Building A Culture of Religious Freedom

Back in April, Gerard Baker, the Wall Street Journal’s
editor at large, wrote a column called “Persecuted Christians And Their Quiescent Leaders” that I hope all of you will read. In it, Baker hammers home two facts. Christians of every tradition – Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox – are now the most widely and brutally persecuted religious community in the world. And too many Christian leaders in too many countries, including our own, are too cowardly to name this persecution for what it is – especially when it comes at the hands of Muslim extremists.

Cowardice is not a word you’ll find in the vocabulary of Alliance Defending Freedom. And the threats to religious liberty in our own country come from a different, shrewder, but every bit as ugly brand of extremism. So it’s a blessing and a joy for me to be with you today. Courage, like cowardice, is infectious, and very few people can match the courage and character that permeate the entire ADF team. Michael Farris, Paula and Alan Sears, Amy Shepard, and so many others: These are extraordinary persons doing extraordinary work, and I count it a privilege to admire them. But I’ll come back to that at the end of my comments.

I want to talk today about “building a culture of religious freedom.” So the question naturally becomes: How do we do it? I think I can help us answer that. But I need to offer a few preliminary thoughts.

Here’s my first point, and it’s very simple. We’re mortal. We’re going to die. My father was a funeral director, and I grew up in a home where death was something sacred, but also a natural part of life. Obviously, life is a gift of God and therefore precious, especially to the people who love us. We need to protect it, preserve it, help it to flourish, and make it meaningful.

But for persons of faith, death isn’t something to fear. God never abandons the people who love him. So I’ve always found it odd that American culture spends such a huge amount of energy ignoring death and distracting us from thinking about it. Our time in this world is very limited; science can’t fix the problem; and there’s no government bailout program. So our time matters. And so does the way we use it. As all of the great saints understood, thinking a little about our death can have a wonderfully medicinal effect on human behavior.

The reason is obvious. If we believe in an afterlife where we’re held accountable for our actions, then that belief has very practical implications for our choices in this world. Obviously, some people don’t believe in God or an afterlife, and they need to act in a way that conforms to their convictions. But that doesn’t absolve us from following ours.

For those of us who are Christians, the trinity of virtues we call faith, hope, and charity should shape everything we do, both privately and in our public lives. Faith in God gives us hope in eternal life. Hope casts out fear and enables us to trust in the future and to love. And the love of God and other human persons – the virtue of charity – is the animating spirit of all authentically Christian political action. By love, I don’t mean “love” in a sentimental or indulgent sense, the kind that offers “tolerance” as an alibi for inaction in the face of evil. I mean love in the biblical sense: love with a heart of courage, love determined to build justice in society and focused on the true good of the whole human person, body and soul.

Human progress means more than getting more stuff, more entitlements, and more personal license. Real human progress always includes man’s spiritual nature. Real human progress satisfies the human hunger for solidarity and communion. So when our leaders and their slogans tell us to move “forward into the future,” we need to take a very hard look at the road we’re on, where “forward” leads, and whether it ennobles the human soul or just aggravates our selfishness, our isolation, and our appetite for things.

What all this means for our public life is this: Religious believers can live quite peacefully with the separation of Church and state, so long as the arrangement translates into real freedom of religion, and not the half-starved copy of the real thing called “freedom of worship”. We can never accept a separation of our religious faith and moral convictions from our public ministries or our political engagement. It’s impossible. And even trying to do so is evil because it forces us to live two different lives, worshiping God at home and in our churches; and worshiping the latest version of Caesar everywhere else. That turns our private convictions into lies we tell to ourselves and to each other.

Here’s my second point.
Religious faith sincerely believed and humbly lived serves human dignity. It fosters virtue, not conflict. Therefore, it’s vital in building a humane society. This should be too obvious to mention. But one of the key assumptions of the modern secular state – in effect, the secular creation myth – is that religion is naturally prone to violence because it’s irrational and divisive. Secular, non-religious authority, on the other hand, is allegedly rational and unitive. Therefore, the job of secular authority is peacemaking; in other words, it must keep religious fanatics from killing each other and everybody else.

