Faith and the Halls of Power: Marriage, Family, and Religious Liberty – Timothy S. Goeglein

Transcript (edited for readability).

Before I start, I want to say thank you to a couple of people, if I may, beginning with the great man who just introduced me. It's a great honor and privilege to be here. I travel about a third of the time in my capacity as one of the vice presidents at Focus on the Family, but I very rarely have the opportunity and honor to speak to my fellow Missouri Synod Lutherans, so it is great to be here. And may I tell you, it is a difficult thing to think that I'm speaking directly after Saints Matthew and Sharif, my great friend, and John and Al — these people I've known my entire life. So I will do my best. But may I tell you, it is particularly a great honor to be in the same room as my great pastor, Christopher Esget, who is here. The Eggerling family loves, honors, and respects our pastor, and just know that you're very special to us.

One other thing, if I may. It is a particular honor to be standing in front of the new avant garde. I am not coming all the way to St. Louis to give a speech of gloom and doom, because I feel very strongly that as followers of Jesus Christ, we are not marching toward any victory — we are marching from a victory. And I hope to demonstrate that in part of my remarks this evening. By the way, living and working in Washington, it's great to be in Missouri. It's great to be back in America. Yes, you can clap.

You know the story of the turtle who was mugged by five snails. The police asked the turtle what happened, and the turtle said, "I don't know, it happened so fast." If you, like I, feel that we're on a rather fast conveyor belt for all the things that we know and love, and find yourself asking, "Gee, did it happen so fast?" — if you find certain times in your life when you seem to be bailing out a boat with a Dixie cup, you've come to the right speech. However, it didn't happen so fast. And that's why I want to speak about faith and the halls of power — marriage, family, and religious liberty, which I believe, without any peer, are the three issues of our time in the public square.

Let me be a reductionist, if I may. We are living in the midst of a moral revolution without peer in the American experience. The fabric of this remarkable republic is unraveling as we speak, and I feel that there are probably a few people in this room who share my view that we wonder exactly how the mandarins intend to reweave it. It's an erosion, in part, if I may say, standing before hundreds of pastors — it's an erosion of the church's role as the foremost bulwark of traditional morality in the West, particularly amid the heated battles over same-sex marriage, bioethics, abortion, but above all what I think of as the era of conscience. In fact, if someone said to me, "If you had to translate and synthesize what is the most important issue in the public square," I would say, in three simple words: the era of conscience.

I don't know if it's about departed glory, or about measurable degeneration, from dawn to decadence — a whiff of decay, decomposition — but I think we're all thinking along the same lines. It's not just a moral revolution, by the way, because first and foremost it is a spiritual revolution. It begins with culture, and culture leads. And it is true — I have spent thirty years of my life inside the public square, and I have learned the hard way that politics is downstream from culture, and not the other way around. The very basis of culture is religion, which comes from the cult. And we are all living through, as Missouri Synod Lutherans, a fierce rejection of the existing moral order. In fact, almost every single day now we get up to observe the deconstruction of America — none more so, if I may say, than in the last six and a half years. We have a president of the United States of America who is, in his very person, inimical to everything that we hold most dear.

It's not just that technology spreads the values, by the way, because the values get spread in a lot of ways. We in the West, in other words, are at a crossroads. Free speech, of course, is the lifeblood of political freedom, and if we lose that, the Second will inevitably die with it, and we know what that is — our unbound conscience.

Now, this aggressively secular, and what I might say intellectually relativistic, milieu has many tentacles. And as George Orwell famously said, we have a moral duty to be intelligent. So let's think about what Justice Samuel Alito, in his mesmerizing and remarkable dissent in the recent marriage case, called "the new orthodoxy." Let's think about that, if we may, together. Because, as Pope Benedict said so well, in a way that I think is worthy of the great Martin Luther, what we are really living through is a dictatorship of relativism. And as my great friend Robby George has said so well, and Sherif, as one of his probably most important students, has said so well, we are officially at the end of comfortable Christianity.

