Reflections on America's Semiquincentennial

by Justin Soutar

This year we celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America, one of the greatest nations in the history of the world and certainly one of the greatest in modern times. Our imposing geographical size and relatively isolated position, our fertile soil and abundant mineral resources, our natural beauty and temperate climate, our vast and diverse population, our productive industry and commerce, our high employment rate and comfortable standard of living, our thriving financial sector, our large and well-trained armed forces, and our prominent influence in world affairs all contribute to our country’s greatness. However, the core of that greatness lies in 1) our appeal to universal and timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and 2) our traditional character as a religious and moral people.

The concept of natural law formed the philosophical foundation for the American colonists’ rebellion against British tyranny and their eventual momentous decision, after many years of lively discussion and intense debate, to politically separate the thirteen colonies from England. This is clear from the ringing opening text of the Declaration of Independence, which was primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson and finalized by the Second Continental Congress:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As men of faith and reason, our nation’s Founders unanimously recognized that “unalienable” human rights are gifts from God, and that the purpose of representative government is to protect these rights. In other words, they realized that human beings are given certain rights by God because of their very nature as persons created in his image, and that any government that refuses to respect these rights is not legitimate. It’s obvious that the Founders were not simply stating their subjective personal beliefs or opinions about the colonists’ problem and how it should be resolved. Justifying their course of action based on “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” anchored the Declaration firmly in the objective truth of natural law. Benjamin Franklin implicitly acknowledged this natural law basis for human rights when he wisely stated: “A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”

This is an important lesson for us today in the difficult battle against radical secularism, a virulent philosophy that directly attacks our traditional identity as a Judeo-Christian nation and the natural law principles of her foundation. In recent years, to cite just two of many examples, innocent healthcare providers and wedding-cake bakers have been dragged into court and threatened with huge fines for refusing to dispense abortifacient drugs or contraceptives or to bake a cake for a homosexual “wedding.” The well-intentioned lawyers representing these good people usually base their defense on their client’s right to act according to his or her personal religious and moral beliefs and conscience, a right indeed protected by the Constitution. While this approach has been fairly successful, its major flaw is its failure to take advantage of the objective truth of natural law, leaving the arguments stuck on the subjective plane of “conscience rights”.

Abortifacient drugs unjustly kill innocent unborn children, violating their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is a fact and not just someone’s sincerely held belief. No woman has a “right” to kill her unborn child. Contraceptives interfere with the essential love- and life-giving aspects of marriage as designed by the Creator. And natural law defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman; the immoral practice of sodomy is not “marriage”, and no two men or women have a “right” to call it that. Defense attorneys should be arguing their pro-life and pro-marriage cases from the natural law perspective that abortion, contraception for married couples, and sodomy are objectively evil (and thus harmful to society) by their very nature, not just because their clients happen to believe that they are evil and harmful, and that no one should be forced to participate in or to support such immoral activities. In order to effectively defeat the ideology of radical secularism, we should abandon the subjective territory of “conscience rights” and reclaim the unassailable moral high ground—-the objective truth of natural law.

Intimately related to the natural law basis for human rights at the core of America’s greatness is our longstanding identity as a religious and moral people in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is evident at every turn, from the words and examples of the Founders, to the speeches and writings of our elected representatives and judges down through the decades, to the tens of thousands of churches dotting our landscape, to the prominent Catholic role in the development of our education and healthcare systems, to Congressional sessions opening with prayer, to the display of the Ten Commandments in our Supreme Court building, to our national motto, “In God We Trust.”

George Washington declared: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” John Adams remarked: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” James Madison said: “We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity… to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Having toured the young United States, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville concluded: “America is great because America is good; and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

In his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, Abraham Lincoln asserted that God’s blessings “should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.” In his famous D-Day Prayer broadcast on national radio in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt said: “With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.” Ronald Reagan observed in the 1980s: “If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” In 2024, Donald Trump attributed his survival of an assassination attempt to “the grace of Almighty God.” The fourth stanza of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” includes the words: “Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land / Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation… And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’” And in the Pledge of Allegiance, we declare that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Our traditional character as a Christian nation, combined with our traditional natural law basis for human rights and liberties, has allowed us to achieve many remarkable things in the past 250 years in the areas of agriculture, architecture, art, aviation, communication, culture, economics, education, energy, entertainment, finance, foreign aid, geology, health care, immigration, law, literature, medicine, meteorology, music, political philosophy, science and technology, trade, transportation, space exploration, sports, world peace, and many other fields. We should celebrate and give thanks to God for all of these accomplishments.

This is not to say that our nation, comprised of flawed human beings, has perfectly lived up to her own ideals. True American patriots wholeheartedly celebrate all that was and is good in our nation while candidly admitting her past and present failures in certain areas and realistically acknowledging her current state of deep division and crisis. We unwisely tolerated the development of a partisan political system, which is now dominated by two major parties that are diametrically opposed on nearly every issue. We unjustly forced most Native Americans onto reservations, tolerated slavery and racial segregation for decades, and bombed innocent civilians in Japan in 1945. We’ve experienced a general religious and moral decline in recent decades with the spread of alcoholism and drugs, pornography, divorce, out of wedlock pregnancies, tens of millions of abortions, sexual abuse, sodomy, transgenderism, and mass shootings, as well as petty theft, vandalism, and littering. Civics education and prayer have all but vanished from our public schools.

Misguided DEI policies have barred hundreds of thousands of qualified people from good jobs. Inflation continues to depreciate the value of our money. Our $38 trillion dollar national debt is far beyond unsustainable yet continues to rise daily. Political corruption and media bias and censorship continue to threaten the common good and obscure the truth. Power struggles and gridlock have replaced bipartisanship and collaboration in Washington as Republicans and Democrats are now bitter enemies, with Democrats attempting to destroy President Donald Trump and to manipulate election laws to their own advantage. Israeli radical Zionists are systematically eliminating Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land, and we’re doing little if anything to stop it. And Communist China has stolen our computer software intellectual property; purchased large tracts of American farmland near our military bases; planted thousands of spies in our city halls and universities; and is actively working to replace us as the world’s leading superpower.

