Gov. Jindal: The Silent War on Religious Liberty

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal delivered a speech Thursday evening (at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library where he will make the case for why defending religious liberty is important. The Governor outlined attacks on religious liberty, including from the Obama Administration, and solutions to combat these efforts. His remarks are below.

Gov. Jindal:

Thank you…it’s an honor to speak here…I’ve been looking forward to this night.

I have spoken out aggressively in recent months about the disastrous effects of Obamacare, about our dire need to reform American education, and about the urgency for our country to re-endorse the concept of growing our economy that President Reagan so uniquely championed. These are issues of great importance, essential for the future of America.

But tonight, I’m going to talk to you about an entirely different topic, and that topic may surprise you. Tonight I want to give a speech I’ve never given before, about an issue lurking just beneath the surface – that issue is The Silent War on Religious Liberty.

I can think of no better place to give this speech than the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Library. President Reagan himself said that, “Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few, but the universal right of all God’s children.”

When he said this, he was not expressing a strictly personal belief in the nature of man as a created being — as a child of God. He was reaffirming the most basic contention of the American Founding, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that we are a nation constituted in accordance with the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and that we are a people “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Let me make this explicit: the source and justification for the very existence of the United States of America is and always has been contingent upon the understanding of man as a created being, with a Creator conferring his intrinsic rights — “among [them] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

How we understand and approach that Creator is properly left to the hearts and consciences of every citizen. I am a Catholic Christian. My parents are Hindus. I am blessed to know Baptists, Jews, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and so many more in the rich tapestry of American faiths. And I know men and women who acknowledge no denomination or creed, confess to uncertainty about the Divine, yet look to the richness of nature and the majesty of this world — and wonder, and inwardly seek, the Author of it all.

These days we think this diversity of belief is tolerated under our law and Constitution. But that’s wrong. This diversity of belief is the foundation of our law and Constitution. America does not sustain and create faith. Faith created and sustains America.

President John Adams, in 1798, wrote to Massachusetts militiamen to remind them that “… Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

In 1798, this was simple common sense. In 2014, we are forced to confront a question that would have been unthinkable to President Adams…and President Washington, and President Reagan, and every other American throughout history who believed in America’s founding premise:

What happens when our government decides it no longer needs a “moral and religious people?”

Today the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war. It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square, and the endurance of our constitutional governance. 

t is a war against the propositions in the Declaration of Independence. It is a war against the spirit that motivated abolitionism. It is a war against the faith that motivated the Civil Rights struggle. It is a war against the soul of countless acts of charity. It is a war against the conscience that drives social change. It is a war against the heart that binds our neighborhoods together. It is a war against America’s best self, at America’s best moments. It is a war — a silent war — against religious liberty.

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