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N. Gingrich: Address to Summit 2022, Session V
Written by Hon. Newt Gingrich, Speaker, House of Representatives (1995-1999), USA
Friday, August 12, 2022
Address to Summit 2022 and Leadership Conference,
Seoul, Korea, August 11-15, 2022
Thank you all very much. It’s a great honor to be here, because religious freedom is actually the most important single topic on the planet. We Americans, in our Declaration of Independence, said that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At the time, this was a very radical statement, because it meant your rights didn’t come from the king, they don’t come from the government, they don’t come from lawyers. Your rights come from God, which presupposes that there is a God, and presupposes that you are subordinated to God. It doesn’t say that you give God rights. It says that God gives you rights.
This belief in religious liberty, which I think is the central basis of all freedom, is now under attack from two very different directions. There are a lot of fights between people who believe in God. But putting that to one side, there’s an attack against everyone who believes in God from two directions. The first direction is totalitarianism. If you’re the Chinese Communist dictatorship, any belief that gives allegiance outside of the Chinese Communist Party is by definition treason and a direct mortal threat to the survival of the system.
This was true for the Nazis, and it was true for the Soviets. It is the nature of a totalitarian system that it can have no rivals and therefore must destroy any alternative center of power. It was John Paul II going back to Poland and re-arousing the Polish people in 1979 that began to shatter the Soviet empire as people decided and said, chanting—3 million people in Victory Square in Warsaw—“We want God.” And it was the beginning of the end. So one threat is totalitarianism.
The other threat is a secular paganism, which is relatively new in the modern world, but which anyone who has read the Old Testament in either its Jewish or Christian tradition understands instantly. This is an ongoing, permanent fight. There have always been pagans, and there’s a very simple definition. Pagans are people who believe that power is centered in themselves. It’s partly why in the Ten Commandments it says, “Thou shalt have no other God before me.” And yet paganism, by definition, creates an alternative god. It’s a god that gets to decide gender. It’s a god that gets to decide when to kill you: whether to kill you because you’re too old or to kill you because you’re an unwanted baby.
It’s a belief system that says, my passions, my interests, my concerns matter. And who is this God person to annoy me? So this struggle between religion and paganism is nothing new. We’re just in another phase of it.
What we’re seeing happen, and the current challenge in Japan, which The Washington Times has covered brilliantly, is a good example. There are opponents of God, many of them in the news media. We’ve seen this in the United States, we’ve seen it in Europe. A large element of the news media hates religion and given any excuse will go all out to destroy religion. So you have this very strange spectacle in Japan that no one in the Unification Church has been suggested to be in any way guilty of harming Prime Minister Abe. In fact, Abe was very fond of and supportive of the church. And yet it is the church that is now the scapegoat, fully as much as the Jews were made the scapegoat by Hitler, fully as much as Christians are made the scapegoat and Uyghurs and Tibetan monks are made the scapegoat in China.
Let’s be quite clear what you’re faced with. And sadly, the prime minister in Japan so far has not been prepared to stand up for religious liberty and face down the mob.
What you have isn’t anything new. We’ve seen it for all of human history. It comes down to a simple test. One by one, each of us has to decide, are we with God or are we with the pagans? Are we with God or are we with the totalitarians? It’s not too complicated. It’s just hard and it’s scary because there’s a lot of power on the other side. And that’s why this meeting and this conversation and this effort to reach out through television and other media is so important.
I thank you for letting me share these observations with you. And I urge you to remain truly committed.
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