Worst of all, the rise of toxic radical secularist (aka “woke’) ideology, openly embraced by corrupt Democratic Party elites, has taught a large percentage of ignorant Americans to hate their country; to reject our traditional Christian identity and natural law foundation; to assert various new “rights” that exist only in their deluded minds; to discriminate against innocent white men; to disrespect our immigration authorities and police officers; to tear down statues of our national heroes; to stage violent protests; and to assassinate their political enemies. This dangerous ideology has profoundly divided our nation, seriously threatening its integrity and survival.

However, there are many signs of hope that our nation will survive the present grave crisis and enjoy a brighter future. Young Americans flocked to churches after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and purchases of new Bibles are on the rise. Millions of Americans are taking the free online civics courses offered by Hillsdale College, and Imprimis now has a monthly circulation of nearly eight million copies. Many employers are making color-blind and merit-based hiring decisions. More than 25 percent of American voters are now politically independent. The number of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics continues to dwindle. And the second Trump administration and congressional Republicans have already done much to repair and strengthen our country in many of the above-mentioned fields of endeavor.

America’s first Catholic president and Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” If we who continue to love this great nation are successful in converting and defeating her radically secularist traitors and in retaining the twin core of that greatness—-our appeal to timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and our traditional character as a religious and moral people—-then she will not only survive, unite, and heal, but will also achieve even greater and more spectacular things in the next two hundred fifty years.

Long live the United States of America!

Copyright © 2026 Justin D. Soutar.

The Natural Law Basis for Dobbs and Eliminating Legalized Abortion

by Justin Soutar

Like many other Americans of good will, during the past ten days I've been offering prayers of thanksgiving for the historic Supreme Court decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned the Court's terrible 1973 ruling in Roe vs. Wade. At the same time, I've been offering prayers of petition for the continued growth and spread of a culture of respect for life throughout our land.

The Dobbs decision is a credit to the fine legal minds and devout Catholicism of Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Writing for the majority, Alito is absolutely correct that the reasoning underpinning Roe was egregiously flawed, and that there is no "right to abortion" in the U.S. Constitution. These five justices performed their sworn duty before God to the American people by strictly interpreting the Constitution according to its original text, meaning, and intent with regard to abortion law. That is exactly what all Supreme Court justices are supposed to do in every legal case, regardless of the issue. They are not supposed to "legislate from the bench," twisting the Constitution's original meaning to impose a contemporary ideological viewpoint on the entire nation, as they did in Roe and have unfortunately done many times since then on other important issues.

So what does Catholicism have to do with the majority's ruling in Dobbs? Two things. First, the Catholic Church teaches that there is no conflict between faith and reason, properly understood and applied, because both come from God and are sources of objective truth. When taken seriously in its totality, when believed and practiced as intended, Catholicism not only encourages faith in God (religion) and love of God and neighbor (morality), but also good critical thinking, coherent logical reasoning, and sound judgment. This is why the Catholic Church founded the modern university system in Europe in the High Middle Ages, and it is a major reason why these five justices earned great legal reputations and were appointed to the highest court in the United States.

Secondly, as Catholic League president Bill Donohue pointed out in his excellent book Why Catholicism Matters (2012), the foundation of inalienable human rights originating from the Creator on which our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were built was given to the world by the Catholic Church. While some of her members have notoriously violated her teachings in these areas, the Church has steadfastly maintained the sacredness of human life and the immorality of abortion since ancient times and has developed her doctrine on ordered liberty in the course of centuries. Our nation's Founders inherited the timeless natural law principle of inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness primarily from Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Robert Bellarmine, and they explicitly constructed a new nation on this principle written by the Creator into the fabric of human nature.

The idea of objective and universal moral truths of divine origin existing outside of ourselves and to which we must humbly submit is anathema to the morally relativistic and radically secularist thinking that has poisoned our society with a hedonistic "culture of death" in recent years. As a result of Roe vs. Wade, during the past fifty years, more than sixty million innocent unborn children (potential citizens) of the United States have been brutally denied the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that were theoretically guaranteed to them by the Constitution for the sake of convenience. Simultaneously, the number of violent crimes against born human beings in this country has increased dramatically, and several states have legalized euthanasia. This should come as no surprise. Saint Teresa of Calcutta declared truthfully that abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace because if a woman can kill her unborn child, there is nothing to stop anyone else from killing whomever they wish to kill.

But the reality of inalienable human rights exists in all times and places, whether it is fully acknowledged and respected or not. The grave evil of African-American slavery was both legal and common throughout much of the United States for more than eighty years, and the alleged "right" to own slaves was even upheld for a time by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott vs. Sanford. Someday, the citizens of this country will rightly look back with utter horror at the Roe vs. Wade regime, viewing abortion the same way we view slavery today: How could this civilized nation founded on the principle of "liberty and justice for all" have tolerated such a grave injustice against so many millions of her own people for so many years?

I was disappointed but not surprised that Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the pro-Roe minority in the Dobbs case. Appointed to the High Court by President George W. Bush in 2005, Roberts was a faithful Catholic with apparently stellar conservative credentials. Just seven years later in 2012, however, Roberts was the deciding vote upholding the Affordable Care Act in United States vs. ObamaCare. He is an example of the unfortunate trend among many justices and judges in the United States in recent decades pointed out by Robert Bork in Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996): when conservative lawyers are placed in U.S. courts, they often become less conservative.

The Supreme Court was right to return the issue of abortion to us, the people and our elected representatives. Unfortunately, while many states will now vote to restrict abortion or to outlaw it altogether, some will keep it legal with few if any restrictions. The monumental challenge now facing the pro-life movement in the United States is to sufficiently educate and mobilize the public and elected representatives to eradicate the evil of legalized abortion from all fifty states, either state by state or through Congressional legislation. President Ronald Reagan foresaw the latter method in his famous "Evil Empire" speech of 1983, declaring, "Human life legislation ending this tragedy [abortion on demand] will someday pass the Congress, and you and I must not rest until it does."." 

