{"id":112,"date":"2008-05-09T14:23:24","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/romney-gets-it-rightthe-second.html"},"modified":"2008-05-09T14:23:24","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:23:24","slug":"romney-gets-it-rightthe-second","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/romney-gets-it-rightthe-second.html","title":{"rendered":"Romney gets it right–the second time around…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former GOP presidential candidate and exemplar of everything Mormon, Mitt Romney, last night received the 12th Annual Canterbury medal from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm that (admirably) takes on cases of religious freedom on behalf of all faiths. (The medal is for “Courage in the Defense of Religious Liberty.”) In his speech at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Club, Romney (who received the medal with his wife, Ann), certainly defended religious liberty and renewed his usual endorsement of religion as the indispensible foundation of freedom and a just society, citing everyone from George Washington to John Adams to Pope Benedict XVI.
\nThe Becket Fund awarded Romney the medal in part because of his speech last December defending his Mormonism. Romney was forced to take that step as he was getting treated as badly as, well, Catholics in the nineteenth century. In that earlier speech he was critiqued rather widely for trying to be too political in folding Mormonism into the mix of American Christianity and dumping on non-believers–playing to a faith-friendly audience. No JFK, he. But getting out of the eye of a political campaign can be good for the vision, and last night Romney had some interesting revisions of his earlier views:<\/p>\n

In the days that followed, my remarks drew a considerable amount of congratulatory comment\u2026and some criticism as well. The criticism was a good thing, of course. It meant that my words were not like the proverbial tree falling in the forest \u2014 unheard and unheeded. It also gave me an opportunity to go back and re-think, and that presents an opportunity for more learning.
\nSeveral commentators, for instance, argued that I had failed to sufficiently acknowledge the contributions that had been made by atheists. At first, I brushed this off \u2014 after all this was a speech about faith in America, not non-faith in America. Besides, I had not enumerated the contributions of believers \u2014 why should non-believers get special treatment?
\nBut upon reflection, I realized that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity\u2026an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty.
\nIf a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief \u2014 to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience \u2014 it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God.
\nWe are all in this together. Religious liberty and liberality of thought flow from the common conviction that it is freedom, not coercion, that exalts the individual just as it raises up the nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thoughful stuff. The full text is posted at NRO<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former GOP presidential candidate and exemplar of everything Mormon, Mitt Romney, last night received the 12th Annual Canterbury medal from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm that (admirably) takes on cases of religious freedom on behalf of all faiths. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}