Richard A. Sokerka
More often than not, commencement speakers give graduates advice based on the speaker’s life experiences and what they can do with that newly-minted diploma as they enter the business world.
But what about giving graduates advice about their faith as they step into the secular world?
Considering how religious liberty is under attack in our nation, sound advice on their faith is something our graduates need to hear if they want to stand strong against those who want to take it away.
Vice President Mike Pence, in his commencement address at Liberty University, spoke to this very important issue. “Throughout most of American history, it’s been pretty easy to call yourself Christian,” Pence said. “But things are different now. The truth is we live in a time when the freedom of religion is under assault.”
He listed some of these attacks on religion, saying: “It’s become acceptable and even fashionable to ridicule and even discriminate against people of faith.” He cited as an example the reaction on the part of “the media and the secular left” vilifying his wife for taking a teaching position at a Christian elementary school.
“Some of the loudest voices for tolerance today have little tolerance for traditional Christian beliefs,” he said.
He warned the graduates: “As you go about your daily lives, just be ready because you’re going to be asked not just to tolerate things that violate your faith, you’re going to be asked to endorse them. You’re going to be asked to bow down to the idols of the popular culture and you will be shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible.”
“Decide here and now that you’re going to stand firm in your faith,” Pence said.
At the University of Notre Dame, Peggy Noonan, Pulitzer Prize winning-columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, was the commencement speaker.
The day before the commencement, she met with some of the graduates at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture, devoted to the Catholic intellectual tradition within all disciplines. “I told the students the most important thing to remember as they enter the rough old world: Keep your faith. If you lose it, get it back. It is the thing you will need most, the thing without which nothing is real. Everything good in your life will spring from it,” she wrote in her column in the Wall Street Journal.
In her commencement address, she told the graduates, “Americans intuitively understand the crucial nature of religious institutions, and they don’t want to see them under siege. They don’t want long-held religious beliefs compromised or trampled. I feel I’ve known America a long time. Deep down it actually respects you when the dogma lives loudly within you.”
To our graduates in the Class of 2019: take to heart these words of advice from these commencement addresses. Going forward into the secular world, stand firm in your faith and let the dogma live loudly within you.