I'd like to quote and comment on the quote from his short book, On Belief. In it he rightfully criticizes the liberal notion of the liberal "freedom of choice." He rightfully calls "freedom of choice" as "the very nerve center of the liberal ideology" (p. 116). Freedom of choice is what mobilizes the United States army in Afghanistan and Iraq to "free" persons from their "traditional societies" and allow them to chose Coke or Pepsi, rock-n-roll or rap. The Christian tradition calls such notions as "Pelagianism". Yet Zizek sees that this conception is "grounded in the notion of the 'psychological' subject endowed with propensities he or she strives to realize" (p. 116) -- a psychology of a certain type of human will, not ordered to the Good, but to psychological preference.

He argues that such an understanding makes "it all the more necessary today to REASSERT the opposition of 'formal' and 'actual' freedom in a new, more precise sense." While we think we have a formal freedom to chose, like we can rise beyond our concrete material environment in which we live by a strength of will to power -- we are all Nietzcheans at heart. At any rate he quotes a pyschological experiment from France. Zizek summarizes: "Repeated experiments estalbished the following paradox: if, AFTER getting from two groups of volunteers the agreement to participate in an experiment, one informs them that the experiment will involve something unpleasant, against their ethics eve, and if, at this point, one reminds the first gruop that they have the free choice to say no, and says nothing to the other group, in BOTH groups, the SAME (very high) percentage will agree to continue their participation in the experiment.
What this means is that conferring the formal freedom of choice does not make any difference: those given the freedom will do the same things as those (implicitly) denied it. . . . those given the freedom to choose will not only tend to choose the same as theose denied it; they will tend to 'rationalize' their 'free' decision to continue to participate in the experiment . . . they will tend to change their opinions about the act they were asked to accomplish. (p. 117)

Thus by emphasizing formal freedom, liberalism actually masks the concrete freedoms, the actual freedom, the freedom to act differently in a certain situation than authorities dictate. As Zizek says, "'liberal' subjects are in a way those least free: they change the very opinion/perceptoin of themselves, accepting what was IMPOSED on them as originating in their 'nature' -- they are even no longer AWARE of their subordination" (p. 120).

This is the difference between liberal freedom and Gospel freedom. Gospel freedom is an actual freedom; freedom from the "psychological subject" with its self-determined needs to an actual freedom to live concretely for Christ in a particular situation, even to not conform to the world, and therefore, to receive the transformation of one's mind so then one might know the good and perfect will of God, and thus, to become who we really are in God. The Spirit frees us to live in Christ within the world, but not of the world.

Zizek recognizes this difference of Christianity. Although he does not believe, he calls forth the faithfulness of witness of the church as necessary in the contemporary world that labors under the false formal freedom of the liberal subject.