by Bill McCormick, S.J. September 16, 2025
AMERICA
“It should therefore come as no surprise that the promotion of ‘values’—however evangelical they may be—but ‘emptied’ of Christ, who is their author, is incapable of changing the world.” Pope Leo XIV addressed these words to a group of French pilgrims on Aug. 28, but he could just as easily have meant them for the United States for all the significance they have for our country today.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 has led to a conversation across the political spectrum about freedom of speech. How vibrant can the American political tradition be, many worry, when exercising one of its most fundamental rights can lead to being killed?
Free speech is of vital importance, both constitutionally and culturally, for the United States. At a time when it seems under threat, perhaps it is worth inquiring into its foundations.
Leo’s words harken back to those of another pope, Benedict XVI. In his 2004 debate with the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the then-cardinal and the Kantian public intellectual agreed that liberal democracy rests upon foundations not of its own making. The ultimate moral values that undergird it are not self-justifying but finally rest upon its Christian inheritance.
So what happens when that inheritance fails to underwrite the modern project of self-governance? What happens when a political community slouches away from that patrimony?
The murder of Charlie Kirk was not just a violation of free speech. It was a radical denial of his goodness as a creature of God.
Human beings are created out of sheer love and loved by God for their own sake. Life is sacred. Ultimately, any meaningful theory of human rights has to rest on this bedrock, even if some human rights advocates would rather not admit that foundation. When that bedrock crumbles, it is not long before other rights are also abandoned.
This is no time for apocalypticism. As Thomas Joseph White, O.P., recently wrote in First Things, “global liberalism is not dead and has not failed.” This reassurance applies a fortiori to the U.S. political tradition, which another priest-scholar, John Courtney Murray, S.J., argued drew upon the English traditions of the common law. For despite the traumas of the English Reformation, Murray wrote, the Anglo-American tradition was far more Catholic in its roots than the Continental Enlightenment and thus gave issue to a far more moderate and sober liberalism than found elsewhere.
But if the American experiment is not dead, it is also not well.
At its best, the U.S. civic tradition is about adjudicating differences. Indeed, our very constitutional design presupposes that we will not always agree, and that creating spaces to draw out those competing differences in a civil manner (above all, Congress) can be a fruitful antidote for the tyranny of factions as well as a spur to reconcile diverse interests. The Founders did not expect us to get along or to agree about everything.
But we do have to agree on some things, truths so basic as to be the common patrimony of all of humanity. The most fundamental is that every human life is sacred.
And yet, those truths we hold to be self-evident are at constant risk of being forgotten or denied. A political culture that cannot see or will not accept such truths is in danger not only of bad policies and weak rights, but of losing its mind and destroying itself from within, beginning with the most vulnerable.
To put all of this another way: We have seen over and over again that reason closed off to faith can become ideological and violent, prey to inhuman ambitions and bloody mythologies. The most basic facts about human existence are in principle knowable by reason, but in practice the Gospel time and again must be invoked to remind us all of the sacredness of life. It helps to resist the totalitarian impulse that denies the goodness of all persons, and helps purify political religions that would otherwise prop up some substitute for God in his place.
Any debate about secularism and the role of religion in public discourse must take this seriously.
As Pope Leo recently said at a Sept. 13 address, the gift of Catholic social teaching is not simply ethical but profoundly anthropological: “What is a human being? What is his or her inherent dignity…?”
Christians in the U.S. political scene are used to arguing about how their faith informs their decisions on specific elections and specific policy issues, and those debates will not go away. But addressing such concerns is not their fundamental vocation in politics.
For Christians, that vocation is to be witnesses to hope, in word and deed. Yes, to speak the Gospel truths that make even some of us uncomfortable. And, yes, to do acts of compassion and mercy that remind a suffering world that God is love. Our calls for freedom of speech will not be credible if we do not work for the dignity of all persons.
Our witness will also be credible only to the extent that it manifests itself as true love of neighbor, and thus resists all the forces of division in our culture. For cynics, the death of Charlie Kirk was further proof that Christians are just as tribalistic as anyone in the United States, as it was easy to see even the Christian voices in the aftermath of his murder as politically opportunistic.
To be sure, Christians are deeply divided politically in the United States. It does not help that many major Christian personalities are closely identified with one political party, and few seem troubled by it. For the millions of Americans who never darken the doorframe of a church, such worldly ecclesial figures are often their primary experience of Christianity. Sadly, such experiences make it harder to hear the Gospel as truly good news.
But that cynical reading of our age, if not completely wrong, is thankfully not the whole story. The Gospel itself resists being subordinated to political ends, and so should those who are called to share it with others. As Pope Leo’s theological master St. Augustine of Hippo tells us, we live caught between two cities: one ordered toward destructive self-love, and one toward the self-sacrificial love of God and neighbor. May Christians by their lives ever point toward Christ as the light of the nations as he leads them toward the new heavenly city of the Father.
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