But the attempt to make sex — so let's cut right to the quick, if we may — the attempt to make sex into a recreational activity, equally available to men and women, and free for both from the burdens of shame and guilt, is, in fact, something new. That's the heart of much of why we are meeting today. We are living in an age of feelings. It's not just moral relativism, it is a kind of composite emotional relativism. And may I say, as pastors — as they pray for a congregant in good standing — it is emotional relativism that must be, day in and day out, one of the most difficult hurdles that you have to think about. You know why? I am the father of two teenage sons, Timothy and Paul. I love them more than life itself. As I was saying to my new best friend today, since they are nineteen and seventeen, getting to the end of the teen years, my wife and I feel that we gain at least two points on our IQ every day. After they turn twenty to twenty-one, we hope to be back to full strength.

But let me just tell you all that by the time the millennials get to church, they've already seen dozens of YouTube videos. They've seen internet memes, and they've seen Instagram photos, and your sermon goes on for twenty or twenty-five minutes.

You know, this wave of cultural cleansing leads into the question, ultimately, of the moral ecology of our country — order versus chaos. I am a conservative in good standing. And there is a great man, who is probably the most important member of the faculty of this great university — by God's grace, never having met James Hitchcock, I began reading him when I was fifteen years old, and I never stopped. And I think it is possible, equal only to Al Schmidt, that I have read just about everything James Hitchcock ever wrote. And I would pray and hope that you might think about reading James Hitchcock too. Because as early as 1971 he was talking about the celebratory nature of moral transgression. He said transgressive currents in culture are giving us not only a new country — they are giving us a kind of moral inversion that is unprecedented in the United States of America.

You all know about situational ethics. I think, if I may say, from inside the Beltway, it's the version of situational politics — situational public policy — which feeds beautifully into the age of emotional relativism. Eve Arnold said so eloquently: "What do you hang on the walls of your mind?" That's a pretty good question. My friend Bill Kristol is trying to make sense of a lot of the things that we're all trying to make sense of. He's Jewish and I'm Christian — the Judeo-Christian tradition. He said, "We're not just line-drawing questions about particular liberties." He said, "But the question of religious liberty, and even liberty itself, hangs in the balance as a result of this public debate."

And may I say, as a person from Focus on the Family, it's not just questions at the margins of family law that we're talking about, but about fundamental issues about the meaning and the status of the family. Let me use one example, if I may — Planned Parenthood. Fiscal year 2013 to 2014, a mere twelve months, that organization of infamy — an odious, odious organization — received $530 million in taxpayer funding. If you like math as much as I do, let me say it another way: Planned Parenthood gets $1.4 million every day in taxpayer money to kill children. They performed 330,000 abortions in 2013 alone, and taxpayer funding accounts for 41% of their overall revenue.

Malcolm Muggeridge, a man whose conversion was late but complete, one of the great men of the twentieth century, said, "People do not believe lies because they have to — they want to." There's the law. Just before going to church, I was watching the first of the videos, the infamous videos that everybody in this room should be watching. I was stunned by the discussion of a baby's head — the need to preserve a baby's head. And I said to my wonderful wife, "A baby's head." And I looked in the New York Times that same week of the first Planned Parenthood video, and guess what I found? I found a quote from a ninety-four-year-old, Oskar Gröning. You should know that name — Oskar Gröning. He had been a functionary at Auschwitz, and he was convicted by a German court just a few weeks ago, the same week as the first Planned Parenthood video, of 300,000 — that's right, 300,000 — counts of accessory to murder. He admitted knowing something was wrong at Auschwitz when a camp guard grabbed a crying baby and smashed its head against a wall. That should ring in our ears.

Now, we have a president who I mentioned a moment ago, President Barack Obama, who in 2007 gave a speech where he first played the science card that he loves to play, over and over again. He plays the science card when he talks about abortion. And I'm eager to tell you what he said in his absolutist stance, in favoring abortion for any reason, up to and including the ninth month of pregnancy. And I'm quoting the president — it will not sound like Madison to you — on this fundamental issue, he said, "I will not yield, and Planned Parenthood will not yield." And then, in a way that seems, yes, surreal, he prayed a blessing upon Planned Parenthood.

George Will, in five little words, said it all: "The barbarity of a nation." George Will's best friend was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Pat Moynihan once said we are in the era of "defining deviancy down." We have arrived, my friends, in the sub-cellar. But there is always hope. And you will remember that wonderful phrase from the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn — in the midst of totalitarianism, in his magnum opus, he wrote: "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world." And my friends, therein lies hope.

