Religion in Public Life Is a Safeguard to Liberty — Not a Threat

American liberty rests on moral truths.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, our central tradition of religious liberty is increasingly misunderstood. America is more secular than at any point in its history, a shift that has been accompanied by growing hostility toward public expressions of faith. Political leaders and citizens alike no longer treat religious belief as a legitimate source of moral reasoning, but as a provocation or disruption. Even symbolic expressions of faith by public figures — such as Jack Posobiec holding a rosary at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest — triggers disproportionate outrage as religious skeptics recast moral disagreement as subversion. This reflex reflects not concern for constitutional order, but unease with public morality itself.

From presidential campaigns to late night television, the bedrock American belief in religious liberty — enshrined in the First Amendment — is frequently misinterpreted in political discourse to require a strict “separation of church and state,” such that no viewpoint or advocacy may be rooted in the moral teachings of religious faith.

Under this assumption, appeals to Christian morality in the public square are actively dismissed as unconstitutional or even dangerous. But this is simply not true. American Christians are not only justified, but morally responsible in bringing their moral convictions into public discourse. Doing so is fundamental to our form of government.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was never intended to purge religious reasoning from public life. Its original purpose was far narrower: to prevent the federal government from establishing a national church or coercing religious belief. In a nation shaped by citizens fleeing religious persecution, the concern was state compulsion in matters of faith — not the moral convictions of religious citizens participating freely in democratic self-government.

Nothing in the text or historical understanding of the First Amendment suggests voters, legislators or advocates must conceal their deepest moral beliefs when entering the public square. The Constitution restrains the state, not the consciences of the people who govern it. To argue otherwise is to transform a protection against tyranny into a tool of exclusion — casting religious moral convictions out of the conversation.

American liberty rests on moral truths it did not invent and cannot revise. The Founders understood rights as grounded in human nature, not historical accident or social consensus. The government exists to secure rights, not create them. This is why the Declaration appeals beyond positive law to our Creator and human nature.

Every state constitution contains some acknowledgment of God or divine authority. These references do not establish sectarian rule, but affirm that political authority operates under limits it does not impose on itself. Citizens’ beliefs in a higher moral order serve as safeguards against arbitrary power.

The natural law tradition, historically shaped by Christian philosophy, supports the Founders’ account of natural rights. Claims about universal human rights and justice were understood as accessible to human reason, even as they emerged from a broadly Christian moral inheritance.

Yet, religiously-grounded arguments are now often portrayed as inapplicable and inaccessible to those who do not share the same — or any — faith. America has never required citizens to depend solely on a value-neutral language — only that laws be debated and enacted through constitutional processes. Religious arguments, like secular moral arguments, have always been part of the public square.

The modern insistence that politics remain strictly secular represents a sharp departure from this tradition. It is not a constitutional requirement, but an ideological weapon that treats religious beliefs as politically illegitimate. By denying any moral source beyond the state, individual will or abstract “principles,” strict secularism undermines the very power separation it claims to protect.

Critics often conflate Christian moral arguments and public religiosity with the more extreme elements of integralism — a philosophy based on the idea that the government should be subordinated to the Catholic church. Such a system would certainly violate the Establishment Clause of our Constitution, as it supplants the order and authority of our democratic system with the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the church.

But when it comes to citizens or politicians arguing from a place of faith, such concerns are wholly misplaced. Christian-informed viewpoints against euthanasia and embryo selection, for example, bring a moral framework to consider these issues under which otherwise only economic and scientific arguments are blindly prioritized. To argue from Catholic moral premises within a constitutional republic is not to seek clerical governance, but to participate in ordinary political deliberation about justice, law, and the ends of government.

What is at stake is not integralism, but moral self-government. A pluralistic country does not require citizens to bracket their deepest convictions — it requires them to test those convictions through persuasion rather than coercion. Religious arguments, like all arguments, succeed or fail on their merits in open debate.

A functioning country requires citizens willing to argue about right and wrong, justice and injustice, truth and fiction. Excluding religiously informed moral reasoning hollows out our American system, denying its very origins. Christian Americans who speak from their moral convictions exercise the core premise of the American system: free people may reason together about the good they seek to secure.

Sam Raus is the David Boaz Resident Writing Fellow at Young Voices, a political analyst and public relations professional. Follow him on X: @SamRaus1.