The problem with that line of thought is this: It’s simply an Enlightenment fantasy. Secular politics and ideologies have murdered and oppressed more people in the last one hundred years – often in the name of “science” – than all religions together have managed to mistreat in the last millennium.

What’s really going on in much of today’s political hand-wringing about religious extremism and looming theocracy is a push by America’s elites and leadership classes to get religion out of the way. God is a competitor in forming the public will, so God needs to go.

Here’s my third point. Man is a moral and believing animal. The need to believe is hardwired into human nature. Christian Smith, Notre Dame’s distinguished social researcher, notes that all human beings, everywhere and always, have a need to believe something as an organizing idea or truth, and to behave according to a moral code that distinguishes right from wrong.

Why is that important? It’s important because any claim that atheists, agnostics and a secularized intelligentsia are naturally more “rational” than religious believers is nonsense. We’re all believers. There are no unbelievers. Smith puts it this way:

All human beings are believers, not “knowers” who know with certitude. Everything we know is grounded on presupposed beliefs that cannot be verified with more fundamental proof or certainty that provides us with assurance they are true. That is just as true for atheists as [it is] for religious adherents…. All human knowing is built on believing. That is the human condition.

To put it another way, atheists just worship a smaller and less forgiving god at a different altar. And it means that people of faith should make no apologies – none at all – for engaging public issues respectfully but vigorously, guided by a faith that informs and humanizes their reason. Having said all that, the question is: How can we build a culture of religious freedom?

We can start by changing the way we think. Patriotism is a limited virtue. Our political system has many strengths. But it’s not an end in itself. Majority opinion doesn’t determine what is good and true. Like every other form of social organization, democracy can become a form of idolatry and a license for inhumanity. The deep moral problems we now face in our country didn’t happen overnight. They’ve been fed by a false understanding of freedom for decades, and they have roots in the exile of God from public consciousness.

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Critics often accuse faithful Christians of pursuing a “culture war” on issues like abortion, sexuality, marriage and the family, and religious liberty. And in a sense, they’re right. We are fighting for what we believe. But of course, so are advocates on the other side of all these issues. They too are “culture warriors,” and neither they nor we should feel uneasy about it. Democracy thrives on the struggle of competing ideas. We steal from ourselves and from everyone else if we try to avoid that struggle. In fact, two of the worst qualities in any human being are cowardice and acedia. By “acedia,” I mean the kind of moral sloth that masquerades as “tolerance” and leaves a human soul so empty of courage and character that even the devil Screwtape would spit it out.

In real life, democracy is built on two practical pillars: cooperation and conflict. It requires both. Cooperation, because people have a natural hunger for the kind of solidarity that makes all community possible. And conflict, because people have competing visions of what’s right and true. The more deeply they hold their convictions, the more naturally people seek to have those convictions shape society.

What that means for people of faith is this: We have a duty to treat all persons with charity and justice. We also have a duty to seek common ground where possible, but that’s never an excuse for compromising with grave evil. It’s never an excuse for being naive. And it’s never an excuse for standing idly by while our liberty to preach and serve God in the public square is whittled away. As the team at ADF knows better than anyone, we need to work vigorously in law and politics to form our culture in a God-based understanding of human dignity and the purpose of human freedom. Otherwise, we should stop trying to fool ourselves that we really believe what we claim to believe.

There’s more. To work as our country’s political life was intended, America needs a special kind of citizenry; we need a mature, well-informed electorate of persons able to reason clearly and rule themselves prudently. If that’s true – and it is – then the greatest danger to American liberty in our day is not religious extremism. It’s something very different. It’s a culture of narcissism that cocoons us in dumbed down, bigoted news, vulgarity, distraction and noise, while methodically excluding God from the human imagination.

