Religious Liberty Is Not Enough with Ryan Anderson
The past decade has witnessed some intense battles over religious liberty. But guest Ryan Anderson argues that when you consider the character of those battles, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that both sides have treated religious liberty as the subject under debate in order to avoid the real points of dispute between them — points of basic moral principle, and ultimately of metaphysical reality. And for religious Americans, there’s a lesson to learn from those battles, Ryan says: Religious liberty is a prerequisite for a moral life, but it is not a substitute for the hard work of moral argument and moral formation.
Ryan Anderson is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation, and the St. John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Dallas. He is also the founder and editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, NJ. He has written numerous books and articles on religious liberty and received his doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. This podcast discusses themes from Ryan’s essay in the Spring 2020 issue of National Affairs, “Proxy Wars over Religious Liberty.”
