ABOUT

First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy (CRCD) recognizes the significance of the relationship between law and culture. We often hear that politics is downstream from culture, and there is no doubt that the moral and cultural assumptions of a society shape the laws and help determine their efficacy. But we also know that what a society legally permits and promotes is formative for the moral character and the behavior of the people. And so to realize a free and flourishing society we must be a virtuous citizenry that embodies the best of the American experiment in ordered liberty. We must be faithful, seeking victory over error and evil in the courts and in the culture. 

“Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without,” observed the political philosopher Edmund Burke. “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Through its litigation and advocacy work, First Liberty defends religious liberty, the foundational freedom of our nation. But for rights to be meaningful they must be exercised. For this reason the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy encourages people of faith to live out of their religious convictions in all areas of life. Through our research, publications, and programming the CRCD promotes the cultural foundations of a free society and seeks to preserve the democratic institutions of self-government. The CRCD exists to empower, encourage, and equip current and future generations of leaders to be “faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms” (1 Peter 4:10). Please join us in this important work.