R.R. Reno on Religious Liberty

There is an excellent piece by R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, over at Hillsdale College on the present and future of religious liberty in America. It is quite a sobering and concerning piece about the threat to religious liberty by secularists. He ends with these words:

In conclusion, I want to focus not on fury but on the remarkable capacity for communities of faith to endure. My wife’s ancestors lived for generations in the contested borderlands of Poland and Russia. As Jews they were tremendously vulnerable, and yet through their children and their children’s children they endured in spite of discrimination, violence, and attempted genocide. Where now, I ask, are the Russian and Polish aristocrats who dominated them for centuries? Where now is the Thousand Year Reich? Where now is the Soviet worker’s paradise? They have gone to dust. The Torah is still read in the synagogue. The same holds for Christianity. The Church did not need constitutional protections in order to take root in a hostile pagan culture two thousand years ago. Right now the Nones seem to have the upper hand in America. But what seems powerful is not always so. If I had to bet on Harvard or the Catholic Church, Yale or the Mennonites in Goshen, Indiana, the New York Times or yeshivas in Brooklyn, I wouldn’t hesitate. Over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.