Jay W. Richards is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a contributing editor at The American magazine and the Enterprise Blog at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the co-author of Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom Before It's Too Late. He spoke with Catholic World Report recently about some current events relating to themes and ideas addressed in that book, including freedom, the role of government, progressivism, and Church-state relations.
Catholic World Report: Let’s imagine George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have time traveled to our current day. How might you 
explain to them how and why the United States has reached a point where the federal government is poised to force businesses and institutions, including Christian schools and organizations, to fund contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs?
Richards: I suspect Washington and certainly Jefferson would doubt that the political experiment they birthed was still in operation. But if I had only a few minutes to explain what has happened, I would tell them that a political philosophy called “progressivism” became dominant in influential sectors of our society. This philosophy disdained the constitutional idea—that the state should be limited in power and scope. The separation of powers that the Founders established in the Constitution, along with a residual spirit of Constitutionalism among the people, has slowed the march of progressive philosophy. But they have failed to stop it, in part, because all three branches of government have been occupied by individuals who shared this philosophy.
A related philosophy of secularism has overrun the “theistic consensus” of the Founders. In the last century, influential elites came to doubt that we human beings are “endowed by our Creator” with certain intrinsic rights. As a result, our laws now fail to recognize those rights for some classes of human beings. And rather than avoiding laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion, Congress is now trying to compel religious citizens to act in ways that violate their deepest moral beliefs.
When it comes to the exercise of religion, politically we have gone from freedom, to indifference, to outright hostility.
Catholic World Report: How far, in your estimation, has our country departed from the original vision of the founding fathers as far as the power and scope of the federal government is concerned?
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