Through the annals of time there has existed an inseparable link between religion and liberty. Those who have claimed liberty in the name of their God have, of course, used religion to legitimate their struggle to be free. The alliance between religion and liberty, however, runs deeper than a powerful source of legitimacy for overturning the status quo in human relationships. Social contracts , whether they be based on egalitarian principles or tyranny, are arrangements between human beings. Covenants are sacred arrangements between God and God's people.
Covenants transcend social contracts, and they endure for all time.
Tyrants, or man-made institutions, may deny the promise of a covenant, but that does not alter the Truth of believers' arrangement with God. Freedoms attained by social contract are always precarious because not only may contracts be breached, they may be torn up and rewritten to the advantage of one group over another. Martin Luther King Jr's brilliant Letter From a Birmingham Jail acknowledges the legality of unjust laws which imprisoned him for civil disobedience. While accepting the consequences of his violation of the law, he appeals to a higher law and authority for deliverance from unjust laws and social milieu that continued to suppress Blacks a century after the Civil War that was fought to emancipate them. This appeal to the authority of the Almighty has been invoked repeated throughout the ages.