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US Attorney General William Barr has blamed “totalitarian democracy” and a “collectivist agenda” for driving faith from public discourse.

In a speech to the 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, Barr said while the founders of the Constitution believed that religion and government should be separate, they also firmly believed  “religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government”.

Barr said today’s political divisions come from the conflict between two fundamentally different visions of how society should be governed.

“One vision undergirds the political system we call liberal democracy, which limits government and gives priority to preserving personal liberty.  The other vision propels a form of totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda.  It subverts individual freedom in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective,” he said. 

“Totalitarian democracy is based on the idea that man is naturally good, but has been corrupted by existing societal customs, conventions, and institutions.  The path to perfection is to tear down these artifices and restore human society to its natural condition.”  

Barr said totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic. Its  adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion.

“Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection.  The virtue of any individual is defined by whether they are aligned with the program.  Whatever means used are justified because, by definition, they will quicken the pace of mankind’s progress toward perfection.”

Barr said experience teaches us that moral values must be based on an authority independent of man’s will to be effective.

“In other words, they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.  Men are far likelier to obey rules that come from God than to abide by the abstract outcome of an ad hoc utilitarian calculus.”

Barr said the US mainstream media has become massively consolidated and monolithic in its views.

An increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change, he said.

“These developments have given the press an unprecedented ability to mobilise a broad segment of the public on a national scale and direct that opinion.”

Barr said the key to fixing the problem is a greater diversity of voices in the media. 

“I am actually an optimist, and I believe that identifying the problem is the first step in correcting it.  Our nation’s greatest days lie ahead, but only if we can alter our course and pay heed to the lessons of the past.”