In this moral crossroads that I'm talking about, in this era of radical dislocation, the question emerges: why, as Christians, should we be hopeful? Even in the midst of moral anarchy? Even in the midst of an inescapable loss of all the things that we're talking about? Even at a time when sex in America has been drained from pregnancy, from matrimony, and, yes, in some circles, from romance? We need to ask ourselves what is the ramification of a radical negation of all that we believe as Lutherans in the culture.

And that, of course, brings me to 1965 — the year after I was born. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who I mentioned earlier in my remarks, was a young demographer at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1965, Pat Moynihan, who was building a rather remarkable career, found something that was deeply disturbing and inexplicable as a social demographer. He asked, "Why are 25% of all black Americans born out of wedlock?" I'm very happy to report to you that he didn't know the answer and was brave enough to say it. But he looked at the trend lines, and in 1965, with one out of every four black children being born illegitimately, he said, "We are in the midst of a crisis."

So let's fast forward, if we may, together, exactly fifty years. Today in America, 72% of all black people are born out of wedlock. In America today, 53% of all Hispanic Americans are born out of wedlock. 34% of all native-born white people are born out of wedlock. Overall, 40% of all Americans are born out of wedlock. And for the first time, in the 2010 census, we found that 50% — 50% — of all babies born to American women ages thirty and younger, their children are born out of wedlock.

65% of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two were married in 1960. Today, only 26% in that range are married. Living together is the accepted means of determining compatibility for marriage for this generation. And yes, you've heard it before — it is demonstrably a hookup generation. Sex with no relationship and certainly with no commitment. And on top of that, our culture encourages young people to experiment with a multiple-choice menu of sexual identities. You all know that Facebook now offers nearly sixty different sexual identities to choose from.

National Review this week just came out and asks, wonderfully, powerfully: what is a single mother? I thought that I knew. I didn't know. With 40% of births in the United States now occurring outside marriage, many more single-mother families today result from premarital childbearing than from failed marriages. May I say it another way — a gigantic percentage of American women don't want to be married. Period. Ever. End of story.

By the way, you think those numbers are big here — we talk about the West a lot. Here are the out-of-wedlock birth rates for a few countries: Iceland, 67% of all children born out of wedlock. Estonia, 58%. France, 56%. Norway, 55% — that used to be a Lutheran country. Sweden, that was too, 54%. Belgium, 52%. Denmark, 51%. England, 58%. The Netherlands, 47%. And you know what, it goes on and on from there. What do you get from countries when you strip away Christianity? We are testing that proposition.

By the way, most social demographers were very pleased just a few years ago to find out that, for the first time in several years, 50% of all American marriages did not end in divorce — that is to say the divorce rates were seriously declining, until they looked at the cohabitation rates, which were through the roof. We still have a nearly 40% divorce rate for first marriages, and 75% for second marriages.

But I want to get to the nub of the nub, if I may. We are in the midst of a plague of fatherlessness in America. Two-thirds — two-thirds — of young boys and girls who are from working-class families do not live in the same home as their own biological father. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns us that the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children. Now, in 1960, a little over 5% of all births in America were to unwed mothers. Today, I just told you, it's 40%.

But I want to be very candid, if I may. I read in one sitting, had a little sleep, and then read in a second sitting, a book that I'm pleading with you all to read — other than mine. It's called Coming Apart, by Charles Murray. He is the most important center-right demographer today. He's at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. He has looked at all of the best empirical data. And I'm raising my right hand — everyone's entitled to his own opinions, but not everyone's entitled to his own facts. Charles Murray has looked at the empirical data, he's looked at the facts, and he posits two Americas: Belmont and Fishtown.

Belmont is very familiar to people in this room. Belmont is affluent, educated America. It's the place where people with at least two years of college education live. May I tell you, my friends, I am thrilled to tell you — thrilled — that in Belmont, America, where moms and dads have at least two years of college education, if they get married, they're probably going to stay married. If they have children, those children are probably going to be born inside of wedlock. Their work ethic is going to be fairly steady. And yes, left and right politically, if they have children, their faith commitment is high by the standards of any Western country.

But we, at Focus on the Family — and if I may be so presumptuous to say, we in the Missouri Synod, which has historically been, in many ways, a blue-collar, working-class synod — we need to pay close attention to Fishtown, America. In Fishtown, America, the majority of people who only have a high school education or below — the majority in America today — if they are going to get married, they will get divorced. If they're going to have children, they're going to have at least one child out of wedlock. Their work ethic is going to be spotty and nearly broken. And their faith commitment — the people that all of us call the salt of the earth — is historically very low. This should concern us very deeply.

