Building a culture of religious freedom
Address Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia gave at the Napa Institute
on July 26.
By ARCHBISHOP CHARLES CHAPUT
A friend of mine, a political scientist, recently posed two very good
questions. They go right to the heart of our discussion today. He
wondered, first, if the religious freedom debate had “crossed a
Rubicon” in our country’s political life. And, second, he asked if
Catholic bishops now found themselves opposed — in a new and
fundamental way — to the spirit of American society.
I’ll deal with his first question in a moment. I’ll come back to his
second question at the end of my remarks. But we should probably begin
our time together today by recalling that even at the height of
anti-Catholic bigotry, Catholics have always served our country with
distinction. More than 80 Catholic chaplains died in World War II,
Korea and Vietnam. All four chaplains who won the Medal of Honor in
those wars were Catholic priests.
Time and again, Catholics have proven their love of our nation with
their talent, hard work and blood. So, if the bishops of the United
States ever find themselves opposed, in a fundamental way, to the
spirit of our country, the fault won’t lie with our bishops. It will
lie with political and cultural leaders who turned our country into
something it was never meant to be.
So, having said that, let’s turn to my friend’s first question.
The Rubicon is a river in northern Italy. It’s small and forgettable,
except for one thing. During the Roman Republic, it marked a border. To
the south lay Italy, ruled directly by the Roman Senate. To the north
lay Gaul, ruled by a governor. Under Roman law, no general could enter
Italy with an army. Doing so carried the death penalty. In 49 B.C.,
when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his 13th Legion and marched
on Rome, he triggered a civil war and changed the course of history.
Ever since then, “crossing the Rubicon” has meant passing a point of no
return.
Caesar’s march on Rome is a very long way from our nation’s current
disputes over religious liberty. But “crossing the Rubicon” is still a
useful image. My friend’s point is this: Have we, in fact, crossed a
border in our country’s history — the line between a religion-friendly
past and an emerging America much less welcoming to Christian faith and
witness?
Let me describe the nation we were and the nation we’re becoming. Then
you can judge for yourselves.
People often argue about whether America’s Founders were mainly
Christian, mainly Deist or both of the above. It’s a reasonable debate.
It won’t end anytime soon. But no one can reasonably dispute that the
Founders’ moral framework was overwhelmingly shaped by Christian faith.
And that makes sense because America was largely built by Christians.
The world of the American Founders was heavily Christian, and they saw
the value of publicly engaged religious faith because they experienced
its influence themselves. They created a nation designed in advance to
depend on the moral convictions of religious believers and to welcome
their active role in public life.
The Founders also knew that religion is not just a matter of private
conviction. It can’t be reduced to personal prayer or Sunday worship.
It has social implications. The Founders welcomed those implications.
Christian faith demands preaching, teaching, public witness and service
to others — by each of us alone and by acting in cooperation with
fellow believers. As a result, religious freedom is never just freedom
from repression, but also — and more importantly — freedom for active
discipleship. It includes the right of religious believers, leaders and
communities to engage society and to work actively in the public
square. For the first 160 years of the republic, cooperation between
government and religious entities was the norm in addressing America’s
social problems. And that brings us to our country’s current
situation.
Americans have always been a religious people. They still are. Roughly
80% of Americans call themselves Christians. Millions of Americans take
their faith seriously. Millions act on it accordingly. Religious
practice remains high. That’s the good news. But there’s also bad
news. In our courts, in our lawmaking, in our popular entertainment
and even in the way many of us live our daily lives, America is
steadily growing more secular. Mainline churches are losing ground.
Many of our young people spurn Christianity. Many of our young adults
lack any coherent moral formation. Even many Christians who do practice
their religion follow a kind of easy, self-designed Gospel that led
author Ross Douthat to call us a “nation of heretics.”^^[1] Taken
together, these facts suggest an American future very different from
anything in our nation’s past.
There’s more. Contempt for religious faith has been growing in
America’s leadership classes for many decades, as scholars like
Christian Smith and Christopher Lasch have shown.^^[2] But in recent
years, government pressure on religious entities has become a pattern,
and it goes well beyond the current administration’s HHS [Health and
Human Services] mandate. It involves interfering with the conscience
rights of medical providers, private employers and individual citizens.
