less respect and credibility for faith itself.

It was through this lens that the philosophy of Locke would come to be viewed.

We can see this in the popularization of modern phrases such as “Follow your heart” and “Seek your truth.” After all, if your heart or conception of truth is subjugated under any but yourself you can’t be truly free.

Can you?

This, Locke believed, was our natural state and a highly important one at that. To be impeded by an outside force was to have your very identity desecrated. 

The sacred had been redefined and now existed within the self.

LOST’s John Locke encapsulates this ethos in his most iconic line… “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

Come back tomorrow as we continue in our critical take on Western freedom.

For now, be blessed.

Jon

Theophilus Newsletter

Video of the Day

Everyday we will include the short of the day, related to the topic of the newsletter. Today: What does the show Lost have to do with Freedom?