Last month saw the release of the “Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles.” Signed by a wide (and still-growing) range of conservative, classical-liberal, and libertarian public figures (including me, in the first category), the FreeCon statement reasserted “the distinctive creed that made America great: that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.” It also reaffirmed concomitant truths about the importance of federalism, freedom of conscience, equality, and more. Unfortunately, people on the left (unsurprisingly) and right (surprisingly) are coming to reject this perspective in greater numbers.

One critique of the statement from the right is that it pays insufficient heed to the source and nature of our rights: i.e., their originating from what the Declaration of Independence calls our “Creator” and what the Sharon Statement, which this new statement references, describes as our “God-given free will,” both things I myself believe. The new statement, on the other hand, contains no such explicit reference. A friendly but pointed critique from occasional National Review contributor Andrew T. Walker, for example, argued that “in terms of what it includes, much of the statement is boilerplate Reaganism,” but “what makes this new statement dangerous is what it does not include — an acknowledgment of God and transcendent truth.”

This is a serious critique. Indeed, as a Catholic, I had similar thoughts when deciding whether to sign the statement. But a careful reading of its contents led me to conclude that they were, in fact, not merely compatible with but also conducive to a vibrant role for Christianity in the public square, consistent with our Founding principles.

Two recent explanations by faithful Christian signatories of the statement, one Protestant and one Catholic, help explain the inner harmony I detected. Writing for Providence, Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, explains his own initial doubts about the statement. “Before signing it, I briefly paused, wondering about the lack of specific mention of God. As a Protestant Christian, should I expect that any declaration of political principles must cite Him?” Reading it, however, he recognized its principles: “a largely biblical perspective about human dignity, the limits of government, private property, equality before the law, the primacy of conscience, protection for families, and statecraft premised on providential realism.” Thus, he concludes that, “although not citing God, the newer declaration’s principles are clearly the legacy of a Christian or at least biblical anthropology.” He also urges conservatives to “strive, with our collective judgment and historical experience, to root our political perspective in ultimate truth claims about God,” but also have enough humility to not “conflate these judgements with divine will or inflexible dogma,” and to “understand that all political principles and institutions are under divine judgment.” Political prudence and the statement’s consistency with the Judeo-Christian heritage guided Tooley’s ultimate approbation.

Similarly, writing for Law & Liberty, Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of Conscience Project, admits that a surface reading of the statement would find it worthy of Walker’s criticism. “A first glance at the statement might make one wonder if it is worthy of this designation” as upholding religious freedom. “Do a quick word search of the Statement and you won’t find ‘religious freedom’ or even ‘religion’ mentioned.” She finds, however, that worries on this front are “unfounded” because “the Statement invokes core principles that are the foundation for religious freedom in America: individual liberty, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, and subsidiarity.” Elements of the statement strongly resemble the Catholic Church’s own declaration on religious freedom. Other aspects of it support America’s federalist architecture, in a manner consistent with Church teaching on subsidiarity. By “empowering families, churches, and church-run institutions in their significant role in forming civil society, and in influencing the political institutions closest and most responsive to them” the freedom-conservative statement “accords with the charge given to Catholic laity: to sanctify the world.” The statement’s congruity with Catholic teaching informed Picciotti-Bayer’s approval.

There are other reasons for conservative Christians to endorse the FreeCon statement of principles. One comes in contrast with the national-conservative statement of principles, against which it is (perhaps inevitably) being contrasted. At first glance, one could at least credit the NatCon statement with acknowledging explicitly that “no nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition.” I agree with that. (So did Bible-demystifier and frequent NatCon bête noire Thomas Jefferson, who once said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”) But, curiously, the NatCon statement asserts this without any reference to the Declaration of Independence, the political document that explicitly enshrines the “Creator” as the source of our rights, unlike the Constitution that the NatCon statement seems to elevate above — or even to the exclusion of — the Declaration. Thus, if the FreeCon statement can be faulted for its apparent silence on God, the NatCon statement, which at least states that men are “created in the image of God,” can nonetheless be faulted for what Henry Olsen described as its neglect of the “basic truth of human equality, which is the starting point for America’s founding principles.”

If the FreeCon statement can be criticized for its underemphasis on religion in public life, the NatCon statement can be faulted for its overemphasis on it. “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private,” it reads. In this light, its purportedly merciful grants that “Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children,” and that “adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes,” make religious freedom not an essential aspect of public life but a kind of grudging sufferance by a majority granted to minorities. “In other words, non-Christians are second class citizens whose freedom is largely confined to their homes and private religious institutions,” as Tooley puts it. Contrast this with George Washington’s view, outlined in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I.:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Another reason for Christian-conservative support of the statement arises from how Christians have thrived in the institutions the Founders bequeathed. Defying Protestant anxieties, Catholics have from the beginning of our time in this country worked fruitfully within the constitutional, federalist architecture of the U.S., strengthening it as a result. In National Review last year, Miles Smith (a non-Catholic) explained how John Hughes, a 19th-century Irish immigrant and archbishop of New York, was well aware of, and grateful for, “the value of that civil and religious liberty which our happy government secures for all.” Catholics in that time and since, Smith observes, “have emphasized their commitment to liberal freedoms inherent in the American order.” Sometimes, they have done so when some Protestants around them did not.

Then there are tactical considerations. A defense of a framework that draws from the Christian tradition and facilitates its expression is one capable of drawing allies from other faiths or of no faith at all. At a time when religious expression per se is under threat, it seems more important than ever to shore up this framework as a priority, not to dwell on post-constitutional methods of virtue coercion. Even conservatism’s recent history affords examples of such strategic consideration. As Tooley notes, “Buckley of course was a devout Catholic, but his Sharon Statement’s reference to the deity was very sparing,” making it unlikely that he would have accepted a vision like that of the NatCon statement.

The early National Review crew was mostly Christian, but not entirely. Regardless, it was not they who forced out atheist contributor Max Eastman for being anti-Christian; he forced himself out, in Buckley’s later account, “on the grounds that we were too explicitly pro-Christian and that he, as a good faithful atheist, couldn’t take it.” By contrast, Buckley saw Ayn Rand’s “exclusion from the conservative community” as arising from “her desiccated philosophy’s incompatibility with the conservative’s emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral,” and its “hard, schematic, unyielding dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable, whether it comes from the mouth of Ehrenberg, or Savonarola — or Ayn Rand.” That was where Buckley drew the line. There is, and ought to be, plenty of room short of it — space enough for both the faithful and friends of faith to find welcome, as in fact both have judging from the statement’s signatories thus far. If the statement does not explicitly invoke God or Christianity, it certainly does not preclude them, and it definitely does not expel them.

Even with all this stipulated, however, there remains a kernel of truth in this criticism of the FreeCon statement. Or, at least, a kernel of possibility: namely, that the opening it leaves for religious expression will be left empty; and that, by taking for granted the heritage that enabled it in the first place, freedom conservatism will merely sap what National Review editor Frank Meyer called “the foundations of belief in an organic moral order,” which remain “the only possible basis of respect for the integrity of the individual personal and for the overriding value of his freedom.” The statement puts much pressure on its signatories and other freedom conservatives to uphold such a moral order through their actions in private and public life, in a manner both according with and bolstering our constitutional order.

In this, it resembles republican government itself, which “presupposes the existence” of the qualities in human nature that “justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence . . . in a higher degree than any other form” of government, as Publius writes in Federalist No. 55. I signed this statement, in part, as an indication of my commitment to rise to this challenge, and of my desire to bring to freedom conservatism and to our polity itself the virtues necessary to sustain both. And that is what I will do. I have not forgotten the Revolution and the government it established, or the important assistance I have received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.