On October 11, 2009, at the invitation of V¨¢clav 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¡± ¡ª 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 J¨¹rgen 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.