And it includes attacks on the policies, hiring practices and tax
statuses of religious charities, hospitals and other ministries. These
attacks are real. They’re happening now. And they’ll get worse as
America’s religious character weakens.
This trend is more than sad. It’s dangerous. Our political system
presumes a civil society that pre-exists and stands outside the full
control of the state. In the American model, the state is meant to be
modest in scope and constrained by checks and balances. Mediating
institutions like the family, churches and fraternal organizations feed
the life of the civic community. They stand between the individual and
the state. And when they decline, the state fills the vacuum they
leave. Protecting these mediating institutions is therefore vital to
our political freedom. The state rarely fears individuals, because,
alone, individuals have little power. They can be isolated or ignored.
But organized communities are a different matter. They can resist. And
they can’t be ignored.
This is why, for example, if you want to rewrite the American story
into a different kind of social experiment, the Catholic Church is such
an annoying problem. She’s a very big community. She has strong
beliefs. And she has an authority structure that’s very hard to break
— the kind that seems to survive every prejudice and persecution and
even the worst sins of her own leaders. Critics of the Church have
attacked America’s bishops so bitterly, for so long, over so many
different issues — including the abuse scandal, but by no means
limited to it — for very practical reasons. If a wedge can be driven
between the pastors of the Church and her people, then a strong
Catholic witness on controversial issues breaks down into much weaker
groups of discordant voices.
The theme of our time together today is “building a culture of
religious freedom.” How do we do that?
We can start by changing the way we habitually think. Democracy is not
an end in itself. Majority opinion does not determine what is good and
true. Like every other form of social organization and power, democracy
can become a form of repression and idolatry. The problems we now face
in our country didn’t happen overnight. They’ve been growing for
decades, and they have moral roots. America’s bishops named the exile
of God from public consciousness as “the root of the world’s travail
today” nearly 65 years ago. And they accurately predicted the effects
of a life without God on the individual, the family, education,
economic activity and the international community.^^[3] Obviously, too
few people listened.
We also need to change the way we act. We need to understand that we
can’t “quick fix” our way out of problems we behaved ourselves into.
Catholics have done very well in the United States. As I said earlier,
most of us have a deep love for our country, its freedoms and its best
ideals. But this is not our final home. There is no automatic harmony
between Christian faith and American democracy. The eagerness of
Catholics to push their way into our country’s mainstream over the past
half century, to climb the ladder of social and economic success, has
done very little to Christianize American culture. But it’s done a
great deal to weaken the power of our Catholic witness.
In the words of scholar Robert Kraynak, democracy — for all of its
strengths — also “has within it the potential for its own kind of
`social tyranny.’” The reason is simple: Democracy advances “the forces
of mass culture which lower the tone of society … by lowering the
aims of life from classical beauty, heroic virtues and otherworldly
transcendence to the pursuits of work, material consumption and
entertainment.” This inevitably tends to “[reduce] human life to a
one-dimensional materialism and [an] animal existence that undermines
human dignity and eventually leads to the `abolition of man.’”^^[4]
To put it another way: The right to pursue happiness does not include a
right to excuse or ignore evil in ourselves or anyone else. When we
divorce our politics from a grounding in virtue and truth, we transform
our country from a living moral organism into a kind of golem of legal
machinery without a soul.
This is why working for good laws is so important. This is why getting
involved politically is so urgent. This is why every one of our votes
matters. We need to elect the best public leaders, who then create the
best policies and appoint the best judges. This has a huge impact on
the kind of nation we become. Democracies depend for their survival on
people of conviction fighting for what they believe in the public
square — legally and peacefully, but zealously and without apologies.
That includes you and me.
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 — 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 –and 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.^^[5]
In real life, democracy is built on two practical pillars: cooperation
and conflict. It requires both. Cooperation, because people have a
natural hunger for solidarity that makes all community possible. And
conflict, because people have competing visions of what is 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 Catholics is this: We have a duty to treat all
persons with charity and justice. We 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. We need to work vigorously in law and
politics to form our culture in a Christian 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 it was intended, America needs a special kind
of citizenry: 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.”^^[6] 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.
