Troubled by the ample evidence of a moral decline in the United States, some Catholic thinkers trace the problem to what they see as a fatal flaw in the American Founding: a reliance on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment. Robert Reilly, the author of America on Trial, disagrees. He argues that the political ideas of the Founders are compatible with—and indeed derived from—the tradition of respect for Reason and Revelation, Church and State, developed by Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages.
 

 
Robert R. Reilly is Director of the Westminster Institute. In his twenty-five years of government service, he served as Special Assistant to the President and as Director of the Voice of America, was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy to the Secretary of Defense, and taught at National Defense University. He attended Georgetown University and the Claremont Graduate University, and he has published widely on American politics and morals, foreign policy, and classical music. His books include Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, and The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. His latest book is America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding.