on Piety

Pietas is our natural and moral obligation to give God, persons, and things their due. Cicero ties piety to family and fatherland and calls it foundational to the virtues. Jesus appeals to this principle: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21). Paul does likewise in Romans 13, recognizing the magistrate’s duty to restrain evil and promote the good.

Piety orders love and so orders power. We owe God worship, our parents honor, our nation loyalty, and our neighbors justice and charity—each in its rank. Where that organic political order holds, authority serves the common good; where it fails, authority serves appetite.

The purpose of a strong civil authority is to promote virtue and restrain vice among a people. When civil authority acts confidently within its sphere—in accordance with a clear national will—families, churches, and local communities are freer to fulfill their distinct purposes as they relate to the common good.

As Russell Kirk put it, “Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility.”

Rights severed from duties become weapons of revolution. Liberty requires order—first within the soul, then within the polis. The fewer moral chains we place upon appetite within, the more compulsion must be applied without. Seen this way, freedom is not mere latitude but ordered power for the good. The right to life entails the duty to revere life in others. The right to property entails the duty to steward. Religious liberty entails the duty to seek the truth and worship God without profaning His name or your neighbor’s conscience.