What I mean is this: We need to re-examine the spirit that has ruled
the Catholic approach to American life for the past 60 years. In
forming our priests, deacons, teachers and catechists — and especially
the young people in our schools and religious-education programs — we
need to be much more penetrating and critical in our attitudes toward
the culture around us. We need to recover our distinctive Catholic
identity and history. Then we need to act on them. America is becoming
a very different country, and as Ross Douthat argues so well in his
excellent book Bad Religion, a renewed American Christianity needs to
be ecumenical, but also confessional. Why? Because: “In an age of
institutional weakness and doctrinal drift, American Christianity has
much more to gain from a robust Catholicism and a robust Calvinism than
it does from even the most fruitful Catholic-Calvinist theological
dialogue.”^^[7]
America is now mission territory. Our own failures helped to make it
that way. We need to admit that. Then we need to re-engage the work of
discipleship to change it.
I want to close by returning to the second of my friend’s two
questions. He asked if our nation’s Catholic bishops now find
themselves opposed — in a new and fundamental way — to the nature of
American society. I can speak only for myself. But I suspect that for
many of my brother American bishops the answer to that question is a
mix of both No and Yes.
The answer is No in the sense that the Catholic Church has always
thrived in the United States, even in the face of violent bigotry.
Catholics love and thank God for this country. They revere the American
legacy of democracy, law and ordered liberty. As the bishops wrote in
1940 on the eve of World War II, “[We] renew [our] most sacred and
sincere loyalty to our government and to the basic ideals of the
American republic … [and we] are again resolved to give [ourselves]
unstintingly to its defense and its lasting endurance and
welfare.”^^[8] Hundreds of thousands of American Catholics did exactly
that on the battlefields of Europe and the South Pacific.
But the answer is Yes in the sense that the America of Catholic memory
is not the America of the present moment or the emerging future. Sooner
or later, a nation based on a degraded notion of liberty, on license
rather than real freedom — in other words, a nation of abortion,
disordered sexuality, consumer greed and indifference to immigrants and
the poor — will not be worthy of its founding ideals. And, on that
day, it will have no claim on virtuous hearts.
In many ways, I believe my own generation, the “boomer generation,” has
been one of the most problematic in our nation’s history because of our
spirit of entitlement and moral superiority; our appetite for material
comfort unmoored from humility; our refusal to acknowledge personal sin
and accept our obligations to the past.
But we can change that. Nothing about life is predetermined except the
victory of Jesus Christ. We create the future. We do it not just by
our actions, but by what we really believe — because what we believe
shapes the kind of people we are. In a way, “growing a culture of
religious freedom” is the better title for this talk. A culture is more
than what we make or do or build. A culture grows organically out of
the spirit of a people — how we live, what we cherish, what we’re
willing to die for.
If we want a culture of religious freedom, we need to begin it here,
today, now. We live it by giving ourselves wholeheartedly to God and
the Gospel of Jesus Christ — 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” (Psalm 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.
Archbishop Charles Chaput is archbishop of Philadelphia.
_______________________
^^[1] For patterns of religious belief in various age groups, see Barna
Group and Pew Research Center data. For the state of moral formation
among young adults, see Christian Smith, editor, Lost in Transition:
The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, Oxford University Press, New York,
2011. For an overview of American religious trends and their meaning,
see Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,
Free Press, New York, 2012
^^[2] See Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal
of Democracy, W.W. Norton, New York, 1995; and Christian Smith, editor,
The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests and Conflict in the
Secularization of American Public Life, University of California Press,
Los Angeles, 2003
^^[3] “Secularism,” a pastoral statement by the Administrative Board of
the National Catholic Welfare Conference, on behalf of the bishops of
the United States, November 14, 1947; as collected in Pastoral Letters
of the American Hierarchy, 1792-1970, Hugh J. Nolan, editor, Our Sunday
Visitor, Huntington, IN, 1971
^^[4] Robert Kraynak, “Citizenship in Two Worlds: On the Tensions
between Christian Faith and American Democracy,” Josephinum Journal of
Theology, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2009; see also a more extensive discussion of
this theme in his book, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and
Politics in the Fallen World, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre
Dame, IN, 2001
^^[5] C.S. Lewis, see his “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” in The Screwtape
Letters, HarperCollins, New York, 2001
^^[6] Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion,
HarperPerennial, New York, 2010, p. 44-45
^^[7] Douthat, Bad Religion, p. 286-287
^^[8] “The American Republic,” a statement by the bishops of the United
States, November 13, 1940; as collected in Pastoral Letters of the
American Hierarchy, 1792-1970
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