As my time with the Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty comes to a close, I would like to reflect on the experience, but also on the frankly bizarre reaction that some people had to my participation.
Just about a year ago, I received a call from the inviting me to serve on a newly formed commission dedicated to fostering in our country. I had, and still have, no idea who recommended me or how my name was surfaced. But upon receiving the invitation, I thought, “Well, the president of the United States is inviting a Catholic bishop to be a voice around the table as the crucially important issue of religious freedom is being discussed.”
Why would I say no, especially since the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had made religious liberty a central concern?
And the commission did indeed do exceptionally important work. In the course of the year, we brought to light violations of religious liberty in the arenas of , education and the military. We explored the sources of religious freedom in the work of the Founding Fathers, and we drew special attention to the antisemitism that is currently bedeviling our country. One of the most significant contributions we made was to bring into sharper relief the issue of church-state relations.
Far too much of the jurisprudence of the last roughly 75 years has been dominated by Thomas Jefferson’s ambiguous metaphor of a “wall” that purportedly separates civil government and .
As many have indicated, there is no mention of such a wall in either the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers or the Constitution itself. What we do indeed find in the is the prohibition against any formal establishment of religion through an act of Congress, but this has nothing to do with eliminating religion from public life or even reducing religious expression to private acts of worship.
In point of fact, that same First Amendment insists that nothing should prevent the in our country. Many of the witnesses we heard from during the year testified to the cynical way that Jefferson’s “wall” was used to justify severe restrictions on their free exercise of religion. To be sure, no student in an American classroom should be compelled to pray according to any particular religious tradition, but we heard of students who were forbidden from singing Christian songs at a talent show, or, in the most absurd case, forbidden from wearing COVID masks inscribed with “Jesus loves me.”
A point that I made frequently in the course of our deliberations is that the greatest threat to religious liberty today comes from what amounts to an alternate religion, which I characterize as “the culture of self-invention.” This ideology dictates that there are no objective and no stable human nature, and hence the determination of value is entirely a product of individual choice.
The more this philosophical perspective comes to hold sway, the more the leaders of the culture want religion out of education, health care and other institutions, for they rightly recognize that the advocates of traditional religion are their most powerful ideological opponents. In many ways, the testimonies we heard and the discussions we had echoed this fundamental theme.
I must say, furthermore, that my colleagues on the commission, including and especially the chairman, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, have been marvelous. They showed great interest in my perspective as I brought Catholic teaching to bear on the matter of religious liberty. There was never an attempt to censor me or question the legitimacy of my participation. I was allowed free rein to express my point of view, to interview witnesses as I saw fit, and to engage my fellow commissioners in lively conversation.
No one ever demanded that I demon
