We must thank Governor Mitt Romney for getting us all thinking about religion and its place in our democratic way of life. Last Thursday in Texas he gave what was arguably the most important speech of his political career. Entitled “Faith in America,” the speech addressed both the issue of Romney’s Mormonism, and his understanding of the role that belief systems play in our democratic way of life. In my book, he scored well in both those endeavors. I happen to believe this speech will claim a lasting place alongside John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960. Kennedy’s speech has been remembered ever since for his dismissal of the role played by religious creed in American public life; Romney’s speech will be remembered for his wholehearted and unabashed endorsement of that role. And without hesitation, he declared: “I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it.” And then he added, to the amazement of not a few: "Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.”

Daring words those, for a would-be first-ever Mormon president of the United States.

To be honest, I find such forthrightness a very welcome breath of fresh air in this campaign. And his thoughtful speech raises many issues worthy of discussion.

But here I want to latch onto one profound and beautifully crafted thought in particular from Romney’s speech:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

There you have three lines which really capture the crucial role played by religion in public life—and expressed in a manner which would evoke the admiration of thinkers as diverse as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedict XVI. But more on that in just a moment.

This whole issue of religion in public life also got me thinking about Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ 1984 tome The Naked Public Square.

If you are unfamiliar with the book, I could attempt to explain its content, but better to get that from someone much more qualified than myself, someone like Mary Ann Glendon. In a 2004 First Things symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication, Glendon wrote:

In The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus charged that the United States, while calling itself a democratic society, was systematically excluding the values of the majority of its citizens from policy decisions. He contended that to rule out of bounds in public life religiously grounded moral viewpoints not only does injustice to America’s “incorrigibly religious” citizenry but also saps the very foundations of our democratic experiment. Convinced that the moment had come for men and women of faith to make themselves heard in setting the conditions under which we order our lives together, Neuhaus was heartened by what he saw as the growing political effectiveness of groups that were beginning to do just that. If religious voices in the U.S. today are stronger, more confident, and more adept at translating their values into terms that are persuasive to their fellow citizens, more than a little credit must go to the encouragement and example of Richard John Neuhaus.

And as Fr. Neuhaus himself describes it, the book “was a plea not for religion as such but for reasoned public moral discourse, which discourse must also and of necessity draw on the resources of religion.”

Which brings us to the point of this column: what—we need to be reminded—is the role of religious belief in American public life? Or to paraphrase Governor Romney, why does (ordered, political) freedom “require” religion?

Fr. Neuhaus just offered us one answer: the moral tenets embedded in systems of religious creed are an important source of nourishment for a vigorous public moral discourse, without which a democratic system simply cannot thrive.

In addition to invigorating moral discourse, the expression of religious creed in the public square plays a further important role, a role certainly not lost on that young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville who came to the United States in 1831 to study the flourishing young democracy. Wrote Tocqueville:

If you give democratic peoples education and freedom and leave them alone, they will easily extract from this world all the good things it has to offer. They will improve all useful techniques and make life daily more comfortable, smooth, and bland…But while man takes delight in this proper and legitimate quest for prosperity, there is a danger that in the end he may lose the use of his sublimest faculties and that, bent on improving everything around him, he may at length degrade himself. That and nothing else is the peril.

In a democracy therefore it is ever the duty of lawgivers and of all upright educated men to raise up the souls of their fellow citizens and turn their attention toward heaven. There is a need for all who are interested in the future of democratic societies to get together and with one accord to make continual efforts to propagate throughout society a taste for the infinite, an appreciation of greatness, and a love of spiritual pleasures.

The expression of religious creed in the public square continually points us toward the transcendent—and experiments in ordered liberty like ours have thrived thanks in large part to those constant and manifold reminders of the “infinite,” the religious representations of “greatness,” and creedal appeals to the “love of spiritual pleasures.”

That individuals and the democracies they compose necessarily suffocate without these continual invitations to transcendence is a truth wholly present in the thought of Pope Benedict. As I noted in my series of reflections on Benedict’s Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, the Pope understands that the question about God is unavoidable. There is something in our very human make-up that forces us to answer a “yes or no” question about God. "The thirst for the infinite," affirms Benedict, is a fundamental aspect of human nature, indeed, "the very essence of human nature." Speaking of the impossibility of putting agnosticism into practice in one’s personal life—and consequently in public life—Benedict wrote:

As a pure theory, it may seem exceedingly illuminating. But in its essence, agnosticism is much more than a theory: what is at stake here is the praxis of one's life. When one attempts to "put it into practice" in one's real field of action, agnosticism slips out of one's hands like a soap bubble; it dissolves into thin air, because it is not possible to escape the very option it seeks to avoid. When faced with the question of God, man cannot permit himself to remain neutral. All he can say is Yes or No-without ever avoiding all the consequences that derive from this choice even in the smallest details of life. Accordingly, we see that the question of God is ineluctable; one is not permitted to abstain from casting one's vote (pp. 88-89).

We are creatures who ask about the infinite, about our origin, about our ultimate destiny, and the Cause of it all. And that's why the presence of religious creed in the public square is so important. We need creed- based invitations to seek the Cause of it all, to aspire to that Ultimately Reality that is the ground and source of our own reality.

Lacking this, or in a liberal democracy which attempts to sanitize the public square of expressions of religious belief, as Governor Romney cogently reminds us, freedom will indeed “perish alone.”

As for the Commander in Chief of a liberal democracy that welcomes expressions of religious belief and draws on their richness, we would expect him (or her, as the case may be) to govern, drawing on the guidance of a religiously informed conscience. As Michael Gerson put it quite cogently last Friday in The Washington Post:

It is one thing to assert, as Kennedy did, that politicians should not take orders from popes and prophets—that is the institutional separation of church and state. It is another thing to assert, as Kennedy seemed to, that politicians should not take guidance from their own religiously informed conscience—that is a multiple personality disorder.

Our American democratic way of life not only allows us, but encourages us to draw guidance from our systems of belief as we continue to order our lives together. It is permissible to talk religion in the public square, to talk theology, to dispute theology, to question our fellow citizens—and even our presidential candidates—about their creedal beliefs. Not only is it good, it’s essential to our survival. As Fr. Neuhaus surmised three years ago:

The liberal democratic tradition is a Western and Christian achievement and its future depends, for better and for worse, chiefly on the American experiment. If it dies here, I do not see anyone else picking up the fallen flag.

I can’t help but agree.

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