JACKSON (MS)
Clarion Ledger
Dec. 19, 2019
By Richard Conville
In October of this year, Attorney General William Barr gave a major address on religious liberty at the Notre Dame University Law School. With the impeachment process well underway, the speech has gotten little notice, but deserves more, because it reveals so much about Mr. Barr’s religious commitments and how they inform his politics.
The speech is over seven pages long, so I will limit my comments to a small portion that seems to articulate his central thesis–that the country’s “traditional moral order” has experienced serious erosion. He asserts three causes, (1) the “assault on religion,” thus losing “the right rules to live by;” (2) the state (i.e., the federal government) has become the “alleviator of bad consequences” of bad behavior; and (3) “secularists have been continually seeking to eliminate laws that reflect traditional moral norms.”
I disagree with Barr on several points, and you may too. First, to allege there has been an “assault on religion” is pure hyperbole. To blame eroding moral standards on “secularists,” as Barr does, raises the question, why do more people now, than, say, 50 years ago, consider themselves to be secular and not so religious? Could part of the fault lie at the feet of the Church? How has it failed to capture the imagination of those now more secular people? Rather than an assault on religion, traditional religious institutions have been leaking members for decades: no news here. Moreover, the “traditional moral order,” that Barr so highly prizes, was presumably in place during the time of the rampant, world-wide sex scandal involving Catholic priests’ assaults on thousands of young boys. Those “right rules” did not save those children.
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