Mr. Kevin McCarthy acknowledged that consensus is much more difficult today than in the eighteenth century. He noted the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville who, visiting the United States in 1830, remarked that Americans “combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”

Mr. McCarthy said that faith leaders have a critical “prophetic” function to hold public officials as well as citizens to moral and ethical standards of conduct, and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked, “Where are the prophets in place to answer this role today?”

Mr. Kevin McCarthy called on Americans to uphold values shared by faiths through the example of service.