If the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution mean anything, the inalienable right to life of American unborn children cannot be protected in some states and left unprotected in others per the differing whims of majority vote, court ruling, state law, or executive order. As a matter of basic justice, it must be legally guaranteed throughout the nation. Given the controversial nature of the issue, this won't happen without a fight. As we fought a Civil War for the just cause of eliminating legalized slavery, we may well have to fight another for the just cause of eliminating legalized abortion. Our national transformation from a culture of death to a culture of life will not happen overnight, and prayer and fasting will play a critical role in its success. The closing lyrics of our national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," come to mind:

O thus be it ever, when free men shall stand 

Between their loved homes and the war's desolation.  

Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n-rescued land 

Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserved us a nation!

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Copyright © 2022 Justin D. Soutar. All right reserved.

Defending our Freedom

As we Americans prepare to celebrate Independence Day less than two weeks from now, we American Catholics are observing the fifth annual Fortnight for Freedom declared by our bishops, a two-week period of prayer, fasting, education, and activism in support of religious liberty that always begins on June 21 and ends on the Fourth of July. Recognizing the increasing frequency and intensity of the attacks on freedom of religion by militant secularists, especially in our government and the courts but also in the media and our educational and cultural institutions, in the spring of 2012 our bishops published an important pastoral letter entitled "Our First, Most Cherished Liberty." In this document, our shepherds recalled America's rich tradition of religious freedom spanning four centuries; listed more than a dozen examples of recent attacks on that freedom; called the faithful to be vigilant in defending their hard-won religious liberties against the ever-mounting assault of radical secularism; and finally announced the first annual Fortnight for Freedom, which was promoted by EWTN and observed by Catholics across the United States.

Of course, the main event that led our bishops to establish this annual observance was the controversial HHS mandate bombshell dropped by the Obama administration in January of 2012, which demanded that health insurance plans across the country include artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients regardless of religious or moral objections to the distribution of such items. Although this mandate--the crucial centerpiece of the massively unpopular Affordable Care Act, generally known as ObamaCare--is still on the books four and a half years later, having been unfortunately upheld by the Supreme Court along with the rest of the ObamaCare travesty as somehow "constitutional" in June of 2012, dozens of lower court rulings against it have provided temporary injunctive relief to scores of Catholic and other Christian religious groups, healthcare providers, charitable organizations, universities, media entities, and other institutions that have rightly refused to comply with this unjust law despite the threat of crushing tax penalties. Furthermore, last year the Supreme Court ruled that most businesses that object to compliance with the mandate on religious grounds should be permanently exempt from it. So while some progress has been made against this particularly egregious and unconstitutional attack on our religious liberties, more remains to be done: it must be completely overturned.

Like the other freedoms we enjoy as Americans such as freedom of speech and of the press, freedom to peaceably assemble, and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, freedom of religion is a gift from our Creator that is guaranteed by our Constitution and must accordingly be protected by our government. No one should be forced into providing anti-life products and services that he or she considers immoral, against the dictates of his or her religion and conscience.

However, as Yuval Levin pointed out in an article in First Things magazine several months ago, we should beware of too narrowly individualistic, negative, and subjective an approach to religious liberty. Freedom of religion must not be confined to simply obtaining and retaining exemptions for certain individual persons and organizations that refuse to obey the law because they consider it wrong. Rather than being limited to a condescending exception for certain seemingly fanatical individuals within our society, religious liberty should be the rule for our society as a whole, as it was once upon a time. The idea here, which originated with our nation's founders, is that American society will flourish when all of its members are allowed to freely exercise their religious beliefs together as a community. In addition, it is fundamentally misguided to oppose the HHS mandate simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law that attacks our religious liberties and moral conscience rights or simply because we Catholics regard contraceptives and abortifacients as immoral drugs. Such arguments are too narrowly focused and too subjective to be really convincing in the long run, and our radically secularist opponents have already seized on those weaknesses to bolster their own position. We must go deeper, building our defense on the bedrock of natural law and objective truth. Ultimately, we seek to rid America of the HHS mandate, not simply because we Catholics consider it an unjust law, but because it is an unjust law--not only for Catholics, but for pro-life Americans of all faiths and even for pro-life atheists. It isn't just an attack on our religious liberties and moral conscience rights; it's an attack on the natural law established by our Creator and upon our sacred right as human beings to act in accordance with that law.

Anchored firmly in the natural law, the concept of ordered liberty was a key founding principle of our nation that unfortunately is largely forgotten today. In a remarkably Catholic view of this concept, the Founders regarded freedom not as the totally unrestricted ability of human beings to do whatever the heck they may want to do, but rather as the ability to do what they ought to do, what they should do. While the freedom our Creator has given us is indeed very broad, it does have certain limits that He has laid down for our own good, and those limits are defined by the natural law, which is accessible to human reason. As long as we obey the natural law and thus act in accord with right reason, we remain truly free as individuals and as a nation. Morally speaking, to violate the natural law is an abuse of freedom, which was once commonly referred to as license or permissiveness.

A big part of the problem with America today is that we have largely abandoned this rational concept of ordered liberty rooted in the Creator's natural law in favor of a nebulous, ill-defined sort of "freedom" that is ultimately a product of moral relativism. In the past, our nation had laws prohibiting obscenity, indecency, and pornography in printed material and radio broadcasts; these entirely reasonable laws, which reflected the natural law, benefited our society by discouraging certain forms of immorality, which naturally helped to protect our freedom. No one at the time ever claimed that these laws violated anyone's right to freedom of speech. But if someone today advocates for bringing back such laws, he or she is derided as a crackpot fundamentalist who opposes freedom of speech. That's a shame. We must revive this forgotten concept of ordered liberty based on "the laws of nature and nature's God" in order to re-learn the true meaning of freedom, so that we can preserve this treasure and hand it on to future generations.

This is the first full Fortnight for Freedom since the Supreme Court's infamous ruling last June that overturned dozens of state marriage laws by elevating immoral homosexual relationships to the legal status of marriage throughout the country. As with the Obama administration's HHS mandate, this terribly misguided and wrong decision is not just a major attack on our religious liberties, but constitutes an assault on the Creator's natural law, in which the union of a man and a woman is the primary social institution for the good of the couple, their children, and the whole society. As we fight to defend our religious freedom on this particular front, our well-reasoned arguments must be grounded in the objective truth of the natural law and borne out by the personal witness of our own lives in order to resonate with the widest possible audience and effectively influence public opinion.

