{"id":1269,"date":"2016-12-16T01:12:52","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T06:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/?p=1269"},"modified":"2016-12-16T01:22:19","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T06:22:19","slug":"abp-chaput-religious-freedom-in-danger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/2016\/12\/abp-chaput-religious-freedom-in-danger\/","title":{"rendered":"Abp. Chaput: Religious Freedom in Danger"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Winona Daily New.com<\/div>\n
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\u00c2\u00a0Religious freedom is a fundamental natural right and first among our liberties. This is borne out by the priority protection it specifically enjoys in the Constitution\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s First Amendment.<\/div>\n
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Consider four brief points:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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First, religious faith and practice are cornerstones of the American experience. Many of America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first settlers were fleeing religious persecution. Nearly all of the American founders saw religious faith as vital to the life of a free people. They believed that liberty and happiness grow organically out of virtue. And for the founders, virtue needed grounding in religious faith.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00c2\u00a0At the heart of American public life is an essentially religious vision of man and government. This model has given us a free society marked by a wide variety of cultural and religious expressions. But our system\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s success does not result from clever legal mechanics. Our system works precisely because of the moral assumptions that undergird it. And those assumptions have religious roots.<\/div>\n
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When the founders talked about religion, they meant more than a vague \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirituality.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The distinguished legal scholar Harold Berman showed that the founders \u00e2\u20ac\u201d though they had differing views about religion among themselves \u00e2\u20ac\u201d understood religion positively as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153both belief in God and belief in an after-life of reward for virtue, and punishment for sin.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In other words, religion mattered. It made people live differently and live better. People\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s faith was assumed to have broad implications, including the political kind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That leads to my second point: Freedom of religion is more than freedom of worship. The right to worship is a necessary but not a sufficient part of religious liberty. For most believers, and certainly for Christians, faith requires community. It begins in worship, but it also demands preaching, teaching, and service. Real faith always bears fruit in public witness and action. Otherwise it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just empty words.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The founders saw the public value of religious faith because they inherited its legacy and experienced its formative influence themselves. They created a nation designed to depend on the moral convictions of religious believers, and to welcome their active role in public life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my third point: Threats against religious freedom in our country are not imaginary or overstated. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re happening right now. One example is the Obama administration\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Health and Human Services mandate, commonly called the contraceptive mandate, which violates the religious identity of many religiously inspired public ministries. Government now increasingly interferes with the conscience rights of medical providers, private employers and individual citizens and attacks the policies, hiring practices and tax statuses of religious charities and ministries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Much of this hostility links to Catholic and other religious teaching on the dignity of life and human sexuality. Catholic moral convictions about abortion, contraception and the purpose of sexuality are clearly unpopular in some quarters. Yet Catholic ideas about the nature of personhood, marriage and sexuality are rooted not just in revelation, but also in reason and natural law. Human beings have an inherent nature that is not just the product of accident or culture, but universal and rooted in permanent truths knowable to reason.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00c2\u00a0This understanding of the human person anchors the entire American experiment. If human nature is little more than modeling clay, and no permanent human nature exists by the hand of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nature\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s God,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d then natural, unalienable rights obviously can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exist. And no human \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rights\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can finally claim priority over the interests of the state.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The problem is that critics of religious faith tend to reduce all of these moral convictions to an expression of subjective beliefs. And if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re purely subjective beliefs, then \u00e2\u20ac\u201d so the critics will argue \u00e2\u20ac\u201d they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be rationally defended. And because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re rationally indefensible, they should be treated as a form of prejudice. In effect, 2,000 years of moral experience, moral reasoning, and religious conviction suddenly become a species of bias.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more, though. When religious belief is redefined downward to a kind of private bias, then the religious identity of institutional ministries has no public value, other than the utility of getting credulous people to do good things. And exempting Catholic social ministries, for example, from actions that directly contradict their religious identity, becomes a concession to private \u00e2\u20ac\u0153prejudice.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And concessions to private prejudice feed bigotry and hurt the public \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or so the reasoning goes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Winona Daily New.com \u00c2\u00a0Religious freedom is a fundamental natural right and first among our liberties. This is borne out by the priority protection it specifically enjoys in the Constitution\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s First Amendment. Consider four brief points: First, religious faith and practice are cornerstones of the American experience. Many of America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first settlers were fleeing religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.latinliturgy.org\/phila\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}