Was America’s Founding Fatally Flawed by the Provenance of Its Ideas?

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.

Image: The Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull

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