Defending the Founders’ Gift to America and the World – Free Exercise of Religion

I am deeply honored to receive ADF’s Edwin Meese Award. Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to have a meeting with General Meese to discuss my own work on religious freedom. General Meese is a Barnabas – an encourager. I left that meeting affirmed in my own vocation to be a defender of religious freedom.

That is a vocation I had first embraced, of all places, at the US Department of State. I was a career diplomat assigned to the new Office of International Religious Freedom, created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act.

As you may know, the State Department has long been one of the most secular institutions in government (and that’s saying something). Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once wrote that our diplomats were trained to stay away from religion because it was nothing but trouble.

This seems a serious deficiency in the agency charged with advancing American values and interests in a world saturated by religion of one sort or another. State’s Office of International Religious Freedom was intended to help overcome that religion-avoidance syndrome, and in some ways it has. But under progressive leadership, our diplomacy has, I regret to say, reverted to type.

That reversion is but one symptom of a deeper problem that I want to address today.

For most of our history, the approach to religion established by America’s Founders – that is to say, a constitutional right to its free exercise – was viewed as an extraordinary gift to America, and by extension, to the world. But today, religion – especially traditional religion – is under attack in America, as is religious freedom itself.

The free exercise of religion has yielded extraordinary benefits to our country. For two centuries, it anchored a productive moral culture derived from traditional Judeo-Christian values. That culture was a source of unity and purpose that helped reconcile Americans even after grievous national crises from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Today, the Left is supplanting that traditional moral culture, including American views of religion, morality, virtue, and the religious freedom that has sustained it. New and radical moral norms have infiltrated most of our cultural institutions. This has triggered a veritable cultural revolution that threatens American exceptionalism in a way that deserves greater attention from conservatives.

The recent election results may defer this threat for a season, but no political change alone can defeat it. Politics in America follows culture.

At this moment in our history, conservative defense of religious freedom is critical.

So let’s begin with a look at how a progressive moral culture threatens American greatness, and then turn to the Founders’ gift as the way forward.

At the core of the Left’s objection to traditional religion is a false and dangerous anthropology – the idea that humans are radically autonomous beings whose actions are unrestrained by any objective truth, including accountability to a God of love and justice, to the natural law, or even to material reality.

This idea of radical human autonomy is not new. It draws on perennial Leftist intellectual trends, such as moral relativism, nihilism, materialism, and Marxism. Today’s version also reflects a reliance on self-validating emotion, and a rejection of reason and common sense. All of these trends have converged in recent years to capture most of our cultural institutions.

The destructive impact of the autonomy concept is perhaps best revealed in the idea of “gender fluidity” – the false and dangerous proposition that human beings, including children, may acquire a “gender identity” that is somehow incompatible with their sex by using therapeutic counseling, cross-hormone drugs, and surgeries that both mutilate the body, and render it permanently infertile.

Of course, there are genuine cases of gender dysphoria and human suffering, and we should address them with compassion and love. But the false idea of “gender fluidity” has been endorsed by the medical profession. Progressives have convinced much of Gen Z that changing their sex will both end their suffering and make them happy. This is a terrible lie, which we should also fight with compassion and love.

A belief in radical human autonomy fuels other elements of progressive policy. If humans are truly autonomous, free to choose with no concern for objective moral or material truths, sexual expression can be understood as solely about human pleasure, or marriage as a dissolvable contract to satisfy adult desires.

In this moral dystopia, women and girls, men and boys, are free to dispose of the unborn child if they believe her presence limits their freedom. This belief has induced millions of Americans simply to wish away the scientific truth that the unborn child is a human being, and to ignore the only just and humane conclusion – that the child in the womb warrants the same legal protections as the rest of us.

Much of the American public no longer believes that abortion is a tragic reality that should be safe, legal, and rare. The very act of abortion is now understood as a public good – good for women, good for men, and good for America.

