The connection between freedom and religion is under assault, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said this week.
“That crucial link between religion and liberty, so well understood at the founding, is all too often forgotten today,” he said. “In American public discourse, perhaps no concept is more misunderstood than the notion of ‘separation of church and state’. Militant secularists have long seized on that slogan as a facile justification for attempting to drive religion from the public square and to exclude religious people from bringing a religious perspective to bear on conversations about the common good.”
READ: Congressman urges Barr to protect religious freedom
Barr made his remarks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.
“Separation of church and state does not mean, and never did mean, separation of religion and civics,” he said. “As late as 1952, Justice William O. Douglas could write for a majority of the Supreme Court that ‘We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being’.”
Barr said that because the religious foundation of America has been weakened over the decades, traditional morality has been eroded with it, leading to increases in broken families and violence in cities.
“That foundation of our free society has increasingly been under siege,” he said. “Traditional morality has eroded, and secularists have often succeeded not only in eliminating religion from schools and the public square but in replacing it with new orthodoxies that are actively hostile to religion. The consequences of this hollowing out of religion have been predictably dire.
“Over the past 50 years, we have seen striking increases in urban violence, drug abuse and broken families. Problems like these have fed the rise of an ever more powerful central government, one that increasingly saps individual initiative, co-opts civil society, crowds out religious institutions and ultimately reduces citizens to wards of the state.”
In addition to Attorney General Barr speaking, President Trump also spoke, announcing that he was signing an executive order protecting all infants born alive from actions of medical facilities that allow them to die if they survive abortions.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice News
