Well, thank you all. It's great to -- it's great to be here this morning, and I hope you guys are having a successful conference. I will say there is a certain irony in speaking on the topic of religious liberty because my, uh, my seven-year-old who is not in school today was forced to come to work with his dad and feels that his liberties are being threatened at this very moment.
[Laughter] So, he's backstage probably not watching the speech, hopefully watching cartoons, but I appreciate you all having me. And I want to give a special note of thanks, of course, to Ambassador Sam Brownback, my dear friend, uh, to Katrina Lantos Swett, Peter Burns, and other faith leaders, government officials, and of course many survivors of religious persecution.
Uh, thank you all for convening and participating in this summit, uh, which is on a topic whose importance unfortunately grows with each passing moment, and hopefully our new administration can help. Now, please -- please, please be seated. I, uh, I always feel weird when people are standing up to hear me speak.
[Laughter] It's not going to be that good, ladies and gentlemen. You can have a seat. [Laughter] Religious freedom, of course, is the freedom to practice one's own faith and act according to one's own conscience. And it's of course the bedrock of civil society in the United States of America and across the world.
We know in America faith nurtures our communities. At home and abroad, it fosters a love for one's neighbors. It inspires generosity and service. It calls us to treat one another with dignity, to lift up those in need, and to build nations grounded in moral principle. In America, our founding fathers rightly recognized this, listing freedom of religion first among the liberties enshrined in our great Constitution.
Before he was elected president, John Adams, who was the first vice president, I might add, observed that politicians, quote, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. Now, of course, that's an important lesson for any lawmaker in this room but for all of us in this room.
But I'm here this morning in part to reflect not only on the words of our founders but especially on those of their own intellectual forebears, the church fathers of classical Christianity to which we owe the very notion of religious liberty. And I know we have people of every faith here, but it is I think a conceit of modern society that religious liberty is a liberal concept.
But we know that religious freedom flows from concepts central to the Christian faith in particular. The free will of human beings and the essential dignity of all peoples. We find its foundational tenets in the gospels themselves with Christ's famous instruction to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's. Early Christians of course suffered greatly, and unfortunately many Christians still suffer today at the hands of oppressive state power.
It weighed heavily on the church's first theologians and apologists. Reacting to the persecution of his fellow Christians in the third century, the early church Father Tertullian of Carthage published an open letter to the Roman Council. In it he advocated the freedom to practice one's faith according to his or her conscience.
And I'm quoting, it is only just and a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions. The religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another. It is not part of religion to coerce religious practice for it is by choice, not coercion, that we should be led to religion, end quote.
Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the same church father who is credited with first coining the phrase religious liberty. Decades later, another Christian apologist would go on to advise Emperor Constantine, quote, religion cannot be imposed by force. The matter must be carried on by words rather than by blows.
And, of course, this this line of thought runs from the early church fathers to now the modern era where we recognize that we can't force our faith on anybody. America's founders recognized that their own writings was in dialog with these -- these philosophical predecessors. In his personal correspondence, Adams himself made references to both Tertullian and other church fathers.
Thomas Jefferson owned an edition of Tertullian's collected writings, which he marked up and which today sits in the Library of Congress. In fact, in a personal copy of his own notes on the state of Virginia, Jefferson went so far as to handwrite Tertullian's quote about faith in the margins of a passage on religious liberty.
This is the legacy that has guided America's political principles from the founding to this very day. We remain the world's largest majority Christian country, and the right to religious freedom is protected by the people for everybody, whether you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or no faith at all. But religious liberty is not simply as we all know about legal safeguards.
It is also about fostering a culture in which faith can thrive so that men and women can fully appreciate and respect the God given rights of their fellow citizens. Because one of the wonderful apparent paradoxes of religion is that, in connecting us to the sacred and to the universal, it deepens our commitment to the particular, to our neighbors, to our obligations to one another, to the individual communities that all of us call home.