Each of these products of radical human autonomy has become an “inviolable human right” in the progressive moral universe. The Biden administration has formally and publicly rejected the very existence of inalienable rights as given by God, and as codified by our Founders.

Unfortunately, most progressive rights have also been sanctioned by the Supreme Court. Justice Anthony Kennedy provided the model in Casey by declaring for the Court: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Today that model of human autonomy is deeply embedded in our public schools, elite universities, the media, Big Tech, and large corporations. It is lodged in the sports and entertainment industries, our diplomacy, and even our military forces.

This model is far more than mere opinion. Its departure from reality has necessitated coercion:

• Blue state laws denying parents the knowledge that their child seeks a so-called “gender transition” or an abortion;
• Corporations requiring DEI training to ensure employees affirm the new rights, or risk their careers;
• Lawsuit after lawsuit against religious resisters like the Little Sisters of the Poor or the baker, Jack Phillips, because of their refusal to support abortion or same-sex marriage;
• The outrageous punishments proposed in the absurdly named “Equality Act.”

These and countless other coercive policies are designed to intimidate defenders of traditional morality into silence. Here, despite the march of progressive moral norms through our cultural institutions, the Left has not yet entirely succeeded. If we are to turn back this assault, we must reappropriate the Founders’ gift.

Let’s turn to what the Founders were actually doing with religion and religious freedom.

Most on the Left insist that the Founders’ political and moral legacy was to exclude religion from the public life of America. As this narrative has it, the Founders were highly influenced by the 18^th Century Enlightenment’s enthronement of pure reason. As a result, they viewed religion as irrational superstition to be protected, if at all, in private worship.

Most of the Founders were indeed well acquainted with classical philosophers of rationality, such as Aristotle and Cicero, as well as the Enlightenment opponents of religion such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot. 

And yet, the Founders’ writings cited the Bible more than any of these sources. Their familiarity with the Bible led them to position religion, which they understood as both faith and reason, at the center of the new republic.

The historical evidence shows that the Founders’ provision of a constitutional right for all citizens to the free exercise of religion included public exercise, as well as private worship. They were coercing no one. To the contrary, they were employing religious freedom to achieve a public good.

Some, like Jefferson, rejected most religion but still believed it necessary to the success of the new republic. Others, such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington emphasized biblical faith and reason together, the primary source of the virtue and morality vital to their experiment in self-government.

John Adams made the striking statement that “the doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the Christian doctrine that we are all children of the same Father, all accountable to him for our conduct to one another, all equally bound to respect one another….”

Further, Adams wrote, the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” In his second farewell address, George Washington insisted that “all of the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

In sum, the Founders’ wisdom was broad and deep. At its heart was a high view of Judeo-Christian religion that encompassed both faith and reason. The result was unprecedented in history, and it has until recently remained so.

No other nation before or since had provided a constitutional right of free exercise of religion to all its citizens. No other nation had understood free exercise as a natural right given by God to every human being, and therefore protected from state control. No other nation had employed public free exercise to build trust and unity among fiercely independent citizens who have highly antagonistic religious and political opinions.

Here are a few examples of the contributions of free exercise to our nation. Please note how progressives today disparage most of these contributions.

• Free exercise has strengthened our constitutional system of limited government by acknowledging a divine authority greater than government. Today, the Left acknowledges no authority greater than government.
• Free exercise has helped us reject the lie that we are merely material beings who should live for ourselves, seeking personal gratification because that is all there is. Today that lie is conveyed to our children by our progressive education system.
• Free exercise has generated the most productive faith-based civil society in history, empowering thousands of religious institutions that provide care for the poor, the sick, the orphan, the aged, and the dying. Progressives sue the morally orthodox among these groups, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, over and over again.
• Free exercise has sanctioned what the great jurist Michael McConnell has called “religious arguing” for public policies. Religious arguments have driven the most consequential reform movements in our history, namely, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and the right to life. Today, the Left often claims that religious arguments for public policies are unconstitutional and bigoted.
• Free exercise has encouraged the survival of traditional views of marriage and family. Today, progressives consider such views as hateful toward same-sex couples. Many progressives actually value childless couples as ways to control population growth and mitigate climate change, even as plummeting birth rates endanger our nation.
• Free exercise has enabled the survival of traditional liberal education amid progressive education that abandons both faith and reason. It has encouraged Christian students to stand with their Jewish peers in fighting the growing scourge of anti-Semitism in America.
• Free exercise has strengthened our health care system and our military by defending the rights of morally traditional medical and military professionals. Progressives often seek to ruin the careers of both.

