Vice President Mike Pence delivered the keynote commencement address at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, on Saturday.
Pence’s address at Williams Stadium began with a congratulations from President Donald Trump to the more than 20,000 students in attendance and included a staunch defense of Christianity and Christian values.
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“America needs men and women of faith and integrity now more than ever,” Pence said before noting rampant Christian persecution around the world. “We live in a time when it’s become acceptable and even fashionable to ridicule and discriminate against people of faith.”
It wasn’t all that long ago that the last administration brought the full weight of the federal government against the Little Sisters of the Poor merely because that group of nuns refused to provide a health plan that violated their deeply held religious beliefs, and when the State of Georgia recently was debating legal protections for the unborn a bevy of Hollywood liberals said they would boycott the entire state, and when my wife, Karen, returned to teach art at an elementary Christian school earlier this year, we faced harsh attacks by the media and the secular left.
Praising the “freedom of religion” that is “enshrined in our First Amendment and in the hearts of every American,” Pence called the attacks on Christian education “un-American,” then touted the Trump administration’s “decisive action to protect religious liberty.” (RELATED: ‘Satisfying And Uplifting’ — Black Church Pastors Tell Don Lemon They Are ‘Encouraged’ By Pence Visit After Arson)
“I promise you, we will always stand up for the right of Americans to live, to learn, and to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience,” Pence said. “No one is ever going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what is in your heart, that’s a promise.”
“You know, throughout most of American history, it’s been pretty easy to call yourself Christian,” Pence said. “It didn’t even occur to people that you might be shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible. But things are different now. Some of the loudest voices for tolerance today have little tolerance for traditional Christian beliefs. So as you go about your daily life, just be ready, because you are going to be asked not just to tolerate things that violate your faith, you’re going to be asked to censor them, to bow down to the idols of popular culture.”