I know that many of you came from all over our country, and I know that many of you know that I come from a poor part of our country. And growing up, my family and I, we were Christians, but we weren't regular church goers. My grandmother who raised me was a deeply faithful woman in her own way, but she was skeptical of institutionalized religion and rarely attended Sunday services herself.
But on the occasions when we did go, whether it was with her or later with my father to his Pentecostal church in southwestern Ohio and certainly now as a member of my own congregation, I was always struck by what I saw. And I will tell you that my -- my grandma once told me that in the area of eastern Kentucky where she grew up, even the Episcopalians were snake handlers.
I don't know if that was true, but that was just Mam-ma's little spin on her own community. [Laughter] But think about it. Church was a place and still is where people of different races, different backgrounds, different walks of life came together in commitment to their shared communities and of course in commitment to their God.
It was a place where the CEO of a company and the worker of a company stood equal before their worship of God. It was a place where people united not just in the pews but in acts of service, on mission trips, charity drives, and in rallying around one another in times of sickness or grief or of course in celebration of new life.
Are these not the kinds of bonds and virtues that lawmakers today should strive to cultivate? Well, I'm pleased to say that they certainly were in the first Trump administration, and they will be even more so in the second Trump administration. Now, in his first term, President Trump centered the cause of advancing religious freedom in his foreign policy.
In China across Europe and throughout Africa and the Middle East, the first Trump administration took critical steps to protect the rights of the faithful, whether that was by rescuing pastors who were persecuted by foreign regimes or bringing relief to the Yazidis, Christians, and other faith communities facing genocidal terror from ISIS.
And in his domestic policy, President Trump's first term brought a new high-water mark for religious Americans.
He took decisive action to defend religious liberty, combat anti-Semitism, and preserve the conscience rights of hospital workers and faith-based ministries as they provided care to their fellow Americans, and to remove barriers for religious organizations and businesses to contract with the federal government.
You shouldn't have to leave your faith at the door of your people's government, and under President Trump's leadership, you won't have to. Now, we are only in the third week of his second term, but I think it's safe to say we've accomplished maybe more in the last two weeks than a lot of administrations have in a few years.
But this administration is intent on not just restoring but on expanding the achievements of the first four years and certainly of the last two weeks. And in this short period, the president has issued orders to end the weaponization of the federal government against religious Americans, pardon pro-life.
protesters who were unjustly imprisoned under the last administration. And importantly, stop the federal censorship used to prevent Americans from speaking their -- their conscience and speaking their mind whether it's in their communities or online. Now, our administration believes we must stand for religious freedom not just as a legal principle as important as that is but as a lived reality, both within our own borders and especially outside of them.
In recent years, too often has our nation's international engagement on religious liberty issues been corrupted and distorted to the point of absurdity. Think about this. How did America get to the point where we're sending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe?
That is not what leadership on protecting the rights of the faithful looks like, and it ends with this administration. And I'd add that part of our protecting religious freedom initiatives means recognizing in our foreign policy the difference between regimes that respect religious freedom and those that do not.
The United States must be able to make that distinction. We must be able to look at the catastrophes like the plight of Iraq's Christians over the past three decades and possess the moral clarity to act when something has gone wrong. Now, this administration stands ready to do so, and thankfully President Trump chose to nominate a secretary of state, one of my dear friends and I believe one of the great living champions of religious liberty across the globe, a person whose dedication to religious liberty flows from his faith in the same way that mine does.
And of course, that's our great Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirmed 99 to nothing by the US Senate. But both at home and abroad, we have much more to do to more fully secure religious liberty for all people of faith. I am grateful for the painstaking work that everyone in this room has poured into that effort.
I pray that together we will be able to better protect the dignity of all peoples as well as the rights of all believers to practice their faith according to the dictates of their conscience. So, thank you all for your work in preserving religious liberty. Thank you for safeguarding the rights of faith communities across the globe.
And thank you most of all for believing because we know that the source of religious liberty is the recognition that all of us are equal under the rights and laws of God, and that principle will guide us in the years to come. God bless you all and thank you for having me.