America’s news merchants seemed surprised to learn that Russian spies are still living undercover in the U.S. two decades after the end of the “cold war.” Some things never change. Thankfully, people can change.

As a young man, WORLD editor Marvin Olasky was a member of the Communist party. Today Olasky is a respected apologist for ideas that are the antithesis of Marxism. Whitaker Chambers (1901 - 1961) is another example of a changed mind. He, too, was an American journalist who had been a Communist agent. His take on freedom is good reading in the afterglow of Independence Day:

Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom.  God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. … External freedom is only an aspect of internal freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.

Whitaker’s ideas, recorded in America’s God and Country Encyclopedia, reminded me of what Russian journalists told me twenty years ago as they emerged from  decades of Kremlin thought control.

Thank God I live in a nation where freedom of thought and expression are blessings secured by Constitutional law. Thank God, also, that He provides a way for minds and hearts to be changed.

Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free … if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”  (John 8:32,36)