Two notable Democratic policy leaders praised the importance of religious liberty and called for bipartisan unification around the issue on Thursday evening.
William Galston, a senior domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1995, received the 2013 American Religious Freedom Award at the National Religious Freedom Conference Award Dinner. Katrina Lantos Swett, chairwoman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), gave the keynote address at the dinner.
Galston received the award for his work to secure the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993. Galston was the Clinton administration’s point person for the bill, which passed the House of Representatives unanimously and the Senate with only three dissenting votes.
A "misguided Supreme Court decision" made the bill necessary, Galston said. The Supreme Court ruled in Employment Division v. Smith that laws that apply to all people and those that incidentally impact an individual’s religious liberty do not run afoul of the Constitutional right to free exercise of religion.
"Religious liberty belongs to no party, to no ideology, to no creed," Galston said, recalling the strong bipartisan support for the bill.
"We should strive toward it ceaselessly," he told the assembled group of about 100.
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, introduced Galston. He praised Galston’s policy and intellectual contributions to American politics.
"Woven throughout his work is an emphasis on restoring civility to public discourse," Land said.
Galston echoed this idea in his remarks, calling for religious liberty to be "an island of unity in a sea of division."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) appointed Swett to USCIRF in 2012, which unanimously elected her chairwoman later that year. Swett is also the daughter of the only Holocaust survivor to be elected to Congress.
Swett, speaking in her personal capacity and not as chairwoman, said that religious freedom in America is "remarkably robust and secure," but she also noted that it faces strong challenges from society’s increasing secularization and the redefinition of social institutions like marriage.
One option for religious followers in the face of increasing pressure on their faith would be for them to retreat from public life.
"For people of religious convictions to abandon the public square would be, I believe, an abdication of both their rights and duties as citizens, and our nation and the world would be poorer for it," she said.
She encouraged those fighting for religious liberty "to get comfortable as a movement in your own policy skin" and to think self-critically about the accusations leveled against them by their opponents. She also encouraged them to respect the arguments and passion of their opponents and to look toward the "long game" in their strategy.
"I don’t need to remind you of all people that many of the most important moral crusades in our nation’s history were conceived of and led by women and men who were inspired by their faith to try and build a more just world," she told the group, specifically mentioning the abolitionist and civil rights movements.