Yesterday, Senator John Kerry gave a speech to students at Pepperdine Univeristy on faith – his personal faith, and faith and politics. Here’s the text.

So, yes, I prayed hard while I was in Vietnam and I made it back, but the experience, the "problem of evil," took some time to reconcile. When I returned stateside, I went through a period of alienation. I was inspired by the Christian moral witness of people like Martin Luther King, Jr. in the civil rights movement, Reverend William Sloane Coffin in the peace movement and other voices of Christian conscience. But still I was searching — somewhat spiritually adrift, unsure of my relationship with God and the Church.

Within the Catholic Church, we talk about being born Catholic — but as in any faith community, there’s a moment when you first consciously choose whether to fully participate in your heritage, or look elsewhere. For me that came a number of years later after the war.

For twelve years I wandered in the wilderness, went through a divorce and struggled with questions about my direction. Then suddenly and movingly, I had a revelation about the connection between the work I was doing as a public servant and my formative teachings. Indeed, the scriptures provided a firmer guide about values applied to life — many of the things you are wrestling with now today.

I remember how difficult it was to be your age — so many decisions to work out, such a tangle of choices and possibilities, whose consequences seem unknowable — and yet life-shaping. For you here at Pepperdine, it’s a time when you’re exploring your commitment to God, embarking on a journey to figure out how to lead a good life, how to translate your values — who you love, what you are passionate about, how you worship — how you translate that into the daily fabric of your existence.

More after the jump:

A third area where we can find common ground is on one of the most emotional cultural issues of all: abortion. Obviously the issue of abortion has been enormously divisive, but there is also no denying there is common ground. There are 1.3 million abortions each year in America.

Everyone can agree that that is too many and on a shared goal of reducing the need for abortion in the first place. And I believe our first step is to unite and accept the responsibility of making abortion rare by focusing on prevention and by supporting pregnant women and new parents.

Even as a supporter of Roe V. Wade, I am compelled to acknowledge that the language both sides use on this subject can be unfortunately misleading and unconstructive. Unfortunately, this debate has been framed in an overly partisan setting with excessive language on both sides — none of which does justice to the depth of moral conviction held by all. There’s been demonization rather than debate. Distrust rather than discussion. Everyone is worse off for it. Instead of making enemies, we need to make progress.

What would progress look like? Many people are surprised to learn that the most dramatic decline in America’s abortion rate took place under the last Democratic administration when poverty declined, more people graduated from college, employment grew at record rates, and the economy grew at record levels. Unfortunately, the economic policies of these last six years increase the pressure on women with unplanned pregnancies to seek abortions.

In addition to focusing on policies that will prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place, I believe we should also embrace and expand a proven set of economic measures to again make significant progress on reducing the number of abortions in America. This would mean raising the minimum wage, expanding educational opportunity, giving tax credits for domestic adoptions, providing universal health insurance, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and expanding federally funded child care.

The fourth and final example of where people of faith should accept a common challenge is perhaps the most difficult and essential of all:

rekindling a faith-based debate on the issues of war and peace. All our different faiths, whatever their philosophical differences, have a universal sense of values, ethics, and moral truths that honor and respect the dignity of all human beings. They all agree on a form of the Golden Rule and the Supreme importance of charity and compassion.

We are more than just Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims or atheists: we are human beings. We are more than the sum of our differences — we share a moral obligation to treat one another with dignity and respect — and the rest is commentary. Nowhere does this obligation arise more unavoidably than in when and how to resort to war.

Christians have long struggled to balance the legitimate need for self-defense with our highest ideals of justice and personal morality.

Saint Augustine laid the foundation for a compelling philosophical tradition considering how and when Christians should fight.

Augustine felt that wars of choice are generally unjust wars, that war — the organized killing of human beings, of fathers, brothers, friends — should always be a last resort, that war must always have a just cause, that those waging war need the right authority to do so, that a military response must be proportionate to the provocation, that a war must have a reasonable chance of achieving its goal and that war must discriminate between civilians and combatants.

In developing the doctrine of Just War, Augustine and his many successors viewed self-restraint in warfare as a religious obligation, not as a pious hope contingent on convincing one’s adversaries to behave likewise.

Throughout the centuries there have been Christian political leaders who argued otherwise; who contended that observing Just War principles was weak, naïve, or even cowardly.

It’s in Americas’ interests to maintain our unquestionable moral authority — and we risk losing it when leaders make excuses for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or when an Administration lobbies for torture.

For me, the just war criteria with respect to Iraq are very clear:

sometimes a President has to use force to fight an enemy bent on using weapons of mass destruction to slaughter innocents. But no President should ever go to war because they want to — you go to war only because you have to.

The words "last resort" have to mean something .

In Iraq, those words were rendered hollow. It was wrong to prosecute the war without careful diplomacy that assembled a real coalition. Wrong to prosecute war without a plan to win the peace and avoid the chaos of looting in Baghdad and streets full of raw sewage. Wrong to prosecute a war without considering the violence it would unleash and what it would do to the lives of innocent people who would be in danger.

People of faith obviously don’t have to agree with me about how we keep America safe, how we prevail over terrorists, or how we end our disastrous adventure in Iraq. But I do hope people of faith step up to the challenge of rejecting the idea that obedience to God somehow stops when the fighting starts. We need a revival of the debate over what constitutes Just Wars and how they must be conducted, and all people of faith, whatever their political allegiances, should participate in the debate.