The Christian as Citizen - Christianity Today

The Issue at Hand: “The Christian as Citizen”

Religion and politics do mix, and recent social issues have forced conservative Christians into the political fray. Their history of limited involvement has left them without adequate tools to do the job, however.

by Kenneth S. Kantzer

How to Recognize a Christian Citizen

Faithful Christians throughout history have been remarkable leaders on public issues. Whether their manner of involvement has always been wise and biblical, however, is another matter.

by J. I. Packer

Church and State: Why the Marriage Must Be Saved

Both the church and civil government have divinely ordained roles in God’s plan, and the church cannot thrive without the state. The erosion of moral absolutes imperils the system, however.

by Carl F. H. Henry

Windows and Doors in the Wall of Separation

Some regulation of religious institutions is always necessary, but the Court has erroneously interpreted the First Amendment’s establishment clause. How far Christians must submit to the state will always be open for dispute.

by Stephen V. Monsma

A Political Strategy for the Local Church

No political activism can be permitted to distract a church from its mission of preaching, teaching, fellowship, prayer, and sharing of resources.

by David L. McKenna

Summing Up: An Evangelical View of Church and State

God is Lord over state and church, and Christians welcome democracy as a system that permits maximum freedom, but they must also accept responsibility to make it work justly.

by Kenneth S. Kantzer

Church and state vignettes by Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch. Editing by Steve Board and Tom Minnery. All photos by Jim Whitmer.

“Religion and politics don’t mix” runs an old saying. But that is pure myth for an active citizen in the 1980s.

At this very moment, more than 2,000 cases involving church-state relations are pending in our courts. A Nebraska pastor, Everett Sileven, has just spent time in jail because he refused to register teachers in his church-run elementary school. The grounds: registration would be an unconstitutional restriction of the free exercise of religion.

A highly respected Michigan judge, Randall J. Heckman, faced charges that threatened his removal from office because his religious convictions would not permit him to order an abortion for a pregnant 13-year-old girl.

During a recent session, the U.S. Senate spent the better part of a week debating an amendment to the Constitution providing for prayer in public schools. Courts have ruled that posting the Ten Commandments in a schoolroom is a violation of the nonestablishment clause of the First Amendment. A recent decision permits free access to the public schools for student-led religious clubs on the same basis as voluntary student meetings for other purposes. Court rulings on released time for religious instruction in the public schools, however, still leave unsettled many gray areas.

In the election of 1984, the Republican party wrote into its platform a plank requiring that judges agree to the sanctity of life. The plank aroused considerable opposition because it appeared to demand a religious qualification for office and therefore violated Article Six of the Constitution. The issue even exploded into the presidential debates immediately before the election.

Motivated by moral and religious pressure, local governments are constantly passing laws restricting pornography and television violence. Equally often they are struck down by the courts as violations of free speech or press.

Planned Parenthood ran a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post featuring a ludicrous picture of a stern senator sitting in bed between husband and wife. The caption read: “The decision to have a baby could soon be between you, your husband, and your senator.” The ad stated further, “Abortion is something personal, not political.”

If this were a matter of wife beating or child abuse, however, most Americans would very much wish the strong arm of the law to penetrate into the bedroom. Planned Parenthood would likely agree.

By their very nature, good religion and good politics ought to mix. And throughout American history, they have been thoroughly mixed—never more so than now at the end of the twentieth century. We Americans are a religious people—perhaps the most religious of any Western nation, unless one excepts Poland. And if religion is our ultimate concern and we love people, we clearly cannot escape the overlap and intertwine of such crucial issues as religion and politics.

Unfortunately, since the turn of this century, evangelicals have not done much serious thinking about church-state relations. For at least two generations they restricted their concerns chiefly to personal salvation, private sins, and private charity. Yet in the last half-decade, evangelical Christians have moved back into politics with a vengeance. But they are doing so largely lacking a well-thought-out philosophy of government or even a theology of citizenship.

They lack a road map. This means that their political strategy and their political goals are usually determined by the exigencies of the moment—whatever works amid the desperate need they see around them. At times, evangelicals are tempted to borrow the practices of secular politicians or the liberal religious-political philosophy that took over in the name of Christianity when evangelicalism was absent.

Yet there is a great heritage on which today’s Christian can draw. In the period immediately following the New Testament, the early church was in no position to make much impact on imperial power. As a proscribed religion, it struggled desperately to survive the severe persecution that at times drove it underground and rendered unthinkable any direct Christian influence on Roman government. The role of believers was reduced to that of modern Christianity in totalitarian lands.

After the time of Constantine (d. 337), Christians, led by their greatest thinker in the ancient world, Augustine, began to formulate a philosophy of government. For this they drew in part on the civil law of the Old Testament given for the state of Israel. They fortified it with the philosophical treatises on government by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and especially the Stoics. Then, borrowing the structure of Roman law, they complemented and softened the whole by appeal to relevant New Testament passages.

At the time of the Reformation (after 1517), Christian theology underwent a radical revision. But in neither its Lutheran nor Reformed churches did this effect an immediate change in church and state. Persecution of Roman Catholics and heretics continued in Protestant lands just as Protestants suffered under the rule of Roman Catholics. Anabaptists alone of the major movements opted for true religious freedom. Their defense was often a move of desperation as they sought to survive the persecution coming at them from all sides.

In the modern period, undoubtedly occasioned by religious pluralism, Christians have re-examined the issue of Christianity and the state. Contrary to what is commonly assumed, however, theirs was no counsel of despair in adjusting to a state torn by diverse religions. Quite to the contrary, Roger Williams developed a highly sophisticated defense of religious freedom. He based it on the distinctly different roles of church grounded in New Testament principles and government dedicated to the preservation of freedom and justice.

Princeton president John Witherspoon and other evangelical leaders who helped frame the new Constitution of 1787 became vigorous defenders of democracy and religious and political freedom. Although they borrowed from the Enlightenment, John Locke, and other sources, they constructed their views not on the deism of Franklin and Jefferson but on what under God was “due” to both state and religion. “Indeed, among the most ardent defenders of the Revolution were churchmen who saw in the situation the working out in action of Christian truths which had been neglected or misunderstood through the ages” (God and Caesar, p. 127).

The four articles that follow draw on Scripture and 19 centuries of such Christian experience to provide the beginnings of a road map for our day.

James I. Packer, a highly respected Anglican theologian, first probes the marks of a Christian citizen. Can a good Christian also be a good citizen, or are the two roles incompatible, as the ancient Romans and Karl Marx argued? Why did evangelicals reject the old social gospel? What approach should we take to the “liberation theology” of our own day? And how can a Christian, committed to absolute right and wrong, become involved in the half-measures and compromises common to worldly politics?

Carl F. H. Henry, widely acknowledged as the dean of evangelical theologians, then seeks to identify the boundary between church and state. Is there a Christian government? Would one be desirable? Should government be indifferent to or foster religion?

This leads him to such questions as: How do we determine which parts of Scripture we should seek to incorporate into civil law? And what right does a public official in pluralistic America have to speak out based on his own private religion or his own personal values?

Stephen Monsma, a political scientist at Calvin College and himself an experienced politician at the state level, probes the second half of the First Amendment. The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion. But is such freedom absolute? And what does a faithful Christian do when his freedom is curtailed? Is civil disobedience or revolt ever defensible?

David McKenna, the former president of Seattle Pacific University and now head of Asbury Theological Seminary, has been active in the world of local politics. In his article, he asks if church and clergy should advocate public policies and political causes. And what about Christian political organizations and even parties?

A final essay briefly spells out a Christian view of church-state relations, drawing on the insights of these four thinkers.

The topic has absorbed the best minds of the ages, and we will not write the last word here. Yet in our time, both our church and nation need special wisdom so that we may continue to enjoy the justice and freedom for which we have been struggling through these past two centuries.

This is our earnest prayer. Perhaps we can move ever so slightly nearer to that perfect freedom and perfect justice that must forever in this life remain only a goal to grasp after and to struggle toward.

To try to improve society is not worldliness but love. To wash one’s hands of society is not love but worldliness.

It is a paradox of the Christian life that the more profoundly one is concerned about heaven, the more deeply one cares about God’s will being done on Earth. The Christians who show most passion to serve others in this world are regularly those with the strongest hold on the other-worldly realities. This has always been true, whether we look at ministers, missionaries, statesmen, reformers, industrialists, physicians, men of wealth and power, or ordinary layfolk.

Service to others, as an expression of love to them, is a Christian priority. But citizenship is a form of service, as most Christians have seen from the start. Despite the Marxist claim that religion anesthesizes one to the needs of Earth, we instead find that, other things being equal, those whose citizenship is in heaven (I echo Paul’s phrase in Phil. 3:20) make the best citizens of any state, democratic or totalitarian, Christian or pagan, secular or even atheist.

The Biblical Basis For Public Activism

In the New Testament, civic obligation is emphatically commanded alongside—indeed, as part of—the obligation to serve God. When Jesus answered the question about taxpaying with the words, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17), this was not a clever evasion of the issue, but a clear acknowledgement that rendering what is due to the existing political regime is part of the Christian calling. When Peter in one breath says, “Fear God. Honor the Emperor” (1 Peter 2:17), he spotlights the same truth; as does Paul when, in the course of his overview of the life of gratitude for grace that is true Christianity, he teaches the Roman Christians to “be subject to the governing authorities” (Rom. 13:1), and tells them that “for the sake of conscience” they should “pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due” (vv. 6–7).

