Throughout my life I have tried to bring Christians together to engage and transform the culture - with varying degrees of success and failure. My identity as a Catholic Christian grounds me in a vision of the human person, marriage and family, the Natural Law, human freedom, and an understanding of a truly just social order which flows from the Social teaching of my Church. This teaching is called social because it speaks to human society and to the formation of social institutions. The truths and principles it offers are certainly taught in both the Bible and the Christian tradition. They derive from a Jewish and Christian worldview. However, they can be known by all men and women because they are revealed in the Natural Moral Law and can be discerned through the exercise of reason. These truths and principles form the foundation of a truly free and human society.
Catholics are not alone in this claim. Increasingly,
our evangelical protestant Christian friends are standing with us as together we recognize that the urgency of the hour demands such a response. I am convinced that this growing alliance is the key to securing a future of authentic freedom.
The struggle we face in the West is the rejection of our Christian roots. Those roots informed our worldview. We face competing definitions of human freedom, human dignity, and human flourishing in the West. What is needed is a recovery of the classical Christian worldview and the social vision which it entails. This worldview is not about being left or right, liberal or conservative - within the contemporary politicized use of those words. It insists upon the existence of truth in an age of relativism. We must gather a movement around such a worldview and work together.
However, we need to apply the social ordering principle of subsidiarity in implementing this obligation in governing structures and in the economic order. This principle insists that governance should be exercised at the lowest practicable level - first - beginning with the family.
We must join together and reassert in an age of relativism that there are objective truths which can be known, principles by which we can form truly free societies, and rights endowed upon us by God.
The American founders carried such a vision into the experiment in ordered liberty called the United States of America. However, they did not come up with this ennobling and enabling vision on their own. They received it from the treasury of Western civilization.
It is only a return to the Christian vision of the human person, marriage and the family and the society founded upon it - the insistence upon normative, fundamental moral truths - which can secure the future of Western civilization. It is Time for an Evangelical and Catholic Alliance for the common good.