Returning to what was said above about the communal aspect of religious freedom, it should be underscored that only a truly religious people will value, fight for, protect, and defend their religious liberty. America's founders and colonists who fought for our independence from Britain and established our nation were deeply religious people of devout Christian faith, and we considered ourselves a Christian country until very recently. As the pseudo-religion of radical secularism increasingly dominates American society and strives to supplant the Judeo-Christian philosophy that made us a great nation, the question naturally arises as to whether we will remain a religious people tenaciously committed to defending our first freedom in an increasingly hostile cultural climate, or whether we will eventually surrender to the forces of militant secularism and allow this cherished freedom to be stolen from us by a handful of godless elitist pirates who have commandeered our Ship of State. It is to be hoped that we the people will retain the courage to stand up and retake control of our nation from the high priests of radical secularism; to recover and proudly reassert our nation's traditional Christian identity; and to consistently and vigorously defend the religious liberties and moral conscience rights of all Americans of good will, so that we can pass this great land on to our children and grandchildren as "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".

Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States, pray for us!

The Tyranny of Radical Secularism (Part 3 of 3)

by Justin Soutar


A Dangerous Cultural Shift

Unfortunately, the United States—a Christian country and the traditional leader of the free world—is now being gradually transformed into a radically secular nation, partly through the increasing moral relativism and religious indifference of its own people, and partly through the aggressive efforts of radically secularist activists in the fields of government and politics, education, and culture. President Barack Obama is the most obvious symbol of this dangerous cultural shift. Prior to becoming president and throughout his years in office, President Obama has consistently exhibited contempt for the Christian faith and its adherents unlike any other president in American history. During his 2008 presidential election campaign, then-Senator Barack Obama derisively referred to Middle Americans as those “who cling to their guns and their Bibles.” He couldn’t have summed up better his contemptuous disregard for our First and Second Amendment rights.

Obama is the first president in U.S. history to invite members of the radically secularist Freedom from Religion Foundation and American Atheists to dinner at the White House. When he went to speak at Georgetown University (a Catholic institution) in 2009, he had the “IHS” symbol behind the podium covered with a cloth. At Christmas of 2009, President Obama considered removing the traditional manger scenes from the White House and offered tree ornaments depicting mass murderer Mao Zedong. When he held a memorial service for the victims of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in January of 2011, the service was held in a basketball gym instead of in a church. His administration has effectively gutted faith from faith-based initiatives and turned a blind eye to increasing attacks on religious liberty around the world. Worst of all, President Obama’s healthcare reform law enacted in 2010, the Affordable Care Act, authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to force most businesses and charitable organizations—including nearly all religious institutions—to provide health insurance plans that cover contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs, even if this violates their moral consciences or religious beliefs, under penalty of heavy fines. In 2012, President Obama publicly declared his support for the legal recognition of homosexual “marriage” alongside traditional marriage. On at least five occasions, when quoting the Declaration of Independence, Obama has said that “we are endowed with certain unalienable rights,” deliberately omitting the phrase “by our Creator.” He has repeatedly failed to mention God in his official Thanksgiving messages. Once he even mocked Congress for reaffirming America’s trust in God through a Congressional resolution, arguing that it was a waste of time. And he has done nothing whatsoever to defend and assist the persecuted Christians of the Middle East, who are now well on the way to extinction.

President Obama’s fanatical secularism is also clearly manifest in his administration’s unprecedented promotion of abortion. Early in 2009, only a massive outcry from the American people prevented Congress from passing the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which Obama had promised Planned Parenthood that he would sign; had this bill become law, it would have demolished all state restrictions on abortion, created an unlimited “right to abortion” supported by government entitlement, and forced all physicians to perform abortions. Although FOCA was defeated, a substantial chunk of Obama’s abortion agenda has found its way into ObamaCare and the unconstitutional HHS mandate, both of which have yet to be completely overturned.

No president in history has ever exhibited such utter contempt for the Christian religion and its followers, much less while claiming to be a Christian himself. President Obama has clearly shown himself to be a genuine radical secularist—an enemy of God and religion, an enemy of the American people, and a traitor to our country.

 

The Battle for America’s Future

So where are we at in America today? The answer is that we, the people of the United States, are at war with our radically secularist enemies for the preservation of our traditional national culture and heritage. On the one hand, we have a small but powerful elite group of militant secularists determined to foist their evil agenda on our country through the news and entertainment media, educational institutions, the courts, and the federal government. This agenda includes removing all references to God from official government texts, from our currency, from our public schools, and from public property. It includes government mandated, taxpayer-funded “health insurance coverage” of abortifacients, contraception, and sterilization in violation of the moral law, our religious liberties, and our moral conscience rights. It includes the redefinition of marriage by the courts to place same-sex “marriage” on a legal par with traditional marriage. And it includes the legalization of euthanasia as a basic “human right” to lighten the growing burden of the elderly and the terminally ill on society. Along with this radically secularist agenda being forced on our country from the top down, there is a gradual weakening of Christian faith and culture among the general population; a proliferation of materialistic and hedonistic attitudes along with widespread moral relativism and religious indifference; and growing percentages of nonreligious people and minority faiths and sects such as Islam and the occult.

On the other hand, however, in our nation today there are also many pockets of devout Christian individuals and families who understand and appreciate America’s Christian heritage and who are working hard to restore, preserve, inculcate and hand on the traditional religious and moral values that made our country great. The Catholic Church in America and the more traditional Christian denominations are growing. The massive pro-life movement, which now includes a majority of the American people, is shutting down more abortion clinics and saving more innocent lives each year through prayer and fasting, public outreach, charitable assistance, and political activism. Public opposition to the Obama administration’s anti-life mandate has been vigorous and sustained. Many Americans, aghast at the radical secularists’ push to eliminate God and Christianity from public life, are joining various Catholic and Christian activist organizations such as Fidelis, Patriot Voices, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition to make their voices heard. A large minority of Americans still believe that marriage is exclusively the union of a man and a woman, and more than thirty states have enacted voter-approved laws preserving this traditional legal definition of marriage. And the spectacular Republican landslide victories in the 2014 Congressional and gubernatorial elections were a clear signal of widespread public disapproval with the direction in which President Obama and his secular fundamentalist allies are leading this country.