Paul speaks of each state official as “God’s servant for your good” (v. 4). Note that it is pagan Roman officials, from the emperor down, that he has in view! And he further explains that God instituted the state as such to maintain law, order, justice, and “good.” “Good” here evidently embraces protection and well-being, and is thus not far removed from the opportunity to pursue happiness, which the American Constitution enshrines.

Hence, although Christians are not to think of themselves as ever at home in this world but rather as sojourning aliens, travelers passing through a foreign land to the place where their treasures are stored awaiting their arrival (see 1 Peter 2:11; Matt. 6:19–20), Scripture forbids them to be indifferent to the benefits that flow from good government. Nor, therefore, should they hesitate to play their part in maximizing these benefits for others, as well as for themselves. The upholding of stable government by a law-abiding life, and helping it to fulfill its role by personal participation where this is possible, is as fitting for us today as it was for Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, Nehemiah, Mordecai, and Daniel (to look no further). We must see it as service of God and neighbor.

As one Christian member of the European Parliament, Sir Frederick Catherwood, trenchantly put it: “To try to improve society is not worldliness but love. To wash your hands of society is not love but worldliness.”¹

Some Misguided Christian Developments

Here, however, we must note three developments in modern Christendom that have set up perplexing cross currents with regard to political duty. Each requires some discussion before we can go any further.

1. The politicized intentions of some Christian relativists. When I speak of Christian “relativists,” I have in mind certain Protestants who treat biblical teaching not as God’s revealed truth, but as man’s patchy pointer to God’s self-disclosure, couched in culturally relative terms that today’s Christians are not bound to use and voicing many sentiments that today’s Christians are not bound to endorse.

When I speak of “politicized intentions,” I mean that their goals reduce the Christian faith from a pilgrim path to heaven into a socio-political scheme for this present world. This scheme is often referred to as establishing God’s kingdom on earth by ending society’s collective sins—racism, economic and cultural exploitation, class division, denial of human rights—and setting shalom (the Hebrew word for communal well-being under God) in its place.

What is wrong here? Not praying for shalom, nor working for it as one has opportunity. Neighbor-love in the global village requires every Christian to do this—and to do it on an international as well as a domestic scale. But it is surely disastrous when Christian faith (our grasp of God’s revealed purposes among men) and Christian obedience (our efforts to do God’s revealed will) are reduced to and identified with human attempts at social improvement. The heart is cut out of the gospel when Christ is thought of as Redeemer and Lord, Liberator and Humanizer only in relation to particular deprivations and abuses in this world. This, however, has become the standard view of liberals and radicals among the Protestant leadership. It is expressed and reinforced by the World Council of Churches. (The “liberation theology” of Roman Catholic Latin America also embodies and feeds these tendencies, but I shall not discuss that now; Protestant North America is my present concern.)

What has happened, putting the matter bluntly, is that clergymen and clericalized laymen in the mainline Protestant bodies have allowed themselves to reinterpret and redefine their basic religious values as political values. Thus they have secularized Christianity under the guise of applying it to life. In doing so, they have turned it more or less into a leftist ideology, in which even revolutionary violence and guerrilla warfare against lawful governments get baptized into Christ. A flow of semi-technical books expressing this viewpoint, the entrenching of it in liberal seminaries, and the verbal dignifying of it as the discipline of “political theology” have made it respectable. Steady propaganda in its favor from Protestant denominational headquarters now leads many laity to equate the Christian citizen’s role with pushing this program everywhere.

The basic mistake in all this is that Christianity’s transcendent reference point has been lost sight of. Those who revere Bible teaching as divine truth, who see Jesus in New Testament terms as first and foremost our Savior from sin, delivering us from wrath to come, renewing us in righteousness, and opening heaven to us, and who view evangelism as the basic dimension of neighbor-love, ought to oppose social evils just as vigorously as anybody else. To do that is part of the practical Samaritanship to which all Christians are called—that is, the relieving of need and misery every way one can. But it is all to be done in the service of a Christ whose kingdom is not of this world, and who requires mankind to understand this life, with its joys and riches on the one hand and its hardships and sorrows on the other, as a moral and spiritual training ground, a preparatory discipline for eternity. Lose that perspective, however, as the relativists of whom I am speaking have lost it, and the entire enterprise of neighbor-love goes astray.

2. The pietistic inhibitions of some Christian absolutists. “Absolutists,” as I here use the word, are either those Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox who believe that God’s unchanging truth is given to the church in Scripture, and that only by obeying this truth can one please God. They may be called Christian conservatives, or even conservationists, by reason of their unwillingness to recast or diminish the historic biblical faith. Among Protestant absolutists, many, perhaps most, would prefer to be called evangelicals, since the gospel (the evangel) of Christ is central to their Christianity.

“Pietistic” points to a concern about achieving holiness, avoiding sin, winning souls, practicing fellowship with Christians, and opposing all the forces of anti-Christianity on the personal level.

Pietistic inhibitions take the form of political passivity and unwillingness to be involved in any level of civil government. Some will vote but not run for office, others will not even vote, and all incline to treat political issues as not directly their business. Their stance as Christian citizens is thus one of withdrawal from, rather than involvement in, the political process.

Why is this? Several factors seem to operate. One is a reaction against the “social gospel” of the more liberal Protestantism such as was described above, from which evangelical pietists want to dissociate themselves as fully as possible. A second is a faulty inference from their eschatology (i.e., their view of the future), which sees the world as getting inevitably and inexorably worse as Christ’s coming draws near, and tells us that nothing can be done about it; therefore it does not matter who is in power politically. A third factor, linked with this, is the stress laid on separation from “the world,” with its moral defilements, its compromises of principle, and its earthbound, pleasure-seeking, self-serving way of life. Politics, thought of as a murky milieu where principles are constantly being sacrificed in order to catch votes and keep one’s end up in the power game, is seen as an eminently “worldly” business, and so off limits for Christians. A fourth factor, potent though imponderable, is an individualism that resolves all social problems into personal problems, feels that civil government is unimportant since it cannot save souls, and so is fundamentally not interested in the political process at all.

But none of this will do. Whatever mistakes the “social gospel” may enshrine, and however true it is that ministry in the church and in evangelism should be our first concern, there remains a social and political task for Christians to tackle.

Even if the Second Coming is near, we need not think that we cannot under God make this world temporarily a little better if we try, and in any case the fear of not succeeding cannot excuse us from trying when God in effect tells us to make the attempt.

Politics is certainly a power game, but it has to be played if social structures are to be improved, and though it belongs to this world it is a sphere of service to God and men that is not intrinsically “worldly” in the proscribed sense. Moreover, political compromise, the basic maneuver, is quite a different thing from the sacrificing of principles, as we shall see.

Finally, the individualism that destroys political concern is a kind of myopia blurring awareness of the benefit that good government brings and the damage that bad government does (think of Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin). No. Pietistic passivity cannot be justified, and its present practitioners need to be educated out of it. This is no more valid a stance for the Christian citizen than was the politicized posture that we rejected above.

3. The political imperialism of some Christian biblicists. I have in mind the crusading spirit that currently animates certain members of Bible-loving churches and fellowships. They would call themselves “fundamentalist” rather than evangelical, because they feel that the former word implies more of the uncompromising fighting stance.

Here there is no hesitation in announcing objectives and plunging into the hurly-burly of the political world in order to gain them. Problems arise, however, through the temptation to view the democratic power game as the modern equivalent of holy war in the Old Testament, in which God called upon his people to overthrow the heathen and take their kingdom by force. It is because of this temptation that I spoke of “imperialism” in my heading.

In biblical holy war, the heathen had no rights and received no quarter, for God was using his people as his executioners, the human means of inflicting merited judgment. Viewed as a revelation of God’s retributive justice (an aspect of his character that shines throughout the whole Bible), holy war made coherent, if awesome, moral sense. But holy war is no part of God’s program for the Christian church. Leave retribution to God, says Paul in Romans 12:19. And it makes no moral or practical sense at all if taken as a model for Christian action in the political cockpit of a modern pluralistic democracy like the United States, India, or Britain.

In a democracy, you cannot govern except as public opinion backs you and retains you in office. Therefore the quest for consensus, and the practice of persuasion with a view to achieving consensus, is all important. Riding roughshod over others as if they did not count will always have a self-defeating boomerang effect. Pressure groups that seek to grab and use power without winning public support for what they aim at will provoke equally high-handed opposition and will typically be short-lived.

Protestants may well rejoice that Roman Catholicism has now given up its long-standing conviction that error has no rights. Should Protestants themselves now flirt with that discredited principle, however, there will very soon be egg on their own faces. And the danger is constantly present. As Paul Henry has pointed out, “righteous zeal” can be very “detrimental to the practice of politics. For ‘true believers’ of any stripe are always tempted to become hard-core ideologues seeking to impose their truths on society at large.”² Christian citizens, who ought to have strong beliefs about communal right and wrong, will always need to be careful here.