We German Lutherans use that wonderful phrase, the Weltanschauung — the worldview. My friends, the worldview from the other side that's been imposed upon us is not working very well. Fifty-one years ago, Lyndon Baines Johnson launched what he called the War on Poverty and the Great Society. I'm raising my right hand for a second time — Lyndon Johnson said, "Not since Jesus Christ came to Earth has there been such a program as this." What — twenty-two — I'm a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation — $22 trillion later. Yes, trillion. You don't believe me, I promise: $22 trillion later. How are we doing? Poverty is higher. Illegitimacy is higher. Family breakdown is higher. I could go on and on and on and on.

My friends, if you incentivize something, you know what — you'll get more of it. And I'm very sorry to report the following: that for millions and millions, and millions and millions, and millions and millions of Americans, the government is the family. May I say that again? The government is the family. I'll use one snapshot, and I'm absolutely making no value judgment in this regard: in a country of 320 million Americans, we have 46 million Americans on food stamps. My friends, in addition to all the other cultural challenges we have as Lutherans, we are looking at a paradigm of family versus the government. That's not in the two-kingdoms paradigm.

Now, I want to shift for just a moment to the founding of our remarkable country. It was a genius of checks and balances. In that really hot summer, in Philadelphia, our founding fathers nailed the windows shut, and by Providence they designed a system, horizontally and vertically, to push power away from any central place or from any person. It was Madisonian to the core — Jimmy Madison. As an adult man, he never weighed more than one hundred pounds. Five foot six. Praise God for malaria — he had malaria as a boy, couldn't run and play like the other boys, although he was a very good horseman. He read the way that Ed Murrow used to smoke cigarettes — one book after the other. And he was preoccupied with freedom, particularly with the Roman Republic. And he was particularly, particularly preoccupied with when free men and women stopped being citizens and became subjects.

And may I tell you, well, in good Madisonian fashion — not from the eighteenth century, but for the twenty-first century — our rulers are getting very impatient with us. You see, the founders knew that the individual was here, and the government was here, and in the middle was supposed to be a robust civil society, powered by the church and by the family. Yes, there was going to be room for the Boy Scouts, the Elks, the Moose, the Yaks — they were all going to be there. But primarily the church and the family.

I could use others, but three of the greatest intellectual pillars of our founding were Hamilton of New York, Adams of Massachusetts, Jefferson of Virginia. These men disagreed on the biggest things that you and I could ever disagree on. Should there be a Constitution? Should there be one currency or thirteen? Should there be a permanent army and military? Should there be a Department of the Treasury? Did we need a Bill of Rights? You all know that Adams and Jefferson were not at the Constitutional Convention — they were in London and Paris, probably emailing every hour to find out what was going on.

May I tell you the one thing they agreed on — and only one? They believed, because Jimmy Madison had been so vocal about it, because John Adams had been such an incredible reader, they all knew that you could not have liberty without virtue. And in the American experience, they counted on one big thing: that because freedom rested on virtue, they had an ongoing conversation about how do you get lots of virtue. Moral excellence, right? The Scriptures. The unbound church. I'm sure they all thought about the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. That's the genius of America. It's not our military that makes us exceptional. It's not our stock market. It's not Capitol Hill — that I need to tell you. We don't need more bills. We don't need higher stock markets or bigger armies, although I welcome them all as a conservative. We need more virtue. We need excellence, moral excellence in the people. That's the taproot. We need a robust, confident, unshackled church. We need robust, confident, unshackled, nuclear, natural families.

I want to say it another way, if I may. America was founded by dissenting Protestants. They got on boats. They went to Amsterdam. They didn't like the Netherlands, so they bought another boat, and they came to the shores of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They liked the Geneva Bible. They didn't like the King James Version. That's the founding of America.

Now, yesterday, being a wonk, I was spending a little time on the ACLU's website — that's the anti-Christian… yeah. Here's what they say — you ready? According to the ACLU's website, the Founding Fathers, and I'm quoting, "knew the best way to protect religious liberty was to keep the government out of religion." My friends, that's false. That's not a fact.

