An increasingly heated debate is taking place in America to redefine the role of faith in the public square. Faith has been a part of the American experience since the earliest days of the founding. As the nation now considers the relationship of the sacred and the secular, it may be helpful to reconsider our roots. [...]
In making a case for the property rights of the American clergy, Bishop John Carroll made a revolutionary case for the nature of the American Church’s relationship with Rome. In these United States our Religious system has undergone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our political one. —John Carroll, 1783 John Carroll and his fellow [...]
The document entitled “To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, A Memorial and Remonstrance” is a jewel of republican rhetoric.[1] Nor has this choice example of American eloquence gone without notice. And yet, compared to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, it has remained obscure—more often quarried for stately [...]
The assault on religious freedom is not occurring in a vacuum. Freedoms of speech and association have also come under siege. These attacks prove a more general truth: that freedom is interconnected; when one basic freedom is undermined, all freedoms are undermined. On the culture-and-religion front, so much has changed over the past three and [...]
The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in the case of Shurtleff v. Boston is in line with the Court’s other recent rulings overturning attempts by state and local government to restrict religious freedom. In Boston, a gay pride flag was allowed to be run up the flagpole of city hall, but the flag of a Christian [...]
Christ assumed the whole of humanity in his assumption of the individual human nature received from and through his mother Mary. Politics is about the final end of human existence, and so politics has an essential relation to the Christian claim. The claim cannot be avoided; it can only be affirmed or denied. When thinking [...]
James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" is in truth among the finest of those works of republican rhetoric in which one finds an adroit enunciation of liberty. The document entitled “To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, A Memorial and Remonstrance” is a jewel of republican rhetoric.[1] Nor has this choice example [...]
The reality is that no person and no private institution can escape the ceaseless initiatives by legal activists, judicial activists, cities, states, and, depending upon the Administration, the federal government to re-standardize American public as well as private life, and search out and cancel dissenters. In recent years, including this presidential year, cases in the [...]
From Tertullian, a North African Christian writer of the early third century, to the Reformation, there is a significant Christian tradition that affirms religious freedom. The origin story of religious liberty commonly cited in college courses and museums, informed by proponents of the so-called Whig view of history, goes something like this. In the West, [...]
Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains… some samples or glimpses of final victory. – J.R.R. Tolkien Together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat. – Galadriel My kingdom is not of this world. [...]
Though Masterpiece is a decision upholding religious liberty, the Supreme Court’s ruling makes it clear that free speech about homosexuality does not enjoy broad protections… In the first of two momentous cases on its docket as to whether some Americans can be left alone as dissenters from the punishing orthodoxies of the progressive society and state, [...]
God unequally bestows gifts to us that are to be used for the common good. The wise can guide others; the well-organized can administer businesses that provide employment; the strong can protect the weak. With such an understanding, equality and a hierarchical social structure are not incompatible, but complement each other. My three children grew [...]
Thomas Jefferson considered his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom one of his three greatest accomplishments; he dictated that his gravestone should acknowledge this fact next to his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his founding of the University of Virginia. Drafted in 1777, the statute was first introduced into the Virginia [...]
The “separation of church and state” was intended in part to prevent the sorts of religious conflicts that had racked Europe in previous centuries. Nevertheless, it was only a matter of time before the ambiguity of this figure of speech would be exploited. During her confirmation hearing last September, Notre Dame law professor, Amy Coney Barrett, [...]