Why We Support Democracy

Representative democracy as we know it—in which the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive have separate status, the public information services (media) are not under government control, the elected administration always faces an elected opposition, and popular elections on a one-man, one-vote basis recur at regular intervals—is not the only form of government under which Christian citizens have lived and served God. However, there is no doubt that from a Christian standpoint it is a fitter and wiser form than any other.

The Christian recommendation of democracy rests on two insights.

The first is the awareness that government of the people, by the people, for the people, in an open community system that in principle allows anyone to qualify for any office, best expresses in political terms the God-given dignity and worth of each individual.

The second is the perception that, since in this fallen world, as Lord Acton put it, all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the separation of powers and the building of checks and balances into executive structures will limit the dangers of corruption, even if such procedures for restraint will never eliminate them entirely.

These Christian insights mesh with the worldly wisdom that sees that the more citizens can feel they have shared in making the decisions that now shape their lives, the more resolutely they will adhere to them. The pattern of government, therefore, that maximizes public consent will ordinarily be more stable than any other system.

Making Democracy Work

Christian citizens, then, may be expected to show a firm commitment to the principles of democracy, and to see themselves as bound to do all they can to make democracy work. But that means conscientious commitment to the democratic process as the best way of decision making within the body politic.

In democracies that are philosophically and religiously pluralist, like those of the West, the democratic process that achieves consent out of conflict is vitally important. In this fallen world, conflict arising from limited vision and competing interests is an unavoidable part of the political scene. The intensity and integrity of the public struggle whereby a balance is struck between the contending parties then becomes an index of community health and morale.

The name given to the resolution of political conflict through debate is compromise. Whatever may be true in the field of ethics, compromise in politics means not the abandonment of principle, but realistic readiness to settle for what one thinks to be less than ideal when it is all that one can get at the moment. The principle that compromise expresses is that half a loaf is better than no bread.

Give-and-take is the heart of political compromise, as compromise is the heart of politics in a democracy. To see this is a sign of political maturity. By contrast, a doctrinaire rigidity that takes up an adversary position towards all who do not wholly endorse one’s views and goals implies political immaturity.

Democratic decision making is as public a process as possible, and officials are expected to publish their reasons for action wherever this can be done without jeopardizing the future. But all major political decisions prove to be both complex in themselves and controversial in the community. This is inescapable for at least three reasons.

First, everyone’s knowledge of the facts of every case is partial and selective.

Second, values, priorities, and opinions of the relative importance of long- and short-term results will vary. Think, for instance, of the debates that go on about conserving the environment.

Third, calculations of consequences, particularly unintended and undesired consequences, will vary too, and many actions that seem right to some will seem wrong to others because they predict different consequences. Because executive decisions regularly have unwelcome by-products, they become choices between evils—attempts, that is, to choose the least evil and avoid evils that are greater. Think, for example, of the debate about using large-scale nuclear devices in war.

The Christian citizen must accept that in politics no black-and-white answers are available, but God wills simply that all be led by the highest ideals and ripest wisdom that they can discover. The case of Solomon (1 Kings 3) shows that God’s gift to rulers takes the form of wisdom to cope creatively with what comes, rather than ready-made solutions to all problems.

Church and State at the Crossroads 1

Christianity’s status as a Jewish sect normally kept it from persecution by the Roman Empire. Upon occasion, however, an individual emperor’s wrath (for example, Nero) could be turned against the church. On other occasions (like Paul’s experiences in Acts 21–28), Christians might find themselves involved in legal proceedings similar to those illustrated here. When faced with such experiences, Christians could expect a fair trial, but also an almost complete lack of understanding by the Romans as to what the new religion meant. Later in the history of the church, Roman indifference would turn to more systematic and oppressive persecution (under the emperors Decius and Diocletion in the third and early fourth centuries).

What Should The Christian Citizen Do?

The New Testament does not speak about active political participation, for the very good reason that this was not an option for first-century believers. The Roman Empire was not a democracy, and many if not most Christians were not Roman citizens. They were a small minority from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, and were viewed as eccentric deviants from the older eccentricity of Judaism. They had no political influence, nor any prospect of gaining any. (It took a longer period than the 200 years of American independence before Christians secured even political protection; prior to Constantine, their faith was illegal, and they lived everywhere under spasmodic persecution.)

So the only politically significant things they could do were pay their taxes (Matt. 17:24–27; 22:15–21; Romans 13:6–7), pray for their rulers (1 Tim. 2:1–4), and keep the peace (Rom. 12:18; 1 Thess. 5:13–15).

Present-day representative democracy, however, opens the door to a wider range of political possibilities and thereby requires of us more in the way of responsible commitment than circumstances required in New Testament times.

That commitment may be summarized:

1. All should keep informed; otherwise we cannot judge well about issues, vote well for candidates, or pray well for rulers. Political ignorance is never a Christian virtue.

2. All should pray for those in power, as 1 Timothy 2:1–4 directs. The secret efficacy of prayer, as Scripture reveals it, is enormous.

3. All should vote in elections and referendums, whenever expressions of public opinion are called for. We should be led in our voting by issues rather than personalities, and not by single issues viewed in isolation, but by our vision of total community welfare. This is one way, real if small, in which we may exert influence as the world’s salt and light (Matt. 5:13–16).

4. Some should seek political influence, by debating, writing, and working within the political party with which they are in nearest agreement. Clergy should not ordinarily do this, since it will be a barrier to the acceptance of their ministry by people who disagree with their politics. It is, however, very desirable that lay people with political interest should be encouraged to see the gaining and exerting of political influence as a field of Christian service, alongside the fields of church life, worship, and witness, with which they are likely at present to be more familiar.

5. Some should accept a political vocation. Who should do this? Those in whom interest, ability, and opportunity coincide, and on whom no rival career has a stronger claim; those with a vision for improving man’s lot globally, advancing international peace, replacing unprincipled discrimination with justice, and furthering public decency; those, finally, who are prepared to work hard, with patience, humility, tolerance, and integrity, fleeing fanaticism, riding rebuffs, and putting the public interest before their own. The Bible histories mentioned earlier show that God wants some of his servants as professional politicians, leading and shaping society well, and the discovery that one is fitted for the role is a prima facie summons from God to go ahead and embrace it.

Let none, however, be starry-eyed at this point: The choice is costly. The political path is rough traveling. The goldfish bowl of public life exposes one constantly to pitiless criticism, and to live there requires resilience and involves major self-sacrifice. As Robert D. Linder and Richard V. Pierard have written: “The work is often thankless and discouraging, and it sometimes means psychological strain and heartbreak for those involved in it. The problems are difficult, and, no matter what a politician does, invariably someone will be dissatisfied and complain about it. Every person in the community has the right to criticize the acts of any public official, and the critics have the advantage of hindsight, a privilege denied the decision-maker.… From a personal standpoint, political endeavor places heavy demand upon one’s time, family and financial resources. Many friends will automatically assume that an individual is in politics for some ulterior motive, and they will reveal this by the knowing look or sly remark …”³ Politics is a power game, and the envy, hatred, malice, and self-seeking duplicity, which the power game regularly draws out of the sinful human heart, is too familiar to need comment here. No politician of principle can expect an easy passage, certainly not the Christian.

But who ever thought that the fulfilling of any aspect of Christian vocation would be easy? The words with which Sir Frederick Catherwood ends his book The Christian Citizen are worth frequent pondering:

“We must be humble and not opinionated. We must be prepared to find that we are sometimes quite wrong and be able to admit it. We serve our fellow-men because of our love for a Lord who gave his life for us, a debt which, however well we serve, we can never repay. So whatever we do, we do it from a sense of duty and because it is right. We do not, like the cults, claim instant satisfaction. We do not, like the salesmen, guarantee success. The Christian’s time-span is not mortal. One sows and another reaps. One labors and another enters into his labors. One day with God is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day. The Christian knows the meaning of patience and endurance. But he also knows the meaning of action.”⁴ This is the right formula for Christian politics, just because it is the right formula for every single part of the Christian life.

Each has a divine mandate for a unique mission.

The American founding fathers frustrated efforts either by the state or the church to control all aspects of society. By the First Amendment they disallowed official religion, but at the same time they implicitly respected the citizens’ voluntary loyalty to an authority higher than the state.

Instead of imposing political boundaries on the entire range of social conduct, or of merging state and church, they placed the religious sphere outside state governance and placed civil government outside church control.

In view of Jesus’ differentiation of the secular and the spiritual (“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” Mark 12:17), Christianity also has discriminated between the religious and political spheres, yet without fully disjoining them. Both are indispensable aspects of a faithful Christian calling, and each renders service to the other.

The Mission Of The Church In The World

While the state’s primary concern is to preserve justice and maintain order, the church’s role is to identify the true and living God and to proclaim Good News. As a new and distinct society of regenerate believers—transnational, transracial, transcultural—the church functions among mankind to exemplify and demonstrate moral and spiritual obedience to the crucified and risen Lord.

The church’s unique mission is to announce to every nation the universal human need of redemption and the glad tidings of God’s ready forgiveness of penitent sinners on the ground of the Redeemer’s substitutionary life and death, and his offer of new spiritual life through the Holy Spirit. Both by word and deed, the church is to publish to the world the standards by which the Coming King will judge all rulers and nations, and even now judges them. She is to mirror the righteousness and mercy of God in interpersonal-relationships and to pursue social justice in the world of politico-economic affairs.