Secular fundamentalism is continuing to gain ground in America today at least in part due to bad Catholics. Take, for instance, “Catholic” politicians such as Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi who abuse their authority to sanction the mass murder of the innocent unborn and legal same-sex “marriage.” But then there are also the millions of “Catholic” voters who keep putting these radically secularist politicians in office—so-called “Catholics” who for decades have been having abortions, using artificial contraception and sterilization, and getting divorces at rates similar to those of the general public. If it wasn’t for his dissident Catholic allies such as Biden, Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius, former head of the HHS, as well as the millions of Catholics who tolerate legalized abortion and have no problem with birth control, President Obama’s anti-life agenda would never have gotten as far as it has. If American Catholics faithfully practiced their Church’s teachings in both public and private life, we would have a very different country today—a place where militant secularism wouldn’t stand a chance. Benedict XVI put it this way: “There can be no doubt that a more consistent witness on the part of America’s Catholics to their deepest convictions would make a major contribution to the renewal of society as a whole.”[2]

 

The Challenge of Radical Secularism

On January 19, 2012, addressing a group of Catholic bishops from the United States during their ad limina visit to Rome, Pope Benedict XVI made the following remarks about the threat to American culture and society posed by radical secularism:

One of the most memorable aspects of my Pastoral Visit to the United States was the opportunity it afforded me to reflect on America’s historical experience of religious freedom, and specifically the relationship between religion and culture. At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.

For her part, the Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering. To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that would curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality, or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being and ultimate vocation, our relationship to God. When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and to close the doors to transcendent truth, it inevitably becomes impoverished and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.

The pontiff then issued a prophetic warning:

In the light of these considerations, it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion. Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices. Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.

On the following day, January 20, 2012, the radical secularism of which the pope had spoken reared its ugly head in our land. Overturning more than two centuries of profound government respect for religious liberties and moral conscience rights in accord with the Constitution and natural law, against the expressed will of the people, and in a direct attack on the Judeo-Christian religious and moral values on which our country is built, the Obama administration announced that nearly all health insurance plans must include abortifacients, artificial contraceptives, and sterilization procedures, regardless of religious or moral objection to these anti-life items. This unprecedented edict, which is still on the books as of this writing despite a slew of court injunctions and exemptions, has nothing to do with the public health and everything to do with the sale of anti-life drugs and procedures for the benefit of large abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies that back the Obama administration. In its disastrous attempt to nationalize our healthcare system, the private interests of a few have trumped concern for the common good, and as a result, the human rights and dignity of tens of millions of innocent Americans have been sacrificed to the false god of money. Corruption and radical secularism frequently go hand in hand.

The fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled both the Affordable Care Act and the HHS mandate constitutional in June of 2012 should serve as a painful warning that the Constitution itself, detached from the religious and moral framework in which it was written and meant to be interpreted, is utterly powerless to protect or guarantee our rights and freedoms. John Adams wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[3] In 1781, in his Notes on that State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson asked: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God?” If our leaders don’t believe that human rights—especially the rights to life and religious liberty—come from our Creator, then those rights will be perceived as coming from the state and the state will claim the authority to give or take them away as it sees fit. And if they don’t believe that it is wrong to legally deprive an innocent person of those rights, then no American’s rights will be guaranteed under the law and the door is wide open to atheistic totalitarian rule.

Benedict XVI identified what is needed to meet the challenge of radical secularism in America:  

Here once more we see the need for an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-à-vis the dominant culture and with the courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about the issues which are determining the future of American society.[4]

For too long now, we American Catholics have cowardly permitted our radically secularist foes to dictate the rules of engagement for the discussion of pressing religious and moral issues, and they are now exploiting our weakness in this regard to strengthen and expand their illegitimate occupation of the public square. We must take back what rightly belongs to us. Specifically, we must articulate a clear defense of the natural moral law written by God in all human hearts, revealed to Israel in the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue, and fully revealed in Jesus Christ and His Church. We must show how this divinely revealed moral compass guided the Founders in charting the course of our nation, and that it is adherence to the law of God that makes us a great nation. We must show how the Ten Commandments, together with the ancient Roman language and law, form the basis of our modern legal system. We must explain how former U.S. laws against abortion, obscenity and pornography were grounded in the objective moral law, and why our nation should enact such laws once again notwithstanding faulty judicial decisions to the contrary. We must demonstrate the universal and unchanging nature of this objective moral law by highlighting its ubiquitous presence in societies and cultures throughout human history. We must show how adherence to the moral law has enabled peoples and nations to flourish and become great (e.g. ancient Rome, medieval Europe, modern America)—and how conversely, abandonment of the moral law has led to the decline and destruction of once-great nations (e.g. ancient Carthage, modern Communist countries).

Freedom to act in accord with the natural moral law is the most basic, the most fundamental of all human rights—even more fundamental than freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, for religion and conscience can both be abused to justify grave violations of the moral law. The HHS mandate and legal recognition of same-sex “marriage” don’t just violate the religious and conscience rights of American believers; even more fundamentally, they violate the natural law and the right of all Americans as human beings to act in accordance with it. By moving beyond a somewhat shallow and subjective “religious liberties and moral conscience rights” approach to a deeper, more profound way of reasoning based on the objective truth of the natural law itself, our logic will resonate not only with fellow American Catholics but also with all people of goodwill in America and beyond, thus enabling us to recruit a broader coalition of allies and mount a more united and effective challenge to the militant secularists within our gates. While defending our specific religious liberties and moral conscience rights as Catholic Americans, we must also defend the timeless freedom of all Americans and all peoples to act in accord with “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

