Romney gets it right--the second time around...

Former GOP presidential candidate and exemplar of everything Mormon, Mitt Romney, last night received the 12th Annual Canterbury medal from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm that (admirably) takes on cases of religious freedom on behalf of all faiths. (The medal is for "Courage in the Defense of Religious Liberty.") In his speech at Manhattan's Metropolitan Club, Romney (who received the medal with his wife, Ann), certainly defended religious liberty and renewed his usual endorsement of religion as the indispensible foundation of freedom and a just society, citing everyone from George Washington to John Adams to Pope Benedict XVI.

The Becket Fund awarded Romney the medal in part because of his speech last December defending his Mormonism. Romney was forced to take that step as he was getting treated as badly as, well, Catholics in the nineteenth century. In that earlier speech he was critiqued rather widely for trying to be too political in folding Mormonism into the mix of American Christianity and dumping on non-believers--playing to a faith-friendly audience. No JFK, he. But getting out of the eye of a political campaign can be good for the vision, and last night Romney had some interesting revisions of his earlier views:

In the days that followed, my remarks drew a considerable amount of congratulatory comment…and some criticism as well. The criticism was a good thing, of course. It meant that my words were not like the proverbial tree falling in the forest — unheard and unheeded. It also gave me an opportunity to go back and re-think, and that presents an opportunity for more learning.

Several commentators, for instance, argued that I had failed to sufficiently acknowledge the contributions that had been made by atheists. At first, I brushed this off — after all this was a speech about faith in America, not non-faith in America. Besides, I had not enumerated the contributions of believers — why should non-believers get special treatment?

But upon reflection, I realized that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity…an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty.

If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God.

We are all in this together. Religious liberty and liberality of thought flow from the common conviction that it is freedom, not coercion, that exalts the individual just as it raises up the nation.

Thoughful stuff. The full text is posted at NRO.