Archbishop Chaput identifies himself as an Enemy of the Republic.

Wait for the vilification campaig in 3....2.....1....

So here’s the premise that grounds the rest of my comments tonight.  On October 6, the Supreme Court declined to hear a variety of state appeals on the nature of marriage.  In effect, the court has affirmed the validity of gay marriage, and I believe this creates a tipping point in American public discourse.  The dismemberment of any privileged voice that biblical belief once had in our public square is just about complete.

This trend has been building for a long time.  Gay marriage is only one of the many issues that have transformed our culture.  But given the intimate and embodied nature of the relationship in every genuine marriage, and the traditional procreative implications it has for making or closing off a nation’s future, gay marriage has a uniquely powerful sign value.

The most disturbing thing about the debate around gay marriage is the destruction of public reason that it accomplished.  Emotion and sloganeering drove the argument.  And the hatred that infected the conversation came far less from so-called “homophobes” than from many gay issue activists themselves.  People who uphold a traditional moral architecture for sexuality, marriage and family have gone in the space of just 20 years from mainstream conviction to the media equivalent of racists and bigots.

This is impressive.  It’s also profoundly dishonest and evil, but we need to acknowledge the professional excellence of the marketing that made it happen.  We also need to thank God for the gift of this difficult moment, because conflict always does two things.  It purifies the Church, and it clarifies the character of the enemies who hate her.  Conflict is good when the issues matter.  And very few issues matter as much to the course of a nation as the nature of marriage and family.

So what do we do now?  Believers don’t have the luxury of pessimism.  And the idea that we can retire to the safety of some modern equivalent of a monastery in the hills, isn’t practical or warranted.  Our job is to be the healthy cells in a society.  We need to work as long as we can, as hard as we can, to nourish the good that remains in our country – and there’s a deep well of good that does remain — and to encourage the seeds of a renewal that can only come from our young people.//

In America, even the Catholics are Protestants.

If only the New Atheists were as honest as the Catholic Archbishop of Denver.

For their own purposes, a traditional New Atheist trope is to deny that the America was founded by Christians as a Christian nation.  They go so far as to cite to the obscure "Treaty of Tripoli" where some diplomats diplomatically pointed out that the American government was not framed as an explicitly Christian nation, and, so, had no dispute with Muslims on religions grounds.

But that doesn't deny that the nation was "born Christian" - or, more precisely, Protestant - or that the government didn't grow out of the roots of a particular Protestant ecclesiological practice that involved decentralized, federalized authority.

This is indisputable as Archbishop Chaput recognized in  a recent talk:

“The American model of religious liberty is rooted in the thought-world and idea-architecture of the Christian humanist tradition,” he said. “Whatever it becomes in the future, America was born Protestant.” The archbishop added that he was

not saying that our Protestant heritage is uniformly good. Some of the results clearly are good: America’s culture of personal opportunity; respect for the individual; a tradition of religious liberty and freedom of speech; and a reverence for the law. Other effects of Reformation theology have been less happy: radical individualism; revivalist politics; a Calvinist hunger for material success as proof of salvation; an ugly nativist and anti-Catholic streak; a tendency toward intellectual shallowness and disinterest in matters of creed; and a nearly religious, and sometimes dangerous, sense of national destiny and redemptive mission.

“The global situation is made worse by the inaction of our own national leadership in promoting to the world one of America's greatest qualities: religious freedom,” he said later in his address. “This is regrettable because we urgently need an honest discussion on the relationship between Islam and the assumptions of the modern democratic state. In diplomacy and in interreligious dialogue we need to encourage an Islamic public theology that is both faithful to Muslim traditions and also open to liberal norms. Shari'a law is not a solution. Christians living under shari'a uniformly experience it as offensive, discriminatory and a grave violation of their human dignity.”