At AEI’s annual dinner, held on February 25 in Washington, D.C., Michael Novak accepted the 1999 Francis Boyer Award and delivered the lecture that customarily accompanies its receipt. Mr. Novak, who has held AEI’s George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy for two decades, has written more than twenty books and hundreds of shorter works exploring the role of religion in free societies, the relation between economic and moral activity, and related topics. In 1994 he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, given to those who have made pioneering contributions to religion in modern society.

Mr. Novak’s lecture, "God’s Country or Taking the Declaration Seriously," examined the Judeo-Christian roots of the American political and cultural tradition and argued that those roots are now misunderstood and neglected, to the nation's peril. "All history is proof of a law of moral entropy," he asserted. "Civilizations, given enough time, end badly. Surrounded in Washington by monuments that echo Greece and Rome, we are reminded daily of the fall of great republics and democracies. What hope have we that our nation will end differently?"

Mr. Novak listed five institutional upheavals in the past half-century in America that have profoundly affected what he termed the "ecology of our souls"--the loss of conviction by the old Protestant elite; the "pollution" of the national ethos by popular culture; the drift away from liberty toward concern for security; the rise of hostility to religion in the nation's courts through the guise of "neutrality;" and the consequent pressures on believers to retreat from the public square. "Jolted by these five institutional upheavals," he contended, "in a brief fifty years the great well of religious and moral self-awareness of the American public has been emptied of its living water."

Because of those upheavals, Mr. Novak explained, we are beginning to see "serious religious people becoming alienated from the American polity." But an opposite consequence, also troubling, is that nonreligious people have grown more adamant in opposing Judeo-Christian influences in public affairs, routinely labeling their opponents as extremists and advocates of theocracy. Tolerance, which once meant that "people of strong convictions would willingly bear the burden of putting up peacefully with people they regarded as plainly in error," has consequently been undone.

Mr. Novak argues that this state of affairs constitutes a crisis. Appealing to the Declaration of Independence and its twofold language of nature or reason, on the one hand, and of Jewish and Christian faith on the other, he pointed out that the Founding Fathers "did not think that these two languages--at least regarding principles of liberty--were in contradiction. These two languages form a union. The Creator spoke both languages, and so can we. Thus spake the Declaration."

If Americans today are to renew their Union, Mr. Novak suggested, religious people must recognize that a cultural war is not a political war, and that culture and politics must be addressed by different methods and, usually, by different institutions, even though they sometimes meet where public decisions must be made in law. Nonreligious people may bear a heavier burden--they must see that their vision of reason alone, without religion, is narrow and intolerant, and "blocks their ears from half the music of the nation's founding."