The church’s evangelization of society will rely on proclamation and persuasion, not on legislation and political coercion. That restrictive determination of the American Founding Fathers was anticipated by the New Testament, which disallows the church from establishing a theocracy.

People of one or another religious confession, even people who work in government, will always reflect to some degree the social consensus of their particular constituency. Jimmy Carter, a confirmed Southern Baptist, drew a line between private religion and public affairs, yet he functioned in the political arena differently than those predecessors who assented merely to civil religion. But Article VI of the Constitution states there must be no religious test for holding office: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Unlike the church, government must be neutral in its relationships with believers and unbelievers.

While the legislative expression of nonestablishment proceeded step by step, the so-called wall of separation was rather serpentine in nature. This less-than-straightforward approach was necessary because the two main purposes of the First Amendment—prohibition of an established religion and guarantee of complete religious freedom—seemed at times to conflict. Were total separation fully practiced, then citizens uprooted by military service, for example, would lose their free exercise of religion; the military chaplaincy was therefore considered proper. Equally, if free exercise were rigidly maintained, then prohibition of established religion would be nullified, since those who would prefer an established religion need only gain political power and claim that free exercise allows them to do as they wish.

Both Church And State Support Religious Freedom

Because the Bill of Rights declares that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, the unbeliever is protected from the aggressive believer and the believer is protected from the state. A pluralistic democracy must enable any minority to present its point of view, however unpopular, and must accord minority opinion a decent respect.

If the prohibition of an established church has seemed necessary to preserve religious freedom, it is so only because the church unfortunately, and all too factually, has needlessly accumulated a reputation for intolerance. No necessary connection exists, however, between nonestablishment and religious freedom. An established religion might very well accommodate religious liberty (as does the Church of England), and religious liberty might embrace an established religion. Separation of church and state does not of itself guarantee religious liberty; indeed, Soviet Russia is evidence that absolute separation is a corollary of religious persecution. By protecting the primacy of obedience to God rather than to man, and the right of conscience, the Founding Fathers sought to safeguard the common good of all citizens.

The individual’s freedom to accept or reject religion is neither simply a political necessity in a complex democratic society nor simply a sociological necessity now that no single spiritual tradition dominates. Religious liberty is far more than a cultural or political desideratum; it is a God-given virtue rooted in the character of true religion. By its very nature authentic religion demands religious freedom. Coerced spiritual decision is worthless both to God and to man. In view of its emphasis on the indispensability of personal decision, evangelical Christianity should in fact be seen as the champion of voluntarism. “Choose you this day whom you will serve” (Josh. 24:15) is a mockery unless personal response involves voluntary commitment. It is an individual’s awesome prerogative to turn religious freedom into freedom for God or freedom from God.

A law-mandated religious society has no scriptural support. Any revival of the late seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay colony would be as much a Christian as a secular calamity. Most evangelicals would not only frown upon any such proposal, they would actively resist it. Much as Christians must consider a Christian nation desirable, they disavow any Christian government that by legal mandate would impose evangelical objectives in society. Were Christians to champion a modern theocracy, they would be at odds with the New Testament doctrine of civil government, for Jesus Christ never instructed his disciples to give to God what is Caesar’s. Only at his return in the last days will Christ rule in Caesar’s stead; until then, nations will function in a variety of forms, each awaiting its own final judgment when every ruler will bow the knee to the King of Kings.

Present-day obedience to Christ does not require Christians to embody all Old Testament law and all Jesus’ teachings in statute law. On the contrary, obedience to the New Testament revelation requires that Christians not incorporate all biblical imperatives into civil legislation, for two reasons. First, some Old Testament law was intended for the Hebrew theocracy only; second, Christians are not to rely on legal implementation to fulfill divine imperatives that they themselves are to communicate to the nonbelieving world through preaching and persuasion.

On what basis then should Christians distinguish which aspects of scriptural morality they should advance by legislative means? Negatively, no moral imperatives should be governmentally imposed on the ground of sectarian religious requirement. Positively, Christians should promote civilization’s basic values and the public good.

Is it right or wrong, then, to espouse antiabortion legislation? Here the issue is two-pronged. First, whether abortion is a proper concern of government, and legislation; and second, whether abortion is ever moral.

The Constitution affords protection of life for all human beings. Although evangelicals tend to promote right-to-life on a biblical basis, support for the sanctity of human life is anchored also in the value system that undergirds Western society and that views the taking of human life as wicked. Not Holy Writ alone, also constitutional concerns require the Christian to protest the cheap devaluation of life inherent in the current proabortion atmosphere.

What of Sunday-closing laws? When these were introduced 50 years ago, their legitimacy lay in protecting the labor force from a seven-day work week. They were not intended to enforce Sunday churchgoing. If closing laws are adopted, their legitimacy still must lie in their civil purpose: the advancement of the public good. No basis exists for the imposition of such laws to promote religion.

The cardinal concern for evangelicals should be human liberty and its ramifications. Failure to exhibit freedom as a foremost religious, political, and social concern makes it easy for critics to misrepresent the Christian agenda as the subjugation of society by a yoke of tradition.

Evangelical Christianity as a whole has indeed repudiated state absolutism, which imposes upon the masses whatever values suit the whim of political tyrants. So too, although in a narrower context, the eighteenth-century American clergy preached “liberty.”

Religious freedom shelters all other freedoms. Under the license and aegis of God, it challenges all arbitrary authorities who would impose false absolutes on the human spirit. Jesus instructed Christians not to render to Caesar what is God’s. His apostles did more than simply approve submission to civil government as good and necessary; they insisted, and boldly so, that when authority claims conflict, we are to obey God rather than man (Acts 5:20). Religious freedom resolutely stands guard against the sovereignty of the state or of the will of the majority or even of a vigorously asserted minority that presumes to speak with absolutistic pretensions.

American evangelicals in our time have not rung the bell of freedom with arresting power. The time to do so is not only when freedom’s champions are persecuted and imprisoned for its affirmation, as in Russia and Eastern Europe; the time to do it is here and it is now.

The Moral Foundation Of Our Democracy

It is important to note that the Founding Fathers respected rather than rejected the enduring importance of God as the universal Sovereign over all human relationships, and an objective supernatural moral order. It is clear from the Declaration of Independence and less formal pronouncements that they regarded theologically grounded values as indispensable to a democracy, and that disdain for such moral principles imperils social stability.

The First Amendment was not motivated by indifference toward religion, far less by a desire to promote secularism. Rather, what underlies the nonestablishment clause is a deep-seated concern for the integrity of both the state and religion. The “establishment of religion” in the Bill of Rights referred to specific churches in eighteenth-century New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and those existing prior to that time in Virginia and other southern colonies. These churches drew no line between religious and political concerns. For example, the state of Connecticut once fined those who failed to attend church on Sunday, and New Hampshire’s first constitution permitted towns—not churches—to elect Congregational ministers. It also provided tax-paid salaries for other Protestant ministers.

Church and State at the Crossroads 2

The church-state situation changed dramatically for Christians when the Emperor Constantine (ca. 280–337) embraced the faith. Constantine received a vision of the cross before battle in 312, and also came to think that he was the recipient of other divine favors. In return he determined to aid the church. Whether he did this sincerely or from a desire to provide a new religious glue for his empire is not entirely clear. Whatever the case, he soon took an active role in church affairs, even to the point of calling the council that met at Nicea in 325 to settle conflict among Christians concerning the divinity of Christ. Christianity, no longer ignored or persecuted, had become the favored religion of the state. Soon, in 381 under the Emperor Theodosius, it would be the empire’s only legal religion. It is not surprising that a whole new set of church-state problems followed in the wake of these actions.

The colonists were predominantly a Christian people. The Constitution in no way excludes the possibility or even the desirability of a Christian nation as the voluntary commitment of the populace. Nor does it commend an interfaith or multifaith nation. For the most part, political leaders and citizenry alike shared, at least conceptually, a commitment to supernatural theism and to unalienable rights that the Creator confers and sustains, and that just governments preserve and protect. Some, like Jefferson, were deists; many more were biblical theists. Nothing in the dual commitments to nonestablishment and to religious liberty was intended to impede or annul Christian engagement in the mandate to preach the gospel worldwide. So long as the church and not the state was the avenue for religious proclamation and extension, and the state was not an instrument of the church, believers were free to challenge every last inhabitant of the land to personal faith in Christ as Redeemer, and to live Christianly in view of Christ’s divine lordship over human affairs.

But today the nonestablishment clause is often skewed to imply that any public acknowledgment of God and the relevance of ethical absolutes to public affairs is improper. Ours is becoming one of several societies in the history of the Western world that expects social stability and national survival on the premise that God and his transcendent commandments are irrelevant to national well-being.

Underlying this changed public mindset are several philosophical developments that reflect a revolution no less significant than that of 1776.

One such development is the vaunting of tolerance as the ultimate virtue. The term “tolerance” has been overextended to imply an intolerance of absolutes, to the point of becoming itself a false absolute. The test of a genuinely democratic nation, it is said, lies in whether and how it accommodates its diversity. To be sure, how a nation deals with minorities is a measure of its sensitivity to justice. But uncritical acceptance of devious moral behavior in the name of tolerance is quite another matter and has costly consequences.