Thomas Jefferson, a deist, asked — ready for this? — "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?" George Washington thought that religion was essential to curbing the influence of despots and providing a higher authority for the rule of law. He wrote about it extensively, and he proclaims in his Farewell Address, one of the greatest speeches in American history — and I'm quoting from that speech — "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." Alexander Hamilton, the politician who loves liberty, knows that — pardon me — knows that morality overthrown, and morality must fall with religion, he says: "The terrors of despotism can alone curb the impetuous passions of men." The theme is freedom, and the detailed relationship between our religious heritage and the system of political liberty cannot be debated. It is absolutely, categorically the case.

I want to quote from Abraham Lincoln. He said, in 1844: "The guarantee of the rights of conscience, as found in our Constitution, is most sacred and inviolable." Here's a summation: good morals are essential for a free republic to endure. That is holy and completely consonant with the beautiful teaching of the two kingdoms. In fact, the doctrine of the two kingdoms is genius. It arises in the debate rooted in God versus Caesar, and it is the one that our country, our culture, and our civilization is in need of more than at any time since our founding.

Now, I could give lots of examples, and pray God I won't. But social democracy — European social democracy — which restricts and constricts religious liberty and conscience, is the goal of those who do not share our Weltanschauung. They are radical secularists, and they believe that we have too much liberty.

Here's my fourth confession of our time together. I was invited three weeks ago to be part of the University of Pennsylvania's PennFed Leadership Program. My friends, I have no idea why I was invited, because it was very clear when I walked in — being a Christian who happens to be conservative — that I was the odd man out. I sat next to the famed Marci Hamilton. She is a very important, and in my view very misguided, legal theorist. She's very highly influential. She turned to me and to the group and said, and I quote: "This country has too much religious liberty." Is this ringing in your ear?

May I tell you — I hope you did the same as I: that you put those little things that are around your wrists, that we can't stand to get rid of — I hope you turn them off and put them in a drawer — and read the Obergefell marriage decision. I also hope you read the three dissents, from Thomas, Scalia, and Alito. But if you didn't, I will be happy to sum up the majority decision for you. Are you ready? Point one: everyone has a right to pursue happiness. Point two: no happiness is possible outside of marriage. Point three: sexual orientation being immutable, gay marriage is therefore — ding — a right. I am paraphrasing Justice Kennedy's infamous Obergefell marriage decision.

I'd like to go to something equally worthy, which is Alice in Wonderland. I think it's worthy, after Justice Kennedy, to quote Humpty Dumpty. Here it goes: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." How's that for emotional relativism?

Here's what Justice Scalia, the great Justice Scalia, said: "Is it conceivable that a minister who is authorized by the state to conduct marriage can decline to marry two men, if indeed this court holds that they have a constitutional right to marry?" He also said, "If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the court that began" — and he's quoting Justice Kennedy — "'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes a certain specific right that allows persons within a lawful realm to define and express their identity' — this is Scalia — I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."

And as the great Sherif reminded us today, the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage has now fully opened the door for plural marriage and for polygamy. And where I work, Faith and the Halls of Power, we already have a gender identity bill that has been drafted and introduced in the House of Representatives. We have thirty-one states that lack what the New York Times calls comprehensive laws that protect gay and transgendered Americans, so thirty-one bills will be drafted. We have a House and Senate which have seen the Equality Act — how do you like that for Orwellian phrases — that will, quote-unquote, broaden legal protections by amending the Civil Rights Act of 1965. This should scare us to death. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has now created a special category for the LGBT community. And we have a series of laws that have been invoked to protect transgender students in over half the states. We also have a new debate, I'm undoubtedly sure that you're following, about the immediate risk of losing tax-exempt status, the building of churches — i.e., zoning laws — and it goes on and on and on.

I want to quote, if I may, because Cicero, who watched what we're watching in ancient Rome, said the following: "Do not blame Caesar. Blame the people of Rome, who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom, and danced in his path, and gave him triumphal processions." Cicero says blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the forum of the new, wonderful, good society which shall now be Rome — interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.

This ever-increasing moral anarchy has not an indirect, but an absolutely direct, impact on our life as Lutheran Christians, who are privileged to live in the United States of America. And silencing Christian voices in America is the number one goal. You don't have to believe me. Eugene Volokh is one of the most important legal minds in America — he's at the University of California, Los Angeles — and he said, "If I were a conservative Christian, which I am most certainly not, I would be very reasonably fearful. Not just as to tax exemptions, but as to a wide range of other programs." Fearful, he said, fearful, that within a generation or so, my religious beliefs would be treated the same way as a racist's — and then he stopped. But you get the point. There is a natural tension between the gay rights agenda and our religious liberty.

