Eric Patterson
President and CEO, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Eric Patterson, Ph.D. serves as President and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC. He previously served as President of the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI) and, prior to that, Dean and Professor at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University. His government experience includes the White House Fellowship, work at the U.S. Department of State, and, for over 20 years, service as an Air National Guard commander. He is an active scholar on the moral dimensions of national security and international affairs, as well as author or editor of over 20 books, including Just American Wars: Ethical Dilemmas in U.S. Military History and the co-edited volume The Reagan Manifesto: ‘A Time for Choosing’ and Its Influence.
Talks and Topics
The Declaration Abroad: The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on Freedom Movements Around the World
The Declaration of Independence’s text and key themes have influenced freedom movements around the world for the past 200 years. This talk looks at the ways the ideas of the Declaration have been explicitly cited or referred to by newly free countries (e.g., those who threw off Spanish tyranny in the early 1800s) to anti-communists such as Vaclav Havel and John Paul II. The Declaration continues to inspire the world today.
America’s Religious Freedom Consensus at 250: The Rich Heritage and Powerful Future of Religious Freedom
Based on the opening chapter of Patterson’s new co-edited volume on religious freedom in the U.S. (B&H Publishers, 2026), this talk looks at the roots of American religious freedom, from the Mayflower Compact through the Declaration of Independence to today. A focus of the talk is what America’s most recent arguments have had to do with the weaponization of state power against individuals and religious institutions, and what to make of the “change of course” of the Supreme Court in recent years.
