Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 16, 2025 / 08:00 am (CNA).
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is calling on Americans to become more open about their faith as a means to “revitalizing” religious belief in the United States.
“I think it’s important, as we are on the brink of Easter during Holy Week, to encourage people of all faiths, whether they’re Christians like me or Jews or Muslims, to speak about their faith,” said Roberts during a Tuesday appearance on “EWTN News Nightly.”
“This is an opportunity here in the United States, not just for political and policymaking success, but more importantly, for the revitalization of our faith as individuals and also as a country,” he said.
Earlier this week Roberts penned an op-ed for the Daily Signal in which the former Wyoming Catholic College president highlighted “the distinct importance that America’s Founding Fathers placed on Christianity, particularly Our Lord’s passion and resurrection.”
Roberts in that op-ed called for the return of religious practice to the public sphere.
“As Christians around the country reflect on that same story this Easter, we should resolve to transform our gratitude — for the political freedoms that our Founding Fathers fought for and the spiritual freedom that Christ died for — into action,” he wrote.
On Tuesday, meanwhile, Roberts told EWTN News Capitol Hill Correspondent Erik Rosales that President Donald Trump has “done two things exceptionally well thus far.”
“The first is he’s been unabashed about speaking about America’s religious roots,” he said. “The second thing that he’s done — and it’s both in the State Department and across the administration and other agencies — is end the Obama-Biden-era practice of running roughshod over religious liberty.”
“It’s not that we want to establish one particular religion as the official one,” he said. “It’s that we, just as people of faith, want to be able to do more than just have private religious thoughts. We actually want to live out our faith in the public square.”
Roberts insisted that for America to experience a true “cultural awakening,” it must be willing to practice religion publicly.
“That awakening is not going to come from politics and policy, it’s going to come from each of us,” he said. “We can make [politicians’] jobs easier as it relates to policymaking if we live out our respective faiths with zeal, with a real passion, with a persuasiveness to bring people to the truth.”
Ultimately, he said, the “golden age of America” will not be ushered in merely by economic policies or by reforming Washington.
“Most importantly, it’s going to be because each of us plays a role in revitalizing the religious institutions in our lives and our communities,” he said.
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We read: “I think it’s important, as we are on the brink of Easter during Holy Week, to encourage people of all faiths, whether they’re Christians like me or Jews or Muslims, to speak about their faith.”
Close, but no cigar?
Unrecognized is the difference between Islamic belief(!) in the Qur’an and Christian “faith” in the person of Jesus Christ—speaking as the incarnate “Word made flesh.” Still, Heritage might speak to a partial commonality in acceptance of the inborn natural law, although even here the Islamic understanding of natural law (“fitrah” as the “germ” of Islam) is different from what is more complete and universal, and therefore foundational to the West; nor is the Islamic understanding even as complete as Moses’ Decalogue with its explicitly prohibitive moral commandments.
And, unlike the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (1981) recognizes only truncated “freedom of worship”, not broader “freedom of religion” as in Heritage’s “public sphere.”
Could we have an estimate of how many Founding Fathers took Our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection seriously? Charles Carroll, yes. But not Jefferson or Adams. Other suggestions?