Vice President JD Vance yesterday delivered a 1 hour and 49-minute address to the 2025 International Religious Freedom Summit at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C. (Video of full remarks.) He said in part:
I'm here this morning in part to reflect not only on the words of our Founders, but especially on those of their intellectual forebears, the Church fathers of classical Christianity to which we owe the very notion of religious liberty. And I know we have people of every faith here, but it is, I think, a conceit of modern society that religious liberty is a liberal concept. But we know that religious freedom flows from concepts central to the Christian faith, in particular the free will of human beings and the essential dignity of all peoples. We find its foundational tenets in the Gospels themselves with Christ's famous instructions to render unto Ceaser that which is Ceaser's, and unto God that which is God's....
Our Administration believes we must stand for religious freedom not just as a legal principle, as important as that is, but as a lived reality both within our own borders and especially outside of it. In recent years too often has our Nation's international engagement on religious liberty issues been corrupted and distorted to the point of absurdity. Think about this. How did America get to the point where we're sending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to NGO's that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe.
Catholic News Agency and Religion News Service reported on his remarks.
