Archbishop Chaput's Great Remarks On Religous Faith and Liberty In America

Nice read here at Archbishop Charles J. Chaput's Canterbury Award Remarks

Here is a part

My point here is very simple. American public life can’t work as its Founders and Framers intended if we stick religion in the closet like a dangerously eccentric in-law. America doesn’t need to be a “Christian” country. But it can’t survive without being a nation predisposed and welcoming to religious faith. We’ve never had a nationally established Church, and that’s a good thing. But as the historian Paul Johnson once said, America was never imagined “as a secular state, [but rather as a] moral and ethical society without a state religion.”

In other words, we were founded as a religious people, but with public institutions that avoid religious tests. American public life depends for its life on Jews and Protestants and Latter Day Saints and Catholics and all religious believers vigorously advancing their convictions in public debate. We need to do that peacefully and respectfully, but we need to do it -- without evasions or apologies or alibis. Otherwise we’re stealing the most precious things we have – our religious faith and our moral character – from the struggle for the common good. And the God who loves us will nonetheless hold us accountable for that cowardice.

Freedom of religious faith is woven into our founding documents. It’s
hardwired into the assumptions of all of us who treasure the privilege of being an American. I never really understood what that freedom meant, though, until I served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and saw what its absence looks like; until I understood from the facts and from my own eyes the systematic abuse of religious believers that takes place in so many countries around the globe. Some of that same contempt for religious faith and disdain for serious religious believers is now part of our own national dialogue. And we underestimate it at our own great cost