Thanks for taking on the discussion. I’ll respond after I get back (2 year old daughter, soon to be 3, is going into a school a couple days a week and we have a meeting).
I think John Paul was talking about how to live as a citizen in a free country, what your duties are as a citizen, and what type of freedom is truly important. Here is the context:
Christian witness takes different forms at different moments in the life of a nation. Sometimes, witnessing to Christ will mean drawing out of a culture the full meaning of its noblest intentions, a fullness that is revealed in Christ. At other times, witnessing to Christ means challenging that culture, especially when the truth about the human person is under assault. America has always wanted to be a land of the free. Today, the challenge facing America is to find freedom’s fulfillment in the truth: the truth that is intrinsic to human life created in God’s image and likeness, the truth that is written on the human heart, the truth that can be known by reason and can therefore form the basis of a profound and universal dialogue among people about the direction they must give to their lives and their activities.
One hundred thirty years ago, President Abraham Lincoln asked whether a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could “long endure.” President Lincoln’s question is no less a question for the present generation of Americans. Democracy cannot be sustained without a shared commitment to certain moral truths about the human person and human community. The basic question before a democratic society is “how ought we to live together?” In seeking an answer to this question, can society exclude moral truth and moral reasoning? Can the Biblical wisdom which played such a formative part in the very founding of your country be excluded from that debate? Would not doing so mean that tens of millions of Americans could no longer offer the contribution of their deepest convictions to the formation of public policy? Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
Full text here: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/world/bal-homily100995,0,4247104.story
Sorry, no sale. There’s not even a discussion to have if you can’t accept that whatever your personal morality and religious belief, it is not the glue of a civil society such as our constitutional republic (I detest the term democracy with its tendency, in both ancient times and modern, to be a tyranny of the majority). To the extent we have such a glue it is our civic ‘religion’ of equality before the law and inalienable rights (regardless of what one considers their source), and the right to pursue our personal ends more or less as we see fit, subject to limited constrains in law. It’s also includes a civic virtue that a Cicero, Cato or Epictetus would recognize.