Note: The following are remarks made by Gov. Mitt Romney at the Metropolitan Club in New York City where he accepted the Becket Fund’s Canterbury Medal for his defense of religious liberty.

Thank you

It is an honor for Ann and me to be with you this evening. We have a lot of friends who work with the Becket Fund. As you can imagine, that makes your recognition even more meaningful.

Your mission--and my topic this evening—involve the intertwining of religion and government. It’s not a new topic. It was in the 12th century that Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett famously refused to allow Henry II to control the Church of England. As you are well aware, his conviction came with a high price: he was killed by the king’s soldiers in his own cathedral.

Our religious liberty in America was bought in large measure by the sacrifice of men and women like Thomas Beckett.

The battle for religious freedom is not over, nor is it likely to ever be. I appreciate the work you do to protect a fundamental human liberty and to defend those who are modern victims of religious intolerance and persecution.

As you know, I gave a speech about religious liberty during the height of my campaign. This was not a speech I was forced to give, it was a speech I wanted to give. I felt that I had a unique opportunity to address in a very public way the role of faith in America.

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.

Perhaps the phrase which elicited the most comment—and controversy—was this: “[the Founders] discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom…Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom…Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

Looking back, do I still believe that religion requires freedom?

History abounds with examples where religion has been imposed by the state upon a people—from the Greek city-state to the dictatorship of the Taliban. But that is not the faith of which I speak. True religious faith is a matter of conviction and can only be discovered through personal communion with God, sought in the heart and in the heavens. And that path of personal discovery is of necessity free of constraint and censor. Yes, I believe religion requires freedom.

The more controversial claim nowadays is that freedom requires religion.

One critic dismissed this idea by pointing out that there are indeed countries in Europe which have become godless but nevertheless remain democratic. But that underscores my point. I was not speaking about Europe’s recent experiments in state secularism, I was speaking about America and the larger family of free nations; and I was not speaking about a moment of time, but rather about a span of history. Would America and the freedom she inaugurated here and across the world survive--over centuries--if we were to abandon our faith in God?

I don’t believe so.

This is hardly a novel view. Nor is it divisive.

It was not lost on the Founders that rights that were the gift of God, not of kings, would defend individual freedom from tyrants and power-seekers of all kinds. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure,” Jefferson once asked, “when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God?” Continued...