Some come with their heads covered by a kippah. Others sport turbans. Occasionally there appears the scarlet zucchetto of a cardinal.
However they dress, each year they gather in New York for what may be the city’s most diverse get-together: the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Canterbury Medal dinner.
So it was this Thursday night at the Pierre. In its elegant ballroom, the former chief rabbi for Britain — Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — accepted a medal named for the English cathedral where Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170 because he had fought the king’s encroachments on his church’s liberties.
The medal is awarded each year to the individual who has “most resolutely refused to render to Caesar that which is God’s.”
The invocation was delivered by a Southern Baptist. The medal was presented by a Catholic professor at Princeton. The rabbi spoke along with the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. And the benediction was offered by an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Perhaps only the Becket Fund could pull off such an event, a glittering evening where men and women of strong (and conflicting) beliefs find common ground without watering down their principles.
Founded by Seamus Hasson, a Notre Dame lawyer, it is today run by Bill Mumma, a Wall Streeter who took up a second career in the nonprofit world as he came to regard the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise as the sine qua non of American liberty.
It wasn’t too long ago that people of faith kept mostly to their denominational ghettos. In other parts of the world, the differing religious beliefs on display in this room lead to war. Here in the Pierre they point to something new and hopeful.
Doubtless some of this is simple self-preservation.
Whether it’s Orthodox Jews targeted by New York’s Health Department, Catholic nuns forced by the feds to underwrite coverage for contraceptives or Tennessee Muslims having their plans to build a place of worship blocked on the grounds Islam is not a religion, people of faith increasingly recognize what Benjamin Franklin told the Continental Congress at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: If we don’t hang together, we will hang separately.
So you would expect this might be a morose bunch. Quite the contrary. Whether they are Becket clients or the confident, Ivy-educated Becket lawyers who plead their cases, these are happy warriors.
And they have racked up some big victories, including this month’s Supreme Court decision upholding a New York town’s right to begin legislative sessions with a prayer.
As important as it is for these people to be free to live in accord with their deepest beliefs, they do not regard themselves as a special interest. Walk among them, listen in on their conversations, and it becomes clear something else is driving them.
This is their conviction that when it comes to America’s future as a free society, they bring something vital to the table.
Rabbi Lord Sacks alludes to this contribution in a conversation with this reporter. He puts it this way: “Liberty is a tree with religious roots. Society cannot sever these roots and expect the tree to survive.”
For non-believers, such an assertion can be misinterpreted as a call to impose one’s theology on everyone else. In fact, it is a call to recognize that societies define themselves by the view they take of the human person.
This was Pope John Paul II’s point when he used to speak about communism. Far from attributing its failures to bad economics or bad politics, he blamed a flawed “anthropology,” i.e., a “mistaken sense of the person.”
The idea here is that a society founded on a mistaken sense of the person is unlikely to be a free one.
The implication is that a free society depends on a proper sense of the person. And we don’t have to look far for an example.
Jefferson gave a pretty clear definition in the Declaration of Independence. To be human, he wrote, is to enjoy rights government cannot violate because these rights are endowed by our Creator, not a gift of the state.
This understanding of the human person — and the limited government that necessarily flows from it — gave rise to a nation where ordinary people have enjoyed freedom and wealth beyond any in history.
And those who regard all the references to a Creator and self-evident truths as relics of a less advanced age have this awkward fact to explain: How is it that America is at once the world’s most modern nation and among its most religious?
Rabbi Lord Sacks and the merry band of Becketeers at the Pierre Hotel would tell you it’s not a contradiction at all. It’s what freedom looks like.