Let me stress again that the Founders’ model of religious freedom was not one of religious or political coercion. It was grounded in Judeo-Christian principles, but it did not and does not bind anyone. It does not coerce or punish. It encourages the religious to view their adversaries as endowed with the divine image and worthy of respect. Allowing for human frailty and corruptibility, the Founders’ model has worked well.

It has worked because the free exercise of religion produced a public moral culture grounded in a unifying anthropology and a belief in objective truth. Every human being has dignity given by God. Every person has a purpose greater than fulfilling his desires. He exists for something, for someone, greater than himself. And he warrants a government that will protect his freedom to be faithful to that vision.

This moral culture has almost vanished in America, replaced by a toxic waste dump of self-regard and its inevitable progeny of coercion. It has also yielded unhappiness and despair. A recent article in The Atlantic by Christine Emba examined why America’s young adults aren’t having children. She asked whether the cause was finances, climate change, war, or political instability.

She concluded that none of these problems explained the choice to be childless. What did explain it was: “uncertainty … about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose, or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child.”

This is perhaps the most devastating aspect of the radical moral culture now infecting our institutions and young adults – our future leaders, namely the belief that there is no purpose to life, to believing in God, to being a mother or a father, or to being a citizen in a nation they have been taught is hateful, racist, and theocratic.

This is a counsel of despair. Is it any wonder that so many of our youth are reporting deep unhappiness, loneliness, and isolation, turning to drugs, and committing suicides of despair? Is it any wonder that the right they hold most sacred is the right to eliminate the child in the womb, or that so many believe they can end their suffering by trying to change their sex?

The progressive assault on our culture and on religious freedom is not simply the result of citizens with different values. All Americans are entitled to their views. But they are not entitled to silence others. That is not democracy. Rather, it is the solvent of democracy. Far from bringing us together, it is cleaving us into two warring cultures.

Conservatism provides a remedy that is unavailable to contemporary progressives. Historically, conservatism has been a movement grounded in reality, one that assumes the existence of objective, knowable, transcendent and material truths. To be sure, true conservatives vigorously debate these truths and how they can be employed to help our nation. But progressives create their own truths and debate how to use them in gaining and retaining cultural and political power.

For the sake of our nation, we must not allow that to continue.

Many conservatives are engaging in this fight. But too few are engaged in the project of restoring the Founders’ vision for the free exercise of religion as the critical counterweight to progressive moral ideology.

As a conservative who has made recommendations on religious freedom policy for recent incoming administrations, I will end by exhorting you to fight the mounting dangers to this blessed land from the opponents of traditional religion and its sacred protector, religious freedom American-style.

Your love for America is in your DNA, and you work hard for its flourishing and its success. You are indispensable to this multi-generational battle.

Again, thank you to ADF for honoring me with this award. May God bless you all.

Since 2009, ADF annually confers the Edwin Meese III Originalism & Religious Liberty Award to honor Americans for their achievements in publicly promoting and defending religious liberty in keeping with the constitutional intent and commitment of our nation’s Founding Fathers. Past award recipients include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Judge Robert H. Bork, The Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, Dr. Albert Mohler, Ambassador Samuel D. Brownback, Chuck Colson, and Professor Robert P. George, among others.

---