Second, modern thought has disengaged ethics from religion and law from ethics. Secular humanists argue that religion is merely an integrating perspective that enhances an individual’s sense of dignity and worth. By denying that ethics has any foundation in a Creator God, they also sever law from a fixed morality. Citizens are asked to support what is law only in view of what is legal, and not primarily in view of what is good or divinely approved. Harvard Law School Prof. Harold Berman underscores the point: “It is supposed by some—especially intellectuals—that fundamental legal principles, whether of democracy or socialism, can survive without any religious or quasi-religious foundations on the basis of the proper political and economic controls and a philosophy of humanism. History, however, including current history, testifies otherwise: people will not give their allegiance to a political and economic system, and even less to a philosophy, unless it represents for them a higher, sacred truth.”

Third, an essentially naturalistic outlook dominates public education and the media. Public schools, when isolated from spiritual concerns, have been unable to make a compelling case for ethics and have set human life into a context not of transcendent principles but evolutionary naturalism. The statistics of such teenage tragedy as adolescent pregnancy, abortion, vandalism, and even suicide are widely linked to this loss of a divine moral anchor.

Although in some circles an effort is under way to reinstate values, but apart from religion, this leaves unresolved the source and sanction of ethical imperatives. Simply to diagnose this national dilemma does not guarantee a response that is either biblical or constitutional or effective.

The Moral Majority and similar movements have emerged to press for a recovery of moral absolutes that would permeate American society. They have challenged legal accommodation of trendy deviant lifestyles and have called for new respect for biblical imperatives. Political pressure groups were organized to defeat advocates of abortion on demand and to promote prolife candidates. In its beginnings, spokesmen for the Moral Majority gave the impression that their goal was to establish or to restore a Christian America through political change.

Reaction was sharp and swift. It came from both Left and Right, fearful that a contemporary theocracy was being championed to displace pluralistic democracy. The Moral Majority then clarified its stance. The movement, explained Jerry Falwell, is not theologically based, but is a transreligious alliance of ethically concerned Americans.

Discerning Christians, however, saw in all this disarray the danger that the call for a recovery of moral absolutes in the life of the nation would be lost because of the incipient disunity of its champions and because of their failure to shape a comprehensive philosophy. The Religious Right’s summons to fixed values in national life required greater intellectual depth and breadth, and greater cross-cultural support.

Why The Church Supports The State

Civil government exists by the providential will of God. The church needs the state’s preservation and promotion of justice in the world because the power of the sword is able to restrain injustice and disorder where and when mankind spurns grace and good will. But Christians also require civil government because the professing family of faith, for all the transforming power of redemption, is not yet perfect and remains vulnerable to self-assertion and self-interest. Only a romantic view of the church militant, one that exaggerates the righteousness of the redeemed, will look upon civil government as totally in the service of Satan.

Religious belief does not exempt churches and other religious movements from any and all responsibility to the state. Church bodies are obliged to observe civil and criminal laws. And, if protesting those laws as less than just, such bodies should do so by exploring all possibilities for change through legal means and not by instigating unlawful mass response, particularly in a day of prevalent disrespect for law.

It is only proper that the state, through its courts, investigate the sincerity with which religious movements hold and apply their beliefs; Muslims who murder or maim adherents who convert to Christianity or defect to atheism, the approval of mass murder as in Jonestown, promotion of violence or terrorism to force swift social change—all invite legal judgment. When Jonestown became a center for Marxist activity, it became a proper subject for government investigation. Religious leaders are expected to comply with criminal laws and to avoid politicizing tax-exempt ministries or commercializing untaxed properties for lucrative purposes.

Christian agencies must respect the unique role of the state in public life. Government is continually bombarded by pronouncements of churchmen who claim to speak authoritatively on all manner of secular issues. Ecclesiastics who cannot agree on basic principles of church dogma suddenly become specialists in deriving from whatever doctrines they choose to retain a list of legislative options. Meanwhile, the views of highly informed and experienced political statesmen, who are also church affiliated, are overlooked and even disparaged by self-declared omni-competent clergy who speak outside their own fields of learning.

The church is indeed free to offer direction to society. That need not mean, however, that the church is to be the prime coordinator and determiner of all social behavior and relationships. In our day, a form of Islam relies upon the sword to extend Quranic influence much as the medieval church in some eras extended Christian influence through the warring expansion of the church-state. A generation ago a leading German Protestant thought that he, as a Christian motivated by love, should personally murder Hitler for his crimes against humanity. In the American context of church-state separation, the need continues in every successive generation for government alertness as to how the church seeks to attain her objectives and what objectives she seeks in the political arena.

By the same token, the church must be alert to civil government’s intentions, especially regarding the state’s assessment of the church. By declaring that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate” the Apostles’ Creed succinctly summarized for all future generations the injustice done to the Nazarene by a Roman procurator.

Church and State at the Crossroads 3

At Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, King of the Franks, “Holy Roman Emperor” in a most impressive ceremony. This event was a momentous contemporary happening. It symbolized the break between the Western Catholic church and the Roman Empire of the East with its capital in Constantinople. It also symbolized the turn of the Roman church northward and its alliance with Europe. During his own lifetime, Charlemagne was clearly the dominant partner in the alliance. But after his death, the division of his great empire, and the rise of stronger popes, power in the alliance shifted to the papacy. This reversal of the power relationship from what it had been in Charlemagne’s day reached its climax in 1077. That year the German Emperor Henry IV stood in the snow for several days outside the northern Italian castle of Canossa before the pope, Gregory VII, retracted the excommunication he had imposed upon the emperor for crimes against the church in Germany.

In early Roman times, Christians were wrongly suspected of engaging in nocturnal conspiracy because they observed Communion with their invisible Lord, and of being atheists because they refused to worship the gods of the state. They were officially blamed for every state calamity, and thousands died as martyrs. Today, in Soviet Russia, Baptists are considered politically dangerous and subversive because they seek to accomplish through Jesus Christ what the Communists vainly seek to achieve on Marxist premises—namely a just and altruistic society.

What evangelical Christians undermine is not civil government, but false gods and a spurious or imprecise vision of justice. The church clearly differentiates between patriotism and nationalism. While not uncritical of “the system,” it cautions against unwarranted alienation.

Because Christians seek an ideal society by avenues other than those pursued by secularists who rely on force and coercion, Christians may appear to be ideologically and behaviorally radical. Except for a misguided minority of activists, however, they are not. They do, though, confront the state with ideas and practices that challenge society.

From a reading of her own past, the regenerate church knows that neither a change of political leadership nor adoption of legislation can assure transformation of a people’s moral character. Christians know that the best way to thrust the impact of Christ’s lordship into the political order is to live out faith’s vitalities in and through the established structures, and to transcend their besetting injustices by personal example. But Christian responsibility on Earth does not end there. As citizens of two worlds, Christians know that the penalty for withholding exemplary guidance and involvement for the social common good is to surrender the political arena by default to non-Christian alternatives. Far worse, lack of public engagement in the world is tantamount to defection from the Redeemer’s army of occupation and liberation.

When to look through, when to step through.

The modern persecutions of Christians in the Soviet Union, China, and some Islamic nations are reminders that freedom to worship God as one’s conscience dictates is a freedom that many in Christ’s church do not possess.

All should therefore thank God for the simple yet eloquent words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The protections contained in these words surely must be seen as one of the most basic freedoms—if not the most basic freedom—afforded by the Constitution. These words erected the proverbial wall of separation between church and state, in the phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson in 1802. The language not only prohibits the state from “establishing” a religion, but it also prohibits the state from interfering with citizens’ free exercise of their religious faith. We are primarily concerned in this section with this latter protection.

The vision of a government barred from interfering with one’s rights to freely exercise and act upon religious belief is one of compelling strength. It means that even the adherents of a small religious group, whose beliefs and practices have been rejected and scorned by the vast majority of the population, can be assured of being able to worship, propound their doctrines, train their children, and live lives according to the tenets of their religion. No bureaucrat, no police officer, no violence-prone mob can take away these rights.

But the constitutional protection of the free exercise of religion is not without problems or controversy. The simple, straight-forward words of the First Amendment—“Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]”—have engendered endless controversy and have spawned innumerable court cases.

Three sets of issues have arisen in the use of the free-exercise clause of the Constitution to protect the church from infringement by the state. All are marked by a certain abiding tension, for all three involve principles that clash and need to be reconciled.

Government Regulation Of Religion

The Constitutional protection of the free exercise of religion cannot or ought not be total or absolute. The so-called wall of separation, by the very nature of the state, society, and religion, cannot be a true wall. The metaphor quickly breaks down. This is true because even the freest, most democratic society imaginable cannot allow the existence of groups of citizens who have the right to do whatever they please.

God has established the state to provide law, order, justice, and righteousness. (See Deut. 16:18–20; Isa. 1:23; Ezek. 45:9–12; Rom. 13:1–7, and 1 Peter 2:13–14.) On this basis Paul and other biblical writers—as well as most of the Christian church down through the centuries—have counseled obedience to legitimate governments as part of the Christian believer’s obligation.

