2006 address:
Politics without God
The
keynote speaker in Glasgow on June 21, 2006, was George
Weigel, a Senior Fellow of the Ethics
and Public Policy Center, in Washington, DC; a Roman Catholic
theologian and one of America's leading commentators on issues of religion
and public life. The Center was established in 1976 to clarify and reinforce
the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate
over domestic and foreign policy issues.
The full text of his address is available for download as a PDF (100kb).
SUMMARY
One of America's foremost public intellectuals, Weigel argues
that Europe's abandonment of its spiritual and cultural roots raises urgent
questions about democracy's future around the world.
Weigel traces the origins
of 'Europe's problem' to the atheistic humanism
of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion
a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems,
the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold War and, most ominously, the continent's
de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death.
And yet
many Europeans still insist, most recently, during the debate over a new
EU constitution, that only a public square shorn of religiously-informed
moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy.
Precisely the opposite
is true, Weigel suggests, asking: can there be any true "politics",
any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defence of freedom
without God? George Weigel argues powerfully that the answer is "No" because,
in the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.