Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
- Sen. John Curtis emphasized virtues like respect and charity to protect religious freedom.
- He highlighted historical religious persecution and stressed the need for civility and pluralism.
SALT LAKE CITY — Sen. John Curtis said virtues such as respect, civility and charity are essential to protecting religious liberty in a speech on the Senate floor last month ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary.
The Republican said those virtues were "presupposed" by the founders who wrote religious freedom protections into the U.S. Constitution and who included liberty as one of several "unalienable rights" all people are endowed with. But even with those guaranteed protections, Curtis said respect and civility toward others are needed to ensure full religious liberty.
"Yes, as members of this national community, we have the right to espouse our values — religious, moral or political — without hindrance or constraint," he said in a speech on June 24. "That also means we must accord to others the right to espouse their values, without hindrance or constraint. Religious freedom is distinctly entwined with pluralism, because the free exercise of religion presupposes a mosaic of differing values and life orientations."
"This grand experiment in democracy required for its organization, and requires for its continuation, a willingness to build bridges of understanding as well as defend principles to which we are committed," he added.
Curtis said religious liberty is "at the forefront" of the liberties outlined in the Declaration of Independence, but noted that those "at the margins of our mainstream" have not always had their religious freedoms protected — both before and after the declaration was signed.
"Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts in 1659; Baptists were imprisoned in Virginia in the 1770s; Catholic convents and schools were burned in 1834," he said. "My own people, the Latter-day Saints, were mobbed and murdered in Missouri and Illinois in the decade to follow; and Jewish people have been the victims of discrimination and violence from the founding to the present."
While you can put protections into law, "you cannot legislate respect or compassion or bonds of charity," Curtis said.
A March poll from the Pew Research Center found that a slight majority of Americans, 53%, say their fellow citizens have bad morals and ethics. The poll also found Americans view their countrymen with "more hostility and suspicion than is the case in any democracy surveyed."
Curtis called the result "distressing" and said Americans "can do better."
"We will never achieve consensus on the particulars of our religious commitments — or our lack of religious commitments. Nor should we," he said. "Our pluralism is a source of our strength and should be a source of pride. However, we can honor our founding principles by returning to a particular kind of faith (the founders) did have in common. Faith in the essential goodness of one another. ... Charity is the only way whereby we flourish in our differences even as we work together for a more perfect union."
