Memorial Day: Can American Liberty Survive Without Religion?

The American system of liberty does not presume virtue. It presumes the need for it. But it makes no provision for the state to supply it.

This is arguably the most serious challenge we face at the center of the American experiment: a free society depends on citizens who are morally grounded, yet the state is barred from deciding what moral grounding looks like. To preserve freedom of thought and belief—our most essential liberty—the government cannot be responsible for shaping people’s sense of right and wrong. That responsibility must lie elsewhere.

This Memorial Day, as we remember those who gave their lives in defense of this republic, we do more than honor their sacrifice. We confront a question they themselves would have understood: Can a nation remain free if it forgets how to form free people?

Those we remember today believed that America was worth dying for. But they also believed it was worth living for—worth shaping one’s life around, worth restraining one's own impulses for, worth teaching one’s children to love not just with feeling, but with discipline and conviction. That belief did not come from the state. It came from families, churches, schools, and communities that taught people how to live with honor, and how to carry the weight of responsibility.

This is why religion—especially the voluntary, pluralistic religious culture that shaped American life—is so hard to replace. It is not just a matter of personal faith or private meaning. For much of our history, religion functioned as the primary institution that taught Americans how to live in freedom: how to exercise self-control, how to distinguish right from wrong, how to treat others with dignity, and how to accept limits.

The American Ideology is the offspring of a marriage between the most rigorously moralistic, anti-humanist religious communities in the Western world, and the most expansive ideas about human dignity, liberty, and equality ever articulated. It is folly to imagine these two forces—the Puritan moral world and the Enlightenment—as incompatible. They could not have emerged and flourished without the other.

The American Enlightenment was built on Puritan foundations. The very people who feared the corruption of art, the pride of intellect, and the vanity of man, also created the schools, the civic forms, and the disciplined citizenry that made Enlightenment ideals sustainable.

They were not humanists in temperament. But they made enlightened men governable. They were not libertarians in theology. But they built the structures that protected liberty. They believed in original sin—and so they designed systems that constrained power. They did not believe man was perfectible—but they believed he could be responsible. And that belief—that people were morally accountable to something higher than themselves—is what made the American republic possible.

One might assume, given my concern about the collapse of religion in American life, that I’m speaking as a member of the “new right,” or as a traditional Republican, or perhaps even as a post-liberal integralist.

I’m afraid it’s much worse than that. I’m a gay, former Republican, divorced from an ex-husband who happens to be an Episcopal priest.

I offer that not just for comic relief—though you’re welcome to chuckle—but to make a deeper point: in a fractured nation, some of our most urgent problems are shared. And if you strip away the party labels and moral posturing, I suspect many of my old Republican friends would be nodding in agreement with my diagnosis so far.

We both believe the loss of religion in American life is an existential problem. We both believe the real crisis is cultural—not constitutional, not economic, not even political. And we both know that a people no longer morally formed will eventually demand one of two things: anarchy or Caesar.

But if that’s true, then my friends on the right must also confront the idols in their own house. When churches become altars to a cult of personality, when nationalism is draped in liturgy, when resentment is baptized and called virtue—you are not making America great again. You are trading a moral inheritance for political theater.

I know the left has lost its way. My own community has forgotten what moral equality means. We speak of justice but cannot define it. We speak of freedom but flinch from duty. We speak of inclusion but practice tribalism.

We all need a little humility. Maybe it starts with agreeing on the problem.

Many of us know something is broken in our culture. And whatever the prescription may be, the first step is the same: we must recover the conscience.

That, at its best, is what the American tradition understood. the most important freedom is freedom of conscience. It is the foundation of speech, assembly, and protest. It is what allows a diverse people to live together without forcing uniformity. But this liberty also sets a hard limit on what the state can do: it cannot dictate beliefs, enforce virtue, or control how people arrive at moral judgments. That’s what makes religion so essential—it filled the gap. It taught, reinforced, and modeled moral expectations through communities, habits, rituals, and consequences. It gave people the tools to govern themselves without needing to be governed constantly by others.

In contrast, many European societies emerged from traditions where religion and the state were fused—most notably in the legacy of Catholicism. In those systems, the Church often governed the soul while the state governed the body. The result was a model in which moral authority and legal power were blended, often at the expense of both. As these states secularized, they often drifted into paternalism or soft authoritarianism—treating citizens as clients rather than moral agents. They preserved public order but struggled to inspire moral character.

America was different. Here, religion and the state were separate, not because religion didn’t matter, but because it mattered too much to be trusted to government. Religion taught Americans how to live in freedom without needing to be managed constantly. And that teaching happened not through power, but through persuasion—through families, communities, congregations, and rituals that made right and wrong real, and reinforced them in daily life.

Secular theories of ethics and human development—however thoughtful—struggle to replace this function. Moral education is not just information. It is formation. It happens in real communities, with real expectations, real rewards, and real consequences. It is lived and practiced, not just read about. That is why moral imagination cannot be taught through policy alone. It must be embodied in institutions that people trust, and that trust must be earned through visible integrity.

So the question is not whether America needs a religious state that mandates Ten Commandments in classrooms. It needs churches that puts people back in the pews. Because the real question is whether a society that no longer believes in anything beyond itself can still sustain the civic habits that liberty requires. There once were men and women who understood this all too well. We honor their memory this weekend with the hope their example might guide us in our own time.

We need to ask ourselves what will replace our churches and religion in America. Religion performed a function that the American system was designed to depend on, but could never allow the state to do. Law protects our rights. Liberty guarantees our independence. But the formation of character—the learning of restraint, responsibility, and purpose—has always depended on something else.

If we lose that, we may keep the form of the republic. But we will have lost its meaning.