Ethics and Public Policy Center at 50: A part of America’s ‘secret sauce’

WASHINGTON — As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) is also celebrating an auspicious anniversary this year: its 50th.

Several hundred supporters of this uniquely ecumenical think tank, which explicitly engages on pressing public policy questions within the context of the country’s historic Judeo-Christian moral framework, celebrated the milestone at an April 30 gala at the cavernous National Building Museum.

The event was headlined by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a Catholic, as keynote speaker. In an interview with EWTN News just prior to the event, Douthat credited the EPPC for both its success and resilience in “maintaining a place for a serious religious conservativism in American political discourse.”

Douthat contrasted the influence of EPPC’s scholars and the American experience with that of Western Europe, which he said suffers severely from a “suffocating secular-liberal, social and cultural liberal consensus in which religious arguments don’t find any purchase and in which ethical norms are all basically utilitarian, in which abortion and increasingly euthanasia are sort of taken for granted.”

For his part, EPPC President Ryan Anderson, also a Catholic, told EWTN News the think tank is part of the “secret sauce” of a country whose founders, such as President John Adams, firmly held that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Citing the U.S. Declaration of Independence during his speech to the assembly, Anderson said EPPC stands for “the proposition that all men are created equal, that we’re endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, and that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Our guiding lights 50 years ago remain the same today: the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the natural law tradition, Western Civilization in general, and the American constitutional order in particular,” Anderson said.

Anderson pointed out that as the country celebrates its 250th and EPPC its 50th, “EPPC is needed now more than ever, to bear witness to the truth about the human person.”

He said EPPC conducts its work in an “intentionally ecumenical way” as a community of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic scholars “developing and deploying the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics.”

As they do in the country at large, Catholic scholars and related initiatives play a major role in the EPPC’s work. The institution runs ongoing programs in fields including bioethics, technology and human flourishing, and Catholic studies, and runs the Catholic Women’s Forum, the Person and Identity Project, and the Life and Family Initiative, among others.

In addition to Anderson, Catholic scholars who continue to occupy leadership roles at the EPPC include two of the institution’s former presidents, George Weigel and Ed Whelan, along with Mary Hasson, Stephen White, O. Carter Snead, Noelle Mering, Aaron Kheriaty, Theresa Farnan, Mary FioRito, Francis Maier, Jennifer Bryson, and Clare Morell, among others.