Conclusion

Due to their a priori rejection of absolute religious and moral truth, radical secularists mistakenly view the Christian religion and the Judeo-Christian moral system as purely human inventions rather than as divinely revealed transcendent truths. They offer twenty-first-century America the same temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed in the Garden of Eden at the dawn of human history—the temptation to reject God and decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil. Militant secularists may present themselves as champions of secularism, freedom, tolerance, and pluralism, but history warns us that the implementation of their ideology would crush American secularism, freedom, tolerance, and pluralism under the boots of a dangerous tyranny. Where absolute religious and moral truth is rejected, nothing is left but a “dictatorship of relativism” and a ruthless Darwinian struggle for power. When man cuts himself off from God, he loses his way and becomes a monster. None are more keenly aware of this fact than those who have survived the terror and brutality of radically secularist regimes. “When God is put aside, the world becomes an inhospitable place for man,” remarked Benedict XVI during his visit to Cuba in 2012. "The Russian Church, which has paid in millions of lives for the godless Soviet experiment, can and must testify before the adherents of militant secularism to the fact that a society torn from its spiritual roots and faith has no future," solemnly declared Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a prominent leader of the Russian Orthodox Church who grew up in the Soviet Union, at a religious conference in London in 2014. "A world without God, without absolute moral values rooted in divine revelation, irrevocably turns into the realm of the rule of slavery and lawlessness."[5]

Ultimately, the religious identity of a nation is rooted in the religious character of its individual citizens. Government institutions alone, however well-intentioned and contrived, cannot protect and ensure that identity. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in his second encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), “man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew…Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning.” As an “eclipse of God” casts its shadow over our era and mankind finds itself lured once again by the temptation to assert its own self-sufficiency, the United States and the world need Christians—especially Catholics—who have the courage to let the light of Christ shine through them to every corner of society. Clearly, the outcome of the cultural war for America’s future will depend in large measure on the religious and moral character of its people, the vast majority of whom still profess the Christian faith. 

It is a cornerstone of modern evolutionary thought that human societies tend to develop gradually over time from dictatorships into democracies. But in his classic historical work The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton pointed out that the opposite is true:

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East...But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one.[6]

With the ideology of radical secularism being aggressively promoted by an elite few in government, academia, and the media and increasingly accepted in American culture, in the early twenty-first century the United States has begun the process of detaching itself from its Christian roots and sliding gradually into the shadow of totalitarianism. There is hope for the future survival of our country to the extent that we the people—individually and as a nation—place our trust in God and remain vigilant, united in our determination to fight this dangerous ideology until it is defeated. We must pray for the conversion of our radically secularist politicians, professors, media pundits, and cultural leaders. We must confront them in the public square, exposing the errors of their pernicious worldview and working to halt their evil agenda. We must rediscover the Founders’ vision of a secular, free, tolerant, and pluralistic Christian society in which church and state coexist harmoniously. We must unstintingly defend our inalienable human rights given to us by our Creator, especially the rights to life and liberty and the right to act in accord with the natural moral law. We must return to and explicitly reaffirm America’s profoundly Christian identity and her great tradition of religious freedom. And we must re-commit to living by the Judeo-Christian religious and moral principles that made America great. Only then will we once again rightly claim to be “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

 

Copyright © 2014, 2015 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

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ENDNOTES

 

[1] “Benedict XVI's Address to US Bishops on 'Ad Limina' Visit,” ZENIT, January 19, 2012.

[2] Ibid.
[3] Letter to the First Brigade of the Massachusetts Militia, 1798.
[4] “Benedict XVI's Address to US Bishops on 'Ad Limina' Visit,” ZENIT, January 19, 2012.
[5] Address at a conference in London, Feb. 21, 2014.
[6] G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008, pp. 58-59).

 

The Tyranny of Radical Secularism (Part 2 of 3)

by Justin Soutar

A major propaganda weapon in the militant secularists’ assault on America’s Christian identity and on religious liberty is their re-interpretation of the concept of the “separation of church and state” implicitly enshrined in the First Amendment. Our nation’s founders intended the distinction between religious and civil authority to allow each governing entity to fulfill its proper public role. Radical secularists reinterpret this common-sense distinction as a radical divorce between the religious and civil spheres. In their view, every trace of religion must be scrubbed from American public life: no references to God should be made by government leaders; no symbols of the Christian religion should be displayed on public property. This malicious anti-God and anti-Christian animus would have struck the Founders as not only quite alien but extremely dangerous to the well-being of our nation. Here is what General George Washington wrote to the governors of the original thirteen states in a letter announcing the disbanding of the Continental Army on June 8, 1783 (note that this was an official U.S. military document):

I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you and the State over which you preside, in His holy protection, that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the field; and, finally, that he would be most graciously pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.

 And James Madison said the following in an address to the Virginia General Assembly in 1778: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

 

The Founders’ Vision for America

Many of us today take it for granted that the United States is a natural product of Christian European civilization. However, we shouldn’t forget that at a time when most European Catholic and Protestant nations were governed by absolute or constitutional monarchies in which Church and state authority were closely linked and intertwined, the concept of a secular republic built on Christian religious and moral values was quite novel. As men of the Renaissance period, our nation’s devout Christian Founders did not eschew experimentation, but their experimentation flowed from the religious and moral principles they held dear. What they gave the world was something altogether unique and unprecedented—a secular Christian republic. What they created has come to be known as the “American experiment.” The Christian religion and Judeo-Christian moral code formed the foundations of this experiment and have contributed enormously to its remarkable success. Without those religious and moral foundations, the experiment would have failed long ago and our nation would never have achieved greatness.

The Founders’ vision for America was simple, intuitive, holistic, and brilliant. Today it appears utterly sane and reasonable when contrasted with the dangerous alternative vision that radically secularist ideologues are working so hard to put into practice. The Founders believed that God created all human persons equal in dignity and endowed them with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They believed that the role of civil government is to protect these unalienable human rights. They believed that such government comes from God and derives its legitimate authority from the consent of the governed. They were also profoundly aware of the fact that human nature has been corrupted by original sin, so they designed a three-branch system of government with checks and balances to minimize corruption and abuse of power. They believed that freedom is sacred because it is a gift from God our Creator, and that the truth is what makes people free. They understood freedom as the right to act in accord with the natural moral law and to practice one’s religious beliefs without government interference. They knew that religion and morality are powerful safeguards of human liberty, and considered both essential to the survival and well-being of America. Most importantly, the Founders agreed that without God’s guidance, protection, and assistance, the American experiment would be a failure.