Kierkegaard once wrote that “the introspection of silence is the condition of all educated intercourse,” and that “talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness.” Silence feeds the soul. Silence invites God to speak. And silence is exactly what American culture no longer allows. Securing the place of religious freedom in our society is therefore not just a matter of law and politics, but of prayer, interior renewal – and also education.

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If we want a culture of religious freedom, we need to begin living that culture here, today, and now. We live it by giving ourselves wholeheartedly to God – by loving God with passion and joy, confidence and courage, and by holding nothing back. God will take care of the rest. Scripture says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Ps 127:1). In the end, God is the builder. We’re the living stones. The firmer our faith, the deeper our love, the purer our zeal for God’s will – then the stronger the house of freedom will be that rises in our own lives, and in the life of our nation.

I’ll end now with just a few thoughts that are a bit more personal. I’ll turn seventy-five at the end of September. In accord with Canon Law – the law that orders the internal life of the Catholic Church – I’ll be offering my resignation to Pope Francis. When I sat down to write these remarks, I did it knowing that this talk will probably be the last one I give as Archbishop of Philadelphia. So the words matter. I’ve been a priest for almost fifty years and a bishop for more than thirty. And that gift from God as a priest of Jesus Christ has been a source of deep and enduring happiness. It has been the greatest blessing of my life.

But, in fact, my life has been filled with too many blessings to count – blessings that include so many, many friends. The leaders, staff, and supporters of ADF will always rank very high among those friends. All of you know the importance of the work you do, or you wouldn’t do it. But what you can’t know, at least in this world, is how many thousands of people you’ve lifted up with courage and confidence and hope through your efforts.

That’s the essence of friendship – offering ourselves, out of love, for the sake of others – and friendship is the heart of the Christian life. Every Christian vocation is simply an intimate friendship with God and others who love him. And it always brings forth new life. For a married couple, it brings forth children; for those of us in ministry, it brings forth the birth of faith in another person’s heart. Always, it brings forth new life. God radiates beauty, and hope, and new life, and he can’t help himself. It’s in his nature to love. He proved that once and for all on Golgotha. So thank you, to everyone in ADF, for all that you do for the rest of us in his name.

Many years ago, the neurologist Oliver Sacks published a book called Awakenings.  It’s the story of an experiment Sacks ran in 1969. Sacks gave the drug L-Dopa to a group of patients who had been catatonic for decades. The results were dramatic. The patients literally “woke up” to a much higher level of understanding, functioning, and communication. And they discovered a world that had greatly changed since their original illness.

The results were temporary. All of the patients eventually slipped back into silence or developed other medical problems. But while they had their window of clarity they saw the world as it really is, and they experienced it with all of the wonder, suffering, fear, and joy that give life its grandeur.

We need to remember those patients. We need to wake each other up to see the world and our nation as they really are – the good along with the evil. We need to support each other in the work for religious freedom we share. We need to treat each other as friends, not enemies or strangers. We need to learn from each other’s successes and mistakes. And unlike the patients of Dr Sacks, we need to keep each other from slipping back into the narcotic haze that so much of America’s everyday life has become.

To put it another way: It’s important for our own integrity and the integrity of our country to fight for our convictions in the public square. But the greater task is to live what we claim to believe by our actions: fidelity to God, love for spouse and children, loyalty to friends, generosity to the poor, honesty and mercy in dealing with others, trust in the goodness of people, and discipline and humility in demanding the most from ourselves.

These things sound like pieties. That’s all they are, until we try to live them. Then their cost and their difficulty remind us that we create a culture of human dignity in the measure that we give our lives to others. Nations change when people change. And people change through the witness of other people – people like each of you here today. You create the future with the choices you make.

So serve the poor. Help the weak. Protect the unborn child. Speak the truth about the beauty and order of creation: Male and female he created them (Gen 5:2). Fight for your right to love and serve God, and for others to do the same. Defend the dignity of marriage and the family, and witness their meaning and hope to others by the example of your lives. If you do that, you’ll inspire others to do the same. And you’ll discover in your own life what it means to be fully human.

God bless all of you.