I went on the website a few days ago of the Alliance Defending Freedom — may I plead with you all to do the same, Alliance Defending Freedom. They list, in black and white, the direct attacks on religion and religious freedom by this administration, and I stopped counting after I got to number seventy-five. A fancy way of saying this to all of us is the following: we are free to shut up.

The collision of religious liberty and gay rights is taking more roads than we possibly have time to discuss. But I want to go to one thing, if I may, because I think it is so important, and I pray that you think it is as well. Have you all followed the Little Sisters of the Poor case? We, in Colorado Springs, at Focus on the Family, have paid particularly close attention to this case, because the Denver chapter of the Little Sisters of the Poor is seventy-five nuns. And along with several other not-for-profit religious organizations, the Little Sisters challenged the Affordable Care Act — they challenged the requirement that they, as the Little Sisters of the Poor, have to provide their employees with healthcare coverage that includes contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion pills. Do you think this is Orwellian? It is Orwellian. They lost. They didn't just lose — they've lost on five separate appeals, and unless they get to the Supreme Court, they've lost permanently.

A very good friend of mine asked the senior sister, who I was very privileged to meet, what has been the most difficult part about this. And she said the most difficult part was an interview that she did with the Washington Post, who said, "We don't understand why you would just not offer this coverage and, you know, just get on with it." And the senior sister said, "We can't." And the reporter said, "Well, of course you can." And she said, "No, we're bound by our conscience. This is not a possibility." And the reporter said, and I quote, "I don't know what you're talking about." That's correct — the other side on these matters does not know what we are talking about. The new ethicists, by the way, the ones who have made gender mainstreaming their leitmotif.

In this era of conscience, the question finally emerges: are we done? Is it over? I'm here to say, I pray in Technicolor, that not only is it not over, but I believe the best days for American Christians are actually ahead of us. Because in the cycle that our Lord and Savior taught us, it goes birth, death, rebirth. And my guess, in light of the late, great Cardinal George, my guess is that we have not yet hit bottom and will at some point. And then, as Cardinal George reminds us, the Christians will be there again to begin putting the shards back together. And I do, in fact, believe that an American renaissance is possible, even probable.

Why do I think that? Because unlike any other country in the developed world — any — we have a history where faith and the public square go together. There would not have been an American Revolution without men and women of faith, beginning with the great Muhlenberg brothers. Did you know that the first speaker of the House was a Lutheran? Probably a Missouri Synod Lutheran, don't you think? Matt Harrison would have been a good speaker of the House. We would not have had the abolition of slavery without the church. We would not have had the co-education of women and suffrage without the church. And we would not, decidedly, have had the civil rights movement or the pro-life movement without the church.

And by the way, it wasn't a hundred years ago — it was about fifteen years ago — where if you were pro-life and in politics, the great counsel to you was, don't ever talk about it. But the pro-life movement wouldn't stop talking about it. And guess what — every reliable survey says that the millennial generation is more pro-life than their parents' and grandparents' generation. And do you know why? Because with two or three little clicks of a mouse, in 3-D and 4-D images, they see that it's a baby, and not a mouse or an elephant.

By the way, my office is across the street from the Supreme Court, and I have marched in twenty-nine straight pro-life marches. Do you know that every single year the pro-life march gets younger and younger and bigger and bigger? In fact, my office is on Second Street. It's a sea of Americans who are twenty-five years of age and under, getting on buses at odd hours to come to cold, rainy, icy streets to march for life. That's called hope. That is how social transformation takes place. But you know what — it takes a long time. And in the era of conscience, it's going to take us a long time to build a pro-marriage culture.

You know, George Orwell found himself, as a rabid anti-communist, at the height of the Cold War, finding that many of his fellow people in Britain had lost the concept of liberty. He said, not only do men and women have a moral duty to be intelligent, he said, we have a moral duty to restate the obvious. We have to reintroduce to our country what is a family? What is marriage? What is religious liberty? What is the church? We have to ask ourselves what kind of country do we want fifty years from now, and then work backwards. We want a country of thriving religious liberty. We want a country where every single person, in the great words of the late, great Richard John Neuhaus, is welcomed into the world and protected by the law. We want to preserve marriage and family. And I believe we can do this.