The great majority of the Founders were Protestants who hailed from eighteenth-century England, where theocratic monarchs forced the state religion of Anglicanism on their subjects and outlawed the public practice of Catholicism and Protestantism. As a result of this experience, the Founders decided that the United States would not have an official religion. They understood that religious freedom is a two-sided coin consisting of these basic elements, one negative and the other positive: 1) freedom from religious compulsion (negative), and 2) freedom to practice one’s own religion (positive). To guarantee religious freedom in the new nation, our founders wisely integrated these two essential elements into the First Amendment to the Constitution: 1) they forbade Congress from passing any law that would institute an official American religion, and 2) they forbade Congress from passing any law that would prohibit the free exercise of religion. Thus the First Amendment authors intended to safeguard our republic from the opposite extremes of totalitarian theocracy and religious repression.

The careful distinction between religious and civil authority in the First Amendment (commonly known today as the separation of church and state) was intended to allow each governing entity to fulfill its proper public role unimpeded by the other. The First Amendment may be considered a blueprint for the secular Christian nation that the United States was founded and intended to be.

 

Secularism v. Radical Secularism

What are some characteristics of a secular nation, properly understood as such? First and most importantly, a secular nation is a religious nation, a nation “under God.” It recognizes that human rights and state authority both come from God and that the state is the guardian of these rights. This proper understanding of the source of human rights and the role of the state makes a secular nation a place of freedom and justice. It is a nation that values religion and morality as “indispensable supports” of its political prosperity (George Washington). It is a nation where church and state coexist harmoniously, each respecting the legitimate authority of the other. It is a place where each citizen is free to practice the religion of his or her choice, or to not practice any religion if that is his or her choice. It is a place where the contributions of religious believers to public life are recognized, welcomed and encouraged, even by those who are not religious themselves. It is a nation where traditional family values are highly esteemed and diligently safeguarded by those in authority. It is a place where government leaders are public servants, chosen by the people and responsible to them, subject to the same laws, who strive to promote the common good of all citizens. All these characteristics of a secular nation have allowed the United States of America to flourish and become the world’s greatest nation.

On the other hand, a “radically secularist” nation is a nightmarish place where atheism has become the official state “religion” and where all genuine religions are suppressed by law. This kind of nation is a nation without God. It recognizes no authority above that of the government. It is a place where human rights are believed to come from the government and may thus be given or taken away as the state sees fit. This false subjectivist understanding of human rights and government power renders it a place of bondage and injustice. It is a nation that rejects religious faith and absolute moral standards as obstacles to its freedom and progress. It is a nation where the church is completely subordinated to the state, and where public practice of religion is either severely curtailed or absolutely forbidden. It is a place where religious believers must leave their faith behind if they are to make any substantive contributions to public life. It is a nation where traditional family values are openly scorned and deliberately attacked by those in authority. It is a place where government leaders are self-appointed elitist dictators, not responsible to the people and not subject to any laws, who use their power to advance their own private interests. Such a godless, radically secularist nation is a nation in despair—a living hell. Within a relatively short time, it self-destructs and usually leaves behind an infamous legacy of violence, war, and mass murder. Historic examples include France under the Jacobins, late 1920s Mexico, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China. Contemporary examples would include Communist China and North Korea.

Many countries of the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, the nations of Western Europe, and Communist China and North Korea, are currently at various intermediate stages on the road to the radically secularist inferno. Abortion on demand is legal in all these countries; in China, parents are forced by law to abort every child after their first. Euthanasia is gradually becoming acceptable and legal everywhere. More than a dozen nations on four continents have already passed laws making same-sex “marriage” the legal equivalent of traditional marriage. In Western Europe, radical secularism has gained significant ground. While freedom of religion still largely exists and the people still elect their government leaders, hostility to religion now permeates Western European culture. A few years ago, a law was passed in Ireland attempting to force priests to violate the seal of confession by reporting sins of sexual abuse heard in confession to the government; a similar attempt was made with a priest in Louisiana last year. The Catholic Church in China is officially suppressed by the government, which recognizes only its own National Catholic Patriotic Association. And North Korea resembles one large prison camp ruled by a military dictatorship.

 

Lessons from History

As hinted above, the takeover of a country by the forces of militant secularism is usually not a “bolt from the blue,” a sudden and swift affair imposed on unwilling and unsuspecting masses by an elite coup with whom they have nothing in common. On the contrary, it is typically a gradual process occurring over several decades or generations that involves a progressive and widespread decline of religious faith among the general population, eventually leaving a yawning vacuum to be filled by the pseudo-religion of radical secularism. This is exactly what took place in Orthodox Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s: a steady loss of religious faith among the bourgeois paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In early twentieth-century Mexico, unscrupulous Catholic landlords had amassed great wealth through unjust exploitation of their tenant farmers and neglected to share their resources with the less fortunate. Plutarco Elias Calles, the radically secularist dictator who took control of Mexico in the 1920s, had grown up in abject poverty that left him extremely bitter and convinced that organized religion was the enemy of the Mexican people. The French Revolution offers another example of this general rule: in late eighteenth-century France, corruption within the Catholic monarchy generated popular resentment, which the Jacobins unhesitatingly exploited to push their fanatically secularist agenda. (Poland is a somewhat different case, as it did not experience a homegrown revolution but was occupied by militantly secularist foreign invaders, while its own people remained devoutly religious under Communist rule.)

Given the critical situation in which America finds itself today, with the benefit of hindsight we may wonder whether the Founders made the right decision in not establishing Christianity as the official religion of the United States. It is certainly legitimate to raise this question and discuss and debate the answer as they pertain to both national religious identity and religious freedom. On one hand, making Christianity the official religion of the United States would have removed any ambiguity about our identity as a Christian nation, making it much more difficult for today’s radical secularists to successfully mount a vicious attack on that identity. On the other hand, however, we need to keep in mind that even countries with official religions are not immune to the forces of militant secularism. France, Mexico, Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Poland—all either officially Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant nations—were shaken by convulsive revolutions in 1789, 1917, 1917, 1922, 1933, 1936, and 1939, respectively, that enthroned more or less short-lived totalitarian atheistic and socialist regimes (the Jacobins, the Federales, Communists, Fascists, Nazis).  

