New York, N.Y. — Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney defended the rights of atheists in a speech in Manhattan on Thursday night.

Recalling criticisms that he left nonbelievers out of his December speech on faith in America, Romney said: “Upon reflection, I came to understand that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity . . . an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty.”

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He continued: “If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God.”

”We are all in this together,” Romney said. “Religious liberty and liberality of thought flow from the common conviction that it is freedom, not coercion, that exalts the individual just as it raises up the nation.”

Romney made his remarks at a dinner sponsored by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The group honored the former Massachusetts governor and his wife, Ann, with its Canterbury Medal, for “resolutely and publicly refus[ing] to render to Caesar that which is God’s.”

The event was both an opportunity for Romney to revisit the speech he gave on religion in College Station, Texas, last December as well as an opportunity for an enthusiastic crowd of religious conservatives to thank the Romney family for defending religious liberty in America and for being themselves models of faithful people in public life.

The gratitude was most adamantly expressed by Ann Corkery, a supporter of the Romney presidential campaign who chaired Thursday night’s event. A Catholic, Corkery thanked Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (as you may have heard during the campaign), for his speech. She called it a rare instance in which “a serious thought got to break through the noise.”

In the Becket speech, Romney also defended the contention that “religion requires freedom and that freedom requires religion.

“I love how plainly that thought was put by John Adams,” Romney said: “Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.”


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