But Christians have to be prepared for battles that will pit the new implicit constitutional right to a redefinition of marriage against the old, explicit constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. That is the crossroads. I believe, and you believe, that the married family is the greatest check placed on the state's monopoly of coercive force. We have to learn how to better articulate the importance of self-governing spheres, and to start to revive the short-circuited separation of powers. But we have to begin in elemental, easy language to share with everybody we know why the things we believe are the core of the matter.

And I still think it behooves Christians to insist on the truth that the Judeo-Christian faith is not only not the enemy of liberty, but actually the predicate for liberty — both historically, philosophically, but above all theologically. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

I want to conclude, if I may, by saying the following. We are in the hometown of my favorite poet, and I think it's probable he was the greatest poet of the twentieth century — Thomas Stearns Eliot, T. S. Eliot. He had a conversion very late in life, and turned out to be one of the most important spokesmen for Christianity of the twentieth century. He found himself in the first part of the moral decay just after the First World War. He wrote something that I think is very relevant to us today. He said, "If we take the widest and the wisest view of a cause, there is no such thing as a lost cause, because," he said, "there is no such thing as a gained cause." He said, "We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory." I believe that. But we can change that, and we can convert that, in my view, to a benefit for our time.

Nothing about life is predetermined except the victory of Jesus Christ. We create the future — we do it not just by our actions, but by what we really believe, because what we believe shapes the kind of people we are. And in a way, "growing a culture of religious freedom" is the better title, I suppose, for my comments tonight. A culture is more than what we make it, or do, or build, because a culture grows organically out of the spirit of a people — how we live, what we cherish. And may I say, what we are willing to die for.

"Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not faint."

The United States of America, in the words of Bobby Jindal, did not create religious liberty — religious liberty created the United States of America. We have a lot of work to do, but I believe that it begins in gratitude for what God has given to us. And I believe that we have a job of cultural reformation.

And I'll close, if I may, with a decidedly non-Lutheran poet, but a man who would have made a good Lutheran — Henry Purcell. And what I believe is the greatest stanza that he ever wrote, he said: "Now, now that the sun hath veiled his light, and bid the world good night, to the soft bed my body I dispose; but where shall my soul repose? Dear, dear God, even in thy arms; and can there be any so sweet security? Then to thy rest, O my soul, and singing, praise the mercy that prolongs thy days."

Do we have a country, a culture, and a civilization to save? I don't know that success and victory is the ultimate goal, but I feel very confident that the ultimate goal is obedience. And I believe, at that point, it's in the hands of Jesus Christ. Thank you all, and God bless you all.

Now, being mindful of time, I will be happy to answer or duck a couple of questions. How about if we start with maybe just one question? Who has the exquisite penultimate question? No pressure. This seems like such a shy bunch. Anyone?

How do we speak as church in ways that do not affirm these choices that we're seeing in society right now, and yet still honor individuals as worthy people, and who they are? It seems to always trip us up. I don't want to go on record to say somebody can't get healthcare. And yet I also don't want to say that they've made godly choices.

I think the really wonderful reality is that we didn't write the Bible, and therefore we don't get to edit it. And it seems to me that the ultimate compassion and love flows from Christ himself. He is, in every turn, our model in the public square. And I believe very strongly, without any exception, that in these areas, which are difficult, where we strongly disagree, our job is to say it, and to believe it, and to think it, rooted in the love of Christ. I really believe that. And I feel very confident that that is the way forward for the church.

I think we have to be civil. I think we have to be diplomatic. And we have to be unapologetic. I think we have to share the thing that powers our faith — it is the law and the gospel. The gospel doesn't negate the law, or the other way around. And I think that that is a beautiful way to navigate the public square. We have to be bold about that.

And the second thing, if I may say, is I think that the job of this generation is the raising of the next generation. And I think we have to fundamentally address the biblical, the cultural, and the visual illiteracy that powers the millennial generation. May I tell you, I love the millennial generation, and I spend a lot of time with them. In the academic year, I'm on a different college campus every two or three weeks on behalf of Focus on the Family. They're young, bright, and smart. They're remarkable. But they have been raised in a brokenness that is almost unprecedented in the United States.