Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Novak

Novak pulls off a neat, slightly barbed inversion: atheists aren’t framed as a threat to religious liberty but as its best exhibit. Their presence becomes “proof” that a society can stretch wide enough to shelter even the people least likely, in Novak’s telling, to supply the metaphysical rationale for that shelter. It’s pluralism as a kind of stress test.

The sentence is built like a compliment with a theological hook. “Atheists in our midst” signals intimacy and mild unease, as if the reader needs reminding that unbelievers are not an abstract category but neighbors. Then comes the pivot: accommodation is so robust it can include “even those” who, Novak implies, lack the conceptual equipment to defend conscience as “sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society.” The subtext is not subtle: the liberal right of conscience rides, ultimately, on pre-political (read: religious or natural-law) foundations, and atheism free-rides on capital it didn’t create.

That’s the context Novak lived in and helped shape: late-20th-century American debates where “Judeo-Christian” moral architecture was treated as the load-bearing wall of liberal democracy. He’s simultaneously defending a capacious public order and warning that it can’t run on procedural tolerance alone. The rhetorical move flatters the regime while disciplining its critics: you’re welcome here; just don’t forget who, supposedly, built the house.