Editors Note: On October 11, 2009, at the invitation of Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, Michael Novak delivered the following keynote address at Forum 2000, an annual conference held in Prague to map the globalization process and to note its positive results as well as the perils encountered by an increasingly interconnected world.

This year’s theme of Forum 2000 is “Democracy and Freedom in a Multipolar World” — in short, “Democracy after 1989.”

That theme is too rich for a brief introduction. Surely, though, one of the dramatic differences between 1989 and 2009 is the new salience of nearly all world religions in matters of democracy. As Jürgen Habermas wrote after September 11, 2001, the notion that the world is secular, and becoming more so, is no longer tenable. In fact, after September 11, secularism seemed to Habermas like a small island, surrounded by a sea of turbulent religion.

Accordingly, I will make four points this evening on the bonds between religion and democracy. First, the great French social thinker Alexis de Tocqueville taught us that religion gives democracy two important tasks: to put in place foundational principles on which human rights are secure against every raging storm; and to teach “the habits of the heart” that allow democracy to work in practice — habits of honesty, self-examination, self-mastery, and free association with others, and a sense of universal fraternity with all other women and men on earth. If men do not learn the habits of self-government in their private lives, how will they practice self-government in their public lives? To live democratically is to live a high moral art.

By itself, secularism tends toward individual, not general, moral standards. It begins with “tolerance,” and steadily slides toward relativism. Cultural decadence — first among entertainment elites, and then among the multitudes of the uninformed young — grows like fungus on the face of democracy. The silent artillery of time wears down the habits of the past. For this reason, democracy needs regular awakenings of conscience, often religious awakenings, just to survive as a morally beautiful and worthy enterprise — a moral enterprise. Democracy is moral or not at all.

Religion teaches humble people that they are valuable and noble, beloved by their Creator, equal to every other man. It also teaches us that the personal lives of plumbers and carpenters — and professors and playwrights — and all women and men, are meaningful, morally dramatic, and made in the image of God — as co-creators. These are the first bonds between religion and democracy.