A just order in society makes it possible for sinful human beings, warped by an inordinate self-love and prone to violence, to live together in relative peace. And the legitimate authority of the state is a crucial—perhaps the crucial—factor making possible a just order in society. If a just order is to be assured, however, this authority must be a real authority. Citizens cannot be free to pick and choose what to obey and what not to obey. Later we discuss civil disobedience and allow for it under extreme circumstances, but the general rule must be obedience. Otherwise, the divinely instituted authority of the state is undermined and rendered impotent. Disorder and the injustice of the strong preying upon the weak would be the final tragic consequence.

This submission must also apply to religious institutions. The state—if it is to be able to fulfill its God-given role in society—cannot allow persons to act in ways destructive of good social order in the name of the free exercise of religion. If a cult would arise, to take an extreme example, which believed in the ritualistic murder of all first-born children, the government would clearly have an obligation to put a stop to such a horror even though the free exercise of religion was being claimed as protection. That example may not be as far-fetched as first appears. The courts have periodically struggled with cases in which parents, because of their religious beliefs, were refusing needed medical treatment, such as blood transfusions for a sick child in a life-threatening situation. Does society’s respect for the parental right to freely exercise their religion override the demand of a just order to protect children not yet able to make their own medical decisions?

The point is that the wall of separation protecting the church from the state, while necessary and crucially important, cannot be absolute. The state must have the right to look through that wall, observe the church or religion, and intervene under certain circumstances.

But once this much is admitted, what is to prevent the government, octopuslike, from sinking its tentacles into all aspects of the life of the church? By what principles can we sort out the permissible from the impermissible activities of government that regulate or limit the actions of religion? That is what we are concerned with here.

The principle the Supreme Court has most frequently put forth is what has been called the “secular regulation” rule. This rule distinguishes between religious beliefs and religious actions, and concludes:

“Religious beliefs admittedly must have absolute protection, but actions, even though purporting to be taken for religious reasons or as part of religious observances, must conform with the regulations established by the community to protect public order, health, welfare, and morals.”

If the goal of the regulation, then, is not the restriction or coercion of the religious group as such, but some appropriate, legitimate secular purpose, the government has the constitutional right to impose the regulation.

On this basis the Supreme Court has held that Mormons could be forced to give up polygamy, smallpox vaccinations could be forced on persons who had religious scruples against them, the handling of poisonous snakes by a religious cult could be banned, and a nine-year-old girl could be prevented from peddling religious literature on a street corner at night.

On the surface this rule appears overly broad. Is any religious practice constitutionally safe under its provision? What has salvaged it has been an almost unarticulated premise of the Supreme Court that it would not allow governmental regulation of religious practices unless the secular ends the legislation was seeking to achieve were “compelling,” “significant,” or not accomplishable by other means.

In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), for example, the Supreme Court decided that, under the free-exercise clause, Old Order Amish parents had a constitutional right to withhold their children from school at age 14, even though the stateset age was 16. The Court found that “however strong the State’s interest in universal compulsory education, it is by no means absolute,” and then went on to elaborate that a state’s interest in requiring children to attend school beyond the eighth grade in violation of a religious group’s beliefs is not of “sufficient magnitude to override the interest claiming protection under the Free Exercise Clause.”

We can essentially agree with the Supreme Court’s position on this issue, as long as a strong and proper emphasis is placed upon the state’s regulating religious actions only when it is truly necessary to do so for valid, appropriate purposes—purposes, we would add, that relate to government’s God-given purposes of maintaining a just order in society. Interference with religion must only affect practices that are merely incidental to one’s faith, and not themselves part of one’s faith.

Applying this principle does not always lead to clear, easy answers. By the very nature of the situation a certain tension will always remain since one is seeking to reconcile opposites. But Christians, who view civil authority as having its origins in God’s will and who have an equally high view of religious freedom, need to live with this tension and the delicate balancing process this principle suggests.

An example of how this principle works in practice can be taken from a current controversy confronting private Christian schools. A number of those schools have refused to submit to their state’s educational and fire code standards. Pastors have gone to jail rather than submit information to state education officials on such items as the number of days of instruction, courses being offered, and the certification of the teachers.

Here the line between permissible and impermissible government supervision and regulation falls between requirements made to assure that basic fire, health, and safety standards are being met or that the basic subjects that society has deemed necessary for an educated citizenry are being taught, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, requirements that seek to dictate the perspective with which subjects are being taught or the religious and moral standards of those who are teaching. The former requirements are clearly related to maintaining a just social order in which all can live together in safety, health, and compatability, and in which children are taught the knowledge necessary for them to contribute to the social order. Such laws do not go directly contrary to the Christian beliefs of these schools. But to go beyond this and to start to dictate which teachers can or cannot be hired (assuming they are educationally qualified to teach), or to dictate the religious beliefs within which subjects are to be taught, is to go beyond maintaining a just social order and to touch the very purpose of having religiously based schools. Such regulations would interfere with the free exercise of religion and must be resisted.

The principle requires that there be a compelling societal need for the regulations and that the regulations not directly confront the school’s religious foundations.

Church and State at the Crossroads 4

A new element entered Western church-state relations with the coming of the Reformation. Before this, tension had often been sharp between the great monarchs and the popes. But the people in general knew—at least in theory—their place. They were the subjects of the lords in church and state whom God’s will had placed on their thrones. When Luther publicly defied the will of Emperor Charles V by saying that his “conscience was captive to the word of God,” he sounded the death knell for the spontaneous deference to authority. The new note was one of the individual conscience. Although Luther would have been somewhat troubled by the idea, his appearance before the emperor pointed to a day when internal matters of the church would no longer be considered the business of the state.

No Establishment Versus Free Exercise

The second area of tension in the free exercise of religion concerns the balance between the constitutional obstacle to “an establishment of religion” and the constitutional protection of the “free exercise” of religion.

At first glance there appears to be no conflict or tension between the two. Are they not merely two sides of the same coin? One assures that government will not impose a particular religion on the people, and the other that government will not stop the people from worshiping God as they see fit.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. A tension arises from the very broad interpretation the Supreme Court has given the no-establishment provision. The Court, in the famous Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township (1947) case, stated:

“The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another” (emphasis added).

For the first time, the Supreme Court declared that general, nonpreferential aid to religion is unconstitutional. This position has been reaffirmed by the Court many times since the Everson decision. We believe this is an overly broad interpretation of the First Amendment’s no-establishment language, and is supported by neither the intentions of the authors of the Bill of Rights nor a reasonable reading of the actual words themselves.⁵

This extremely broad interpretation has brought the no-establishment clause into conflict or tension with the free-exercise clause.

Under a broad interpretation of the no-establishment clause, the Supreme Court has held as unconstitutional any support for religiously based or oriented activities and programs that, if they had not been religiously based or oriented, would be fully constitutional.

For example, literature or camera clubs or young Democratic or young Republican groups are allowed to meet before or after school hours in most public schools, but in two separate cases, lower federal courts have held that student-initiated Bible study and prayer groups could not meet in schools before or after school hours.⁶ The Supreme Court refused to review the cases and thereby left them standing. Is this not the virtual definition of discrimination? Suddenly government becomes the enemy of religion, and the free exercise of religion is infringed.

Similarly, naturalistic evolution or values clarification, with its strong moral relativism, can be taught in the public schools because they are “secular,” even though their religious implications are immediate and clear. Yet Christian perspectives on origins and moral choices cannot be taught because they are “religious” in nature.

Equally, the Supreme Court has at times interpreted the free-exercise clause in a way that allows persons to engage in certain religiously based actions that, if they were not religiously based, could not have been engaged in.

In the Yoder case cited earlier, for example, one can argue that granting Amish parents a right that would not be granted to parents who were seeking to withhold their children from school at age 14 for reasons that were not religiously based, is to favor religion over nonreligion. And this is what the Supreme Court’s no-establishment interpretation has proscribed. Such decisions are in tension with the Supreme Court’s very broad interpretation of no establishment of religion, for these decisions show a certain favoritism to religious groups.

The Court itself has recognized the resulting tension: “But this Court repeatedly has recognized that tension inevitably exists between the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clauses … and that it may often not be possible to promote the former without offending the latter.”⁷

The way out of this dilemma is for the Supreme Court to recognize that neither the historical record nor the actual words of the Constitution support the interpretation of the no-establishment clause it adopted in 1947. It is clear the authors of the Constitution intended that official steps be taken both to assure that the state not impose religion onto the people and that religion be protected from persecution and coercion. These both can only be accomplished at the same time if a narrower interpretation is given the no-establishment clause than is done at the present time.

Civil Disobedience

A high regard for the divinely instituted authority of the state leads to the question of what Christians must do when they perceive government acting unjustly.

What if they see government not only allowing the abortion of unborn image bearers of God, but even actively promoting that injustice by paying for abortions with their tax dollars? Their biblically rooted respect for governmental authority teaches them obedience; their biblically rooted commitment to justice teaches them to resist.

This is the question of civil disobedience. When may—and when must—the Christian in good conscience refuse to obey governmental edicts? In fact, this too is a “free exercise” issue. The Christian’s faith teaches him or her a certain action is morally wrong—to engage in that action is to violate one’s religious beliefs—and now government comes along and says one must do it anyway. Does one then obey God or Caesar?

