Good News: Defenders of the Faith

President Trump’s creation of a “1776 Commission” constitutes a timely intervention to address the pressing need to defend the true meaning of the American founding for faith communities. Pushing back against “critical race theory” and other supposedly expert initiatives to “tell the truth” about America’s past, the President has recognized that those who so ostentatiously “follow the science” are engaged in an effort to silence the more fundamental expertise in religious and moral obligations. At UrbanCURE we take the commitment to “faith, freedom and responsibility” with utmost seriousness. We realize that to do so means speaking up against a supposed scientific expertise whose chief claim is the denial of any authority to faith. It is no surprise how casually they shut churches, silence religious speech, and seek to coerce believers to act in ways contrary to faith. Beyond upholding the true bearings of the founding principles of natural rights and self-government, the responsibility of government in the United States, which the President has recognized, is to defend faith against the assaults of secularism. While the government has no role in defending faith, it has a primary role in defending the freedom of the faithful to defend the faith.  That is why it is so important to remember and promote the responsibility of government to preserve space for the authority of faith to operate in our communities. The “1776 Commission” will point the way to an understanding of political and cultural life in the United States through which we can sustain the power and authority to defend rights of conscience, including the conscientious celebration of those dimensions of the founding which alone vouchsafe for all humankind the hope of moral and religious fulfillment. Practically, that means understanding that the United States is not “systemically racist” for as long as it remains “systemically Christian.” More broadly, it means that all human kind, of whatever faith commitment, can thrive nowise more certainly than it can upon the broad framework of natural rights and self-government.

William B. Allen
Chief Operating Officer
UrbanCURE

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