Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions

by Stephan Kinsella on March 5, 2026

[Cross-posted at PFS Blog]

Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions (Libertarian Christian Institute Press, 2010; Amazon) is an important book written several of my Christian libertarian friends. ¹ All four of the authors are intelligent, well-read, articulate, and principled libertarians. As my endorsement my notes:

Achieving liberty will require enlightening our fellow men about its eternal truths. The contributors to this volume, Christians who are also principled and articulate libertarians, argue for a more libertarian interpretation of Christian teachings, and seek to explain to fellow Christians and other people of faith the glory and morality of liberty in terms they will already relate to. Liberty is ultimately about peace, love, and cooperation, which is a message that can appeal to the 2.4 billion Christians on the planet. This is a big potential audience. This is an important book and undertaking.

A second, expanded edition is forthcoming. I look forward to it. My blurb:

Achieving liberty will require enlightening our fellow men about its eternal truths. Building on the success of the first edition, this updated and expanded second edition of Faith Seeking Freedom features additional authors and new insights from Christians who are also principled and articulate libertarians. They argue for a more libertarian interpretation of Christian teachings, explaining to fellow Christians and other people of faith the glory and morality of liberty in relatable terms. While remaining accessible and not overburdened with scholarly jargon, it still manages to show that libertarian principles are supported by Biblical teachings—such as the explanation, in Sections 12, 14, and 15, of the connection between the libertarian principles of non-aggression, self-ownership, homesteading, and production, on the one hand, and the Biblical teachings about treatment of neighbors, stewardship of the gifts God has bestowed, and the admonition to be productive—to “be fruitful and multiply”—on the other. These insights and principles support and complement each other.

Liberty is ultimately about peace, love, and cooperation—a message that can appeal to the billions of Christians worldwide. This remains a big potential audience, and this enhanced book is an even more important undertaking. In addition, while the book is aimed at Christians, its linkage of principles of freedom to deeper moral truths is valuable to nonreligious libertarians as well. Liberty is not an isolated value; connecting related but different areas of thought is important. I am delighted that this book exists.

Update: from: “The Night-Watchman State”: I’ll Take that Slur; Rothbard and Read on the Origin of “Libertarian”:

In addition, more than anyone else Read coined the name “libertarian” for the current movement. Before that, we had no single name, awkwardly going back and forth between “individualists’” and ”true liberals”. The problem with the latter phrase is that the quasi-socialists had already succeeded in appropriating the term “liberal”, and calling ourselves “true” anything was confusing and hardly persuasive. And the term “individualist” tended to confuse political philosophy with possessing a spirit of individual autonomy. Read and a few others launched the term “libertarian” for the freedom philosophy, and it stuck—the only case I know of when we were able to appropriate a word from others. For before that, communist-anarchists had often referred to themselves as “libertarian.” The first time when we were referred to publicly as “libertarians” was in an odious, book, published in the 1950’s, by a certain Ralph Lord Roy, entitled Apostles of Discord. There was a repellent literature in those days of works written by aggressive centrists and “moderates” who pilloried all “extremists” as per se evil. Roy, a Social Gospel Protestant, wrote this book to attack both Communist and ultra-rightist “extremists” in the Protestant church. That was par for the course in those days, but lo and behold! he included a chapter called “God and the ‘Libertarians’”, spotting quasi-anarchistic extremists then centered around a libertarian publication for Protestant ministers called Faith and Freedom. Libertarianism had arrived on the American ideological scene.⁴

⁴ Murray N. Rothbard, “Leonard Read, RIP,” Libertarian Forum 17, nos. 5-6 (May-June 1983): 1–2, in Murray N. Rothbard, ed. (2012). The Complete Libertarian Forum: 1969–1984. Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute; Kinsella, “Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of ‘Libertarianism‘.” The earlier publication Faith and Freedom reminds of the title of the recent libertarian Christian book Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions (Libertarian Christian Institute Press, 2010; Amazon); see Kinsella, Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions. Grok tells me that Faith and Freedom was a monthly (later bimonthly or seasonal) journal published by Spiritual Mobilization (founded by Rev. James W. Fifield Jr.), a mid-20th-century Christian libertarian organization based in Los Angeles. It ran primarily from December 1949 into the mid-to-late 1950s. It targeted Protestant ministers and promoted a fusion of Christian theology with libertarian/free-market ideas: limited government, individual liberty as rooted in God’s creation and the Declaration of Independence, opposition to statism/collectivism (including New Deal policies and communism), persuasion over coercion, and critiques of the Social Gospel. Contributors included libertarian luminaries like Edmund A. Opitz, F.A. Harper, Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard (sometimes under the pseudonym “Aubrey Herbert”), and others. It was explicitly positioned as a counter to liberal/mainline Protestant trends.

Some issues of Faith and Freedom are online at Mises.org, including some articles by Rothbard, listed in Tyler Kubik, “Murray N. Rothbard Bibliography: 1940s–2019,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 16, 2026). See further discussion of the journal in Lee Haddigan, “The Importance of Christian Thought for the American Libertarian Movement: Christian Libertarianism, 1950–71,” Libertarian Papers vol. 2, art. no. 14 (2010); Mary Sennholz, Faith and Freedom: The Journal of a Great American, J. Howard Pew (Grove City, PA: Grove City College, 1975). Especially, 152–57.

Update: I just noted that neither the first edition nor the new edition of this book includes IP. This is a glaring omission, as IP is such an important issue, as I have repeatedly emphasized:

And the authors are anti-IP. They are solid:

Of course copyright should be of especial interest to Christians since copyright should never be used to restrict the ability of The Word to spread. Some Christians recognize this, including one of the authors who wrote on this even before reading my work. See, e.g.,

I have spoken to the editors; it was just an oversight. They also omitted the drug war in the first edition but remedied that in this one. But they didn’t get to IP. Fingers crossed for the third edition… 😇 ✝ 🙏 🕊

See also Omitting IP in Libertarian Books (forthcoming).