Although the government has sometimes allowed for freedom of conscience, such as military exemption for pacifists, in many instances it has not. Religious pacifists are still required to pay for nuclear arsenals. Prolife Christians are required to pay for abortions. And those Christians who believe the Bible’s ringing calls for justice mean that today government should be active in feeding the hungry must pay taxes to a government that supports tobacco farmers while the homeless and hungry beg on city streets and thousands starve in Africa.

If a government ignores the weak and vulnerable who are being oppressed by the powerful, allows God’s natural creation to be despoiled and wasted, stands by as unborn children are killed, and ignores conditions that are destroying family stability, one can say that government is acting unjustly, and thereby is acting in violation of God’s will. And to the extent one is a part of that government by living under its laws, electing its officials, and paying its taxes, is not one perhaps also participating in its sins of omission?

Should Christians’ high view of governmental authority lead them to support government even when it is unjust? Or should their high view of biblical justice lead them to resist?

The starting point for a biblical answer is Peter’s retort to the rulers of his day when they tried to silence the other apostles and him: “We must obey God rather than men!” (Acts 4:20). This means, at the very least, that whenever governments require Christians to sin—to do something that is directly and clearly against God’s will—they must decline to obey. And they should urge government to allow for conscientious objection in instances of this nature.

Voices are starting to be raised that say one’s Christianity requires one to take “direct action,” including even acts of civil disobedience, in the face of the continuing horror of abortion on demand. Has the time perhaps come when we are to say with Peter, “We must obey God rather than men,” when one is counseled not to picket or when the law says one may not block the entrance to the local abortion clinic? Is it perhaps wrong to go about our comfortable, secure lives of working and eating, watching football games on television, and singing in the church choir while a few blocks away precious human lives are being snuffed out every day?

Three factors, nevertheless, lead us to counsel caution and restraint in claiming the right or necessity of civil disobedience.

One is our high view of governmental authority as rooted in God’s will. The modern secular mind, on the other hand, typically sees law as no more than a creation of human will. Disrespect for law is common. Christians must therefore weigh the positive effects of civil disobedience against the evil effects of making disrespectful attitudes toward governmental authority more acceptable.

The second factor that leads us to counsel caution is the uncertainty and ambiguity usually surrounding potential civil disobedience situations. In the real world, poorly understood complexities, unknown consequences, and clashing interpretations of the factual situation are present in most situations. A sense of Christian humility, which recognizes one’s own fallibility, counsels restraint in exercising civil disobedience.

A third factor is the normal existence of meaningful, legal means with which to affect governmental policies. In a land of freedom, there are opportunities through elections, petitions, letters, and legal demonstrations to make one’s voice heard.

Our commitment, however, to following God’s unambiguous command to love and seek actively the welfare of our neighbors leads us to avoid an attitude that blithely ignores governmentally spawned and governmentally tolerated injustices with a facile appeal to divine authority. We recognize the fact that since obeying government is usually the easier, more comfortable path to take, the temptation never to anguish over our duties is strong. Civil disobedience should be a last resort, but it is an option we believe the evangelical church should more frequently debate, weigh, and consider in the face of clear and severe injustices. And those Christians who, out of a conscience attuned by the Bible and after careful and prayerful consideration, conclude they must disobey certain governmental directives, should have the support of their Christian brothers and sisters.

The importance of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion cannot be overestimated. Our joy and thankfulness for this uncommon religious freedom requires that we defend and strengthen the daily application of it.

When the battle looms, arm the parishioner, but rarely the pastor.

Like it or not, “the church is up to its steeple in politics.…”⁸ Wallace Fisher’s pungent phrase reminds us that political isolation is no longer an option for the church and its clergy. Furthermore, our political involvement is not a temporary condition. Richard Neuhaus, in The Naked Public Square, predicts that church-state issues are here to stay and will dominate the agenda of both the church and the state for the remaining years of the twentieth century.⁹ If so, the question is not, “Will the church and its clergy be engaged in politics?” Rather, we must ask, “Will our public witness be biblically sound and politically effective?”

Fundamental questions must be asked about the role of the church and its clergy in political affairs.

Why should we be involved in politics?

Who should take the lead in political action?

What should be our priorities for political issues?

When should we become politically involved?

Where should we assume our political responsibility?

Each answer to these questions must pass the test of being biblically sound in motive and method, and politically effective. This is the context we need in which to explore the witness of the church and its clergy as participants in the political process.

The Church As The Church

As elementary as it may seem, the foundational principle for discussing the church, clergy, and politics is “let the church be the church.” Whatever is done in political affairs must assure the integrity of the redemptive mission of the church. When Jesus says, “Render therefore … to God the things that are God’s,” he not only reaffirms his mission but gives the church its distinctive spiritual authority and its redemptive function. Political action on the part of the church must always be subservient to its spiritual authority and consistent with this redemptive function.

If politics is not the primary task of the church and yet a part of its public witness, strategy becomes critical. We are not without some guiding principles for strategy from the teachings of Jesus. He declares, for instance, the principle of penetration as the strategy of the kingdom. “Light,” “salt,” and “leaven” are the symbols he chooses to specify the way in which the world is changed when his kingdom comes. Although the function of “light,” “salt,” and “leaven” varies, the power of penetration is their common characteristic. Again, Jesus exemplifies the principle of individual penetration rather than corporate confrontation as the strategy for the church in the world. By refusing to align himself with political parties and rejecting the use of temporal power, Jesus warns against the political captivity of the church by parties, lobbies, or candidates.

To retain the integrity of the church, its spiritual authority, and its redemptive function, corporate political action should be limited to pivotal issues of justice that require action beyond individual leadership. Such selective issues include religions liberty to insure the integrity of the church, social equality to assure the protection of the weak, and moral order to assure the climate for the advancement of the gospel.

Still, a fine line exists between the public responsibility of the church and its political captivity. Having crossed through flaming swords in its transition from the Garden of Eden to Ulcer Gulch, the church and its clergy must be constantly guided by the Word and the Spirit if we are to be “in” but not “of” the world called “politics.”

The Church As Political Witness

A biblical church is characterized in Acts 2:40–47 by its primary program of prayer, preaching, and teaching supported by fellowship, sharing resources, and serving the needy. Around these functions the effective church is built. When these functions are performed, the church enjoys the favor of all the people (Acts 2:47).

Prayer for leaders in government, for example, is a biblical injunction that cannot be denied (1 Tim. 2:1–3). “Wisdom for ruling” is the subject of prayer for those in governmental authority. A “just” society in which the values of liberty, equality, peace, and order prevail is the object of the prayers. In this quality climate, the spiritual growth of individuals and the evangelistic outreach of the church can best occur.

Dr. Richard Halverson, chaplain of the United States Senate, pleads with churches to pray for their representatives in government. As a counselor for leaders on Capitol Hill, he knows the pressures of politics and the value of prayer. The political witness of the church begins with public prayer for all persons who serve in government at all levels. Under no circumstances can prayer become a veiled campaign speech for a favorite son or a pet issue, but in all seasons, under all circumstances, and for all of those in authority, the church must pray. To pray for government is to participate in politics.

Preaching is the prophetic voice of the church that proclaims the gospel and its implications for the individual, the church, the state, and the society. John the Baptist is a model of the prophetic preacher calling for personal repentance and social justice. All who repented under his preaching asked the question, “What shall we do?” To the common people, he instructed that they share their clothes and food with those who were ragged and hungry. To the tax collectors, he required that they take no more than was due. To the soldiers, he commanded them to avoid intimidation, false accusation, and insurrection.

The pulpit is not the place for analyzing, spiritualizing, and leveraging political issues. It is certainly not the place for political campaigning. Yet the pulpit is where a prophetic voice is heard proclaiming the biblical vision of justice, focusing attention on the issues that need to be addressed, pointing the direction for change, calling believers to demonstrate justice and mercy in the dealings of their own sphere, and inviting the members to political discipleship.

Prophetic preaching is most difficult and most dangerous. As in the case of the bombings of abortion clinics, there is always the danger that unbalanced persons will push an ethical issue to its emotional extreme. The prophetic preacher must be visionary and practical, absolute and relative, eternal and temporal, personal and social, objective and involved. Only the mind of the Spirit can keep the balance. Significantly, John the Baptist, in preparation for his prophetic ministry, was filled with the Spirit while in his mother’s womb. Jesus, before enunciating his mission of saving justice for the blind, the bound, the bruised, and the broken, spoke of his anointing by the Holy Spirit.

Teaching is at the center of the political witness of the church. Persuasive teaching provides the substance for a strategy of penetration. Credit goes to the Moral Majority and the mass media for raising the level of political awareness and the sense of political responsibility among evangelical Christians. Political awareness, however, without political literacy leaves the Christian citizen open to emotional issues, partisan pressures, and demagogic candidates.

Information is power, and with the dawning of the age of information the teaching function of the church is critical. As John Naisbitt notes in his book Megatrends, the balance of power based upon information is shifting. Hierarchies sustained by the power of privileged information are being countered by networks of special interests whose power is open and shared information.

Almost daily, new networks are being created around moral and political issues that concern Christians. Drunken driving, pornography, nuclear arms, hunger, abortion, and family abuse are current examples. Usually these networks are built at the nexus of a single salient issue that engages people across the lines of faith in a web of moral concern. Like parachurch and electronic-church ministries, these networks often substitute for the moral teaching and political action missing in the local church. Networks are here to stay, and the church must decide how to work with them rather than against them in its teaching function.

“Political discipleship” should be one of the outcomes of the teaching of the church. People with political gifts and interests should be encouraged to pursue careers as “missionaries without portfolio” in public affairs. In the past, the church gained public recognition by being the motivator for its members to enter leadership careers in law, medicine, and ministry. Also, such voluntary associations in America as the YMCA and the Red Cross were founded by Christians who put their faith into practice. In the future, public affairs, communications, and economics will be the fields with the greatest impact on the quality of life in our culture. If so, the church has the opportunity to encourage the discipleship of Christians in these fields.

Fellowship and sharing of resources to meet human needs support the primary functions of prayer, preaching, and teaching. They give the church credibility for its public witness. Speaking out of his African experience, John Taylor has said, “The church will have to determine just how ‘Christian’ it will be.”¹⁰

If the church is to address the political issues of liberty, equality, peace, and order in a pluralistic society, it must itself be a model of a “just” community. Fellowship in the church must be multi-racial, transgenerational, bipartisan and cross-cultural by income, nationality, education, and class. All members of the body of Christ must be able to participate in the fellowship of the community of faith as well as enter into its governance. Sad to say, some evangelical Christian associations and churches have excluded from their fellowship and forums some outstanding Christian leaders in Congress because they are Democrats or moderates or Republicans.

Until the church is a “just” community, it cannot credibly speak on the issues of justice. In fellowship and sharing of its resources, the church demonstrates a “just” society that is motivated by love and thus is above and beyond the law. An artificial division today separates Christian political and personal responsibility. Paul summarizes in Romans 13 the Christian’s obligation to the state: “Render therefore to all their dues; taxes to whom taxes are due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor” (13:7). Then, in parallel structure, he presents the corollary: “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law” (13:8). Christians have the dual responsibility to obey the law of justice and fulfill the law of love.

No better example can be given than Paul’s call for the fellowship of the church to be a body for reconciliation outside the secular courtroom (2 Cor. 5:18). Throughout the nation, Christian attorneys are organizing reconciliation services in keeping with this biblical injunction. In a society that is captivated by a litigious spirit, the evidence of Christian reconciliation outside the secular courtroom builds credibility for the public and political witness of the church, above and beyond the law. Judicial reform may well be an outcome of this Christian demonstration of “justice served by love.”

The political witness of the church, then, is integral to its distinctive mission and its basic functions. If, in instances of gross dereliction of the state’s duties, the church as an institution must confront the state in political struggle, the price must never be the reordering of its redemptive mission or dilution of its biblical functions.

The Clergy As Political Leaders

In an effective church with a holistic ministry and with links to networks on moral and social issues, the clergy is already up to the collar in politics, whether it likes it or not. But like the church itself, the clergy finds its political duty integrated with its biblical functions.

The pastor is called to lead the church in its redemptive mission through those biblical functions. Political conflict flared in the early church when Hebrew and Greek widows disputed over the distribution of food. Reconciliation required time, energy, and expertise that would take the apostles away from their primary tasks of prayer and the ministry of the Word (Acts 6:4). Consequently, they delegated the political conflict and its resolution to laymen who were known for their practical wisdom, public credibility, and Spirit-filled lives. A sound principle was established. Only in rare and temporary circumstances should the clergy assume leadership in political affairs. The primacy of their calling and the priority of their resources limit their personal involvement, but encourage the extension of their ministry through the political discipleship of the laity.

Wesley, Witherspoon, and Woolman are often cited as examples of clergy who were effective in social reform. In each case, they disavowed an identity as politicians but served as pastors with moral and spiritual influence upon persons in positions of political power. Their example is biblical. Clergy are most effective in political action when they serve as pastors for politicians. If that avenue is closed and the clergy must become engaged in political leadership, allegiance to their spiritual calling and integrity for their pastoral role must be preserved. And even with this resolve, they will change worlds and confront the dilemmas of role confusion, value conflict, political compromise, and public criticism.

Church and State at the Crossroads 5

The English separatists who in 1620 arrived off Cape Cod in Massachusetts had come to the New World for religious freedom. They had been harassed in England for failure to support the English state church. They had been threatened in the Netherlands with the assimilation of their distinct beliefs. And so they had set out for “the howling wilderness,” as the British possessions in North America were sometimes called. The modern American pattern of church-state separation did not arrive full-blown on the Mayflower. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony and their associates, the Puritans of Massachusetts, were more concerned about freedom to worship as they chose than freedom for just anyone to follow their conscience in religion. But they were responsible for making the conscience of the individual a potent force in opposition to the state. With them we have the beginning of the idea that the state is more responsible to protect religious expression than to direct it.

Role confusion haunts the pastor in politics. Jesse Jackson, Jerry Falwell, and James Wallis know the tension of shifting titles from “Reverend” to “citizen” in response to reporters’ questions. It is even more difficult to be the pastor who preaches and teaches a faith that is for the whole of life on Sunday and then demonstrates the separation of roles as a politician on Monday. Not only is the laity confused, but a degree of credibility is lost in both roles.

When the governor appointed me to head his commission to study gambling in the state of Washington, my primary identification was as a university president. Soon the public learned that I was also a clergyman. A community leader told the press that my appointment was like “asking the devil to guard the holy font.”

Value conflicts are part and parcel of the political process. A pastor in politics, then, must learn to live with the dilemma of a “perplexed conscience.” Sen. Mark Hatfield speaks the same dilemma when he entitles his book Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

Pastors live in a world of absolute values, eternal issues, spiritual matters, divine purpose, self-sacrifice, and redeeming love. Politicians, however, must work with relative values, temporal issues, material matters, human processes, self-interest, and raw power. Realistically, we know the the lines between worlds are not drawn hard and fast. Still, the pastor in politics must be ready to “go down into the darkness” of ethical conflict and agree to play by the rules of a different game.

Political compromise for the common good is the outcome of effective politics. In the contest between self-interest and the common good, personal convictions and constituent expectations, compromise is the only alternative. Pastors preach against compromise. They usually fail to distinguish between the compromise of moral principle and the compromise of political process. Senator Hatfield, whose integrity has been tested in political office for many years, states that political compromise may be in timing, wording, and procedure, but never in principle.

Church and State at the Crossroads 6

The United States was founded upon strong principles of the separation of church and state. Yet at both the Continental Congress in the 1770s and the Constitutional Convention in the 1780s, leaders paused to ask God’s blessing on their enterprise. What looks like a contradiction from a modern vantage point was no contradiction to the Founding Fathers. For them, the evil in church-state relations was a despotic government attempting to shape the religion of a people. Yet the Founding Fathers did not want to be rid of God. For some, this “God” was merely a deistic form of energy that began the world; for some, he was no more than the celestial Law Giver; for others, he was the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. However much they differed on what religion was, none desired a European pattern of state domination of the church. However much they wanted to get the state out of the business of the churches, none wanted to dismiss oral and religious considerations from American public life.

Returning to my experience as chairman of the governor’s commission to study gambling, the people had voted to bring games of chance back into the state. Although I am categorically opposed to gambling as a social evil, prohibition against the games was not an alternative. The lesser evil became my political goal. Consequently, when the final report went to the governor, it recommended bingo, raffles, and sweepstakes, but rejected casino games and a statewide lottery. Although the report bears my name, the leadership role gave me the opportunity to write a minority report, influence legislative committees, and publish national articles opposing gambling from expert knowledge as well as from conviction. Strange as it seems, a pastor in politics must try to find a Christian witness in support of a lesser evil.

Public criticism is par for the political course. When a pastor steps from the pulpit into the political arena, whatever immunity there may be for the ministry is left behind. The luxury of slipping back into the pastoral role when issues become hot is also lost. A pastor in politics is wide open for public criticism and fair game for the press. Studies of pastoral personalities show a strong desire to be liked. In politics the rule is, “I would rather be stoned than ignored.” Most pastors are ill equipped with the personality for politics, especially when they are in the minority.

Public criticism of the pastor in politics adds to role confusion. When the pastor-politician speaks, does he represent himself, his church, his party, or his constituency? Mass media coverage does not make these fine distinctions. The broad brush of the 30-second news report sweeps and smears with the same stroke. Even now, public opinion falsely assumes that all evangelical Christians are right-wing conservatives who represent the church and want to impose by law Christian values upon a pluralistic nation. The pastor in politics must learn to live with public criticism and confusion.

The pastor, then, is most effective in political affairs when pursuing the sacred calling of praying for authorities, preaching the prophetic message of justice and mercy, teaching the biblical principles that influence political literacy. That will enable the creation of a model “just” community in the fellowship and sharing of the church. Thus serving as the pastor, he will encourage and sustain political discipleship as a ministry for members who are called to be “saints in Caesar’s household.” As a clergyman who has dipped into politics, I believe every pastor needs the experience—just once.

A final note needs to be struck for humility and restraint in a time when the church is inextricably engaged in political affairs. Only the wisdom of the Holy Spirit can guide us through the maze of moral ambiguity, competing self-interest, power struggles, and uncertain consequences of the political process. The temptation to confuse political means with spiritual ends is always present. But the greater danger is to forget that