AG Barr Highlights ‘Crucial Link Between Religion and Liberty’, Warns of Assault by ‘Militant Secularists’ By Benjamin Gill for Faith Wire
GNN Note – Liberty is from God, while freedom is from man. Both seemingly the same but along together different. #END
Attorney General William Barr says religion in public life is under assault in America, leading to what he called “dire” consequences.
Speaking to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Wednesday, Barr said America’s founders recognized the critical link between religion and freedom, but he says it’s been under siege for the last half-century.
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Barr told the group, “That crucial link between religion and liberty, so well understood at the Founding, is all too often forgotten today. 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,” he continued.
Defenders of religious freedom have long argued that the “separation of church and state” is intended to keep the state from telling churches what to do. They point to the deep faith of many of America’s founders, and the way they incorporated God and biblical principles into the country’s founding documents.
Barr continued, “Separation of church and state does not mean, and never did mean, separation of religion and civics. 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’.”
“Alexis de Tocqueville, the keenest observer of the early American republic, praised America’s separation of church and state while extolling America’s union of the ‘spirit of religion’ and the ‘spirit of liberty’ as the key to its success,” Barr said.
