Religion & Law

This year's recipient of the Canterbury Award, given out by my friends at the Becket Fund (go here and give them money) is Archbishop Charles Chaput.  His remarks on the occasion are here.  A taste:

My job tonight is to talk about the importance of religious freedom, and our need to protect that freedom. More than any other country in the world, the United States is a nation that only really makes sense in a religion-friendly context. The writer Robert D. Kaplan, who has little use for soft-minded moralizing, once said that America has done so well for so long because her Founders had a tragic sense of history. They had few illusions about human perfectibility.  And they got that spirit from the world of faith that shaped their experience.  

The Founders certainly had hope in their ability to build a ?new order of things? -- but only under the judgment of a Creator. In other words, they had a sane kind of hope; the biblical kind that?s grounded in realism, because they also believed in sin. They had an unsentimental grasp of human nature as a mix of nobility, weakness and flaws that need to be constrained. And that kind of thinking had very practical, political results. American ideals require a certain kind of citizen to make them work. That?s why John Adams said that ?Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.? . . .