How did this happen? How did nations that had been Christian and free for centuries succumb to the tyranny of radical secularism? The answer is that, for a significant period of time prior to each revolution, the Christian people within those nations had been growing weak in their faith; as a result, injustices had crept into society and become entrenched, providing a fertile breeding ground for destructive revolutionary ideologies. When a country loses its faith, it then loses its freedom as well, with terrible social consequences. The rise of a godless dictator such as Hitler or Stalin is rarely an accident or anomaly, but rather an ordinary consequence of a religious vacuum and its attendant social turmoil, a predictable response to the need to fill that vacuum and impose order.

A lack of charity and justice properly grounded in the truth, especially from those who call themselves followers of Christ, lies at the root of all social problems. A serious and prolonged crisis of faith inevitably leads to crisis in society. Conversely, the solution to social problems is personal conversion to Christ. This is part of the reason why Pope Benedict XVI, during his papacy, declared a Year of Faith—to address the “profound crisis of faith” afflicting the contemporary global society by summoning all Christians “to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the one Savior of the World.” If bad Christians give religion a bad name, good Christians make religion look attractive and contribute to the building up of human society. As a Muslim sultan once famously remarked to Saint Francis of Assisi, “If all Christians were like you, I would become a Christian.”

Radically secularist despots such as Lenin, Calles, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin who carried out their evil ideology to the letter inflicted untold human suffering and misery and are universally condemned as traitors to mankind (except by those freethinkers in their soap bubbles who think they were just doing what was “right for them”). By contrast, great Christian figures such as Saint Francis, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, Father Benedict Groeschel, Saint John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis who live the Gospel authentically accomplish outstanding achievements for human society and are universally admired, loved, honored, and respected (except by radical secularists). The latter offer marvelous examples of how to authentically live one’s Christian faith in the modern world, while the former serve as ominous reminders of where the radically secularist path ultimately leads.

History also assures us that the stronger the religious and moral character of a people, the more likely their nation is to survive through and triumph over a radically secularist interlude. Poland is perhaps the best example of this: following fifty years of Communist rule there, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 left behind a nation still 90 percent devout Catholic.

 

(To be continued)

Quote of the Day

"Nothing the Court says can change what marriage truly is, and we will continue to promote and defend it. We may have to suffer this lie about marriage in the law, but we must not participate in it or keep silent about it."

--Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone

Abraham Lincoln: Defender of Truth and Justice

Today we Americans celebrated the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, one of the most respected and admired presidents in the history of our nation. Lincoln's greatness lay in his deep religious faith, his solid moral principles, and his honesty and integrity of character. Relying on these qualities, and with the aid of Divine Providence, he successfully guided our country through the stormy period of the Civil War, preserving the Union from disintegration and laying the foundation for a more just American society in which the civil rights of all human persons would be protected by law.

Lincoln knew that slavery was widely practiced and financially profitable, but he also knew that it was gravely unjust, and--for that reason alone--it had to be abolished. Deep within his heart and mind, he knew the truth about the evil of slavery, so he courageously spoke the truth about it and took concrete action as president to rid America of this social scourge. He was not a very good public speaker, but he spoke the truth and stuck to his principles. He did not compromise those principles for the sake of political advantage or out of fear of offending wealthy Southern slave owners. He did not surrender to discouragement over the difficulties he faced in attempting to eradicate an entrenched custom of southern American life. On the contrary, Lincoln stood firm in proclaiming the truth about the grave injustice of slavery and in his determination to make it illegal. At a time of national crisis, he put forth a vision for America of a re-united land in which every person born and raised would be a free citizen regardless of his or her race, skin color, or nationality. And that truth and that vision resonated with the American people, who sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House in 1860 and again in 1864. The results were the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves free; the Union's victory in the Civil War, which restored American unity; and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which permanently outlawed slavery in the U.S. Although he paid the price of assassination for his courageous leadership and one hundred more years would elapse before his vision would be fully realized, Lincoln's legacy as a great civil rights pioneer and as a national hero is beyond dispute.

With his firm stand on basic principles of justice and natural law, Lincoln offers an encouraging role model for us twenty-first century Americans who are active in the pro-life, pro-marriage, and religious liberty movements of our own day. We who are fighting to protect the basic human rights to life and liberty and to preserve the traditional definition of marriage know that abortion is a lucrative business for those involved in it, that deviant sexual behavior has a certain appeal for those involved in it, and that the HHS mandate and ObamaCare are little more than government subsidies for large abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies. But we also know that abortion and the HHS mandate are gravely unjust, while abortion and same-sex "marriage" violate the Creator's natural law, and--for those reasons--these three abominations must be abolished. We know the truth about these evils, so we must courageously speak the truth about them and take decisive action to rid our country of them. We must not compromise these principles for the sake of temporary political advantages or out of fear of offending radical secularists. And we must not surrender to discouragement by settling for restrictions on abortion or temporary court injunctions against the HHS mandate. On the contrary, we must stand firm in proclaiming the truth about the grave injustice and evil of abortion, homosexual "marriage," and the HHS mandate, and stand firm in our determination to abolish them. And we must put forth a vision for America of a land where every unborn child is protected by law; where marriage is always the union of a man and a woman; and where religious liberty flourishes. That truth and that vision will resonate with the American people, and notwithstanding predictable attempts to do them in, the three great civil rights movements of our time will ultimately achieve their long-sought victories.

Today, thanks to the godless and corrupt leadership of President Barack Obama, our nation is once again in grave crisis, more divided than at any time since the Civil War. We could use another president like Lincoln, a true leader--someone of deep Christian faith, solid moral principles, and honesty and integrity of character--someone who could unite and heal our country, someone who knows how to speak to people's hearts and articulate a clear vision for America. In a few months, I will offer my own endorsement for just such a candidate for president of the United States.