Safeguard Religious Identity

“Since they are co-responsible for ministering to the poor, faith-based charities ought to be willing to engage the state with the confidence that they are equal partners in this enterprise, not just government contractors. Subsidiarity works both ways, and religious charities provide an immense help to the state by providing social services in ways that the state itself simply cannot provide. This should instill in the organizations that make up the religious social sector a deep sense of the importance and uniqueness of their contribution to the general welfare. It should also strengthen their determination, as they cooperate with various levels of government in pursuit of common ends, to guard jealously their religious identity, knowing that it is precisely because of it that they contribute to the public good.”

–Luis Lugo, Equal Partners: The Welfare Responsibility of Governments and Churches(Center for Public Justice, 1998).

How to Protect Religious Freedom

“The religious community cannot take religious liberty for granted. It needs to expend a lot more energy defending the right to religious liberty, and it would help to spend a lot less energy attacking the liberty of others.

“Abortion is a special case. But the conflicts between believers and nonbelievers, and between religious conservatives and the gay rights movement, have live-and-let-live solutions in the tradition of American liberty. Unfortunately, neither side seems much interested in those solutions. . . . Neither side in the culture wars seems much interested in protecting the liberty of the other side.”

–Douglas Laycock, “Sex, Atheism, and the Free Exercise of Religion,” University of Detroit Mercy Law Review, 88, Spring 2011.

My Rights and Your Rights

“[W]e affirm that a right for one is a right for another and a responsibility for all. A right for a Protestant is a right for an Orthodox is a right for a Catholic is a right for a Jew is a right for a Humanist is a right for a Mormon is a right for a Muslim is a right for a Buddhist-and for the followers of any other faith within the wide bounds of the republic.

“That rights are universal and responsibilities mutual is both the premise and the promise of democratic pluralism. The First Amendment, in this sense, is the epitome of public justice and serves as the Golden Rule for civic life. Rights are best guarded and responsibilities best exercised when each person and group guards for all others those rights they wish guarded for themselves.”

—The Williamsburg Charter, 1988.