"Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks at the 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention
Nashville, TN ~ Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
Craig, I appreciate the kind introduction. You have dedicated your career to advancing law and faith in an era when so many of our country’s influential institutions seek to undermine both, particularly religion. I thank you for your tireless work to counter this trend. I know that those here, and millions of the faithful across America and around the world, appreciate it too.
Good afternoon, everyone. It is wonderful to be in Nashville, and I am deeply honored to be with you at such an important gathering.
We live at a time when religion – long an essential pillar of our society – is being driven from the public square. Thank God we have the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) to counter that effort. Since its creation in 1944, it has reached, and continues to reach, people from all backgrounds on a variety of platforms.
Your members courageously affirm that entertainment and moral education are not mutually exclusive. You have boldly shown that media can serve higher ends: the safeguarding of faith as well as the cultivation of the classical virtues of the mind and heart that maintain our republican experiment in self-governance. As such, NRB’s members offer an alternative and essential platform for believers and non-believers alike.
Now, I trust that everyone has noticed the current intensity and pervasiveness of politics in our lives. It has infiltrated and overtaken nearly every aspect of life: sports, entertainment, apparel, technology – of course, religion too – even our eating habits.
Politics is everywhere. It is omnipresent. Why is that?
It seems to me that the passionate political divisions of today result from a conflict between two fundamentally different visions of the individual and his relationship to the state. (1)One vision undergirds the political system we call liberal democracy, which limits government and gives priority to preserving personal liberty. (2)The other vision propels a form of totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda. It subverts individual freedom in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective.
In my view, liberal democracy has reached its fullest expression in the Anglo-American political system. This system is responsible for unprecedented human freedom and progress. We providentially enjoy its blessings today.
The wellsprings of this system are found in Augustinian Christianity. According to St. Augustine, man lives simultaneously in two realms. Each individual is a unique creation of God with a transcendent end and eternal life in the City of God. We are created to love our Creator in this world and become united with him in eternity. As Augustine writes in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
At the same time, while we work toward our eternal destiny, we live in the temporal world – the City of Man. But this world is a fallen one. Man is stubbornly imperfect and prone to prey upon his fellow man. Unless there is a temporal authority capable of restraining the wicked – an authority with power here on earth – the wicked men would overwhelm the good ones and there could be no peace.
In the ancient Greek tradition, the state was a positive moral agency whose purpose was to define for men what was good and make them so. Augustinian Christianity sharply departed from that conception. It saw the state as a necessary evil, with the limited function of keeping the peace here on earth.