The First Freedom: Religious liberty as the foundation of human liberty

Archbishop Chaput delivered the following remarks during a tri-diocesan catechetical congress in Victoria, British Columbia on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 15 and 16, 2010.

Excerpt:
Canadian and American Christians often have trouble understanding the brutality of anti-religious repression or serious religious discrimination. It's not part of our national heritage. But many millions of Christians are now being persecuted or harassed for their faith around the world. We need to pray for them. And we also need to pray for ourselves. Because we're not as securely free as we might like to think.

For decades now, we've been witnessing in our two countries -- and throughout the democratic nations of the West -- a campaign against Christian beliefs. The process clothes itself in the language of progress and secularization. But it has little to do with humanity's moral development. It has a lot to do with kicking Christianity out of the public square.

In an open society, religion can be smothered simply by creating a climate in which religious believers are portrayed as buffoons and hypocrites, or as dangerous eccentrics. Or by setting ground rules of public debate that privilege a supposedly “scientific” outlook, and treat religious beliefs as irrelevant.

Inside the media cocoon of a modern society, popular opinion can be shaped in countless little ways until people come to think of their faith as something they should keep to themselves; and that it’s bad manners to interject their beliefs into the political process. They might also come to think that certain basic Christian teachings are in fact hateful, intolerant and repressive of other people’s freedoms.

And then one morning they find that their faith has compromised itself into apostasy -- and they're living in a society where people act as though God no longer exists.  the rest

I can't help but contrast this essay with this:
Bishop Gene Robinson: "How religion is killing our most vulnerable youth"