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The article is an interesting read and to me a bit surprising because it is almost exactly what was going through my mind as I listened to it. The speech was not Evangelical at all. To the extent that it was religious, it is a sort of Judeo/Christian deism. Really what I heard was, for the first time in my memory, a presidential speech that almost completely embodied the essential principles of Natural Law as applied to American society outside of the courts. The speech is not religiously Universalist, but it does bespeak a certain universalism of principles in that it recognizes that our worth as human beings exists not because we are merely individuals, but rather because we and the cosmos around us are a divine creation. This creation does not exist to fulfill our every, personal desire, good, evil or otherwise, though by Free Will we have the "opportunity" to do just that. We and the creation around us are created to fulfill God's plans. In order to foster that, Natural Law, divine and absolute, was created to advance humanity to "become like God", what the Christian East calls "theosis". That "theosis" takes place in a variety of ways among individuals. In the West, the Anglo Saxons created the Common Law to discover and apply what the Church taught, so ordering society according to Natural Law and thereby creating conditions within society which are and have been conducive to theosis.

I don't doubt that the Left, or even secular intellectuals of any stripe, will condemn this speech. It poses a grave threat to their most cherished belief that Liberty means that an individual can pretty much do as he or she feels, at a minimum in their private lives; that the individual is the measure of the universe. Of course, the problem with this is that the accumulation of evils committed in private soon enough infect the public sphere and thus damage and further distort the original perfection of all of Creation. This is not some obscure Patristic theology. A worldwide culture of death and unfettered individualism has developed out of the formerly hidden sins of abortion and euthanasia for example. The burden of this accumulated sin forced these out into the light and Western society, detached from Natural Law principles, but still in fact subject to them, readily, and I think cynically, adopted Natural Law terminology to create a "liberty right" to commit abominations. What the Left dreads is a Liberty only to act morally in an absolute sense. They reject Natural Law because it is of necessity "judgmental", something they cannot accept unless it is a judgmentalism born of the same amoral, humanistic "Liberty" which they accept and Natural Law condemns as a distortion.

What the president spoke of demands an adoption by this society of a "Liberty to act morally". Natural Law sets the parameters of that moral action for any given age.

Great post 21. I think that is exactly what he was saying. I was thrilled to hear him say it. The funny part is, this went over the heads of all those who like to call him simple-minded and dumb.

All of your points are excellent and very true. And this is true, too:

I don't doubt that the Left, or even secular intellectuals of any stripe, will condemn this speech.

Curiously enough, I don't think they have any idea what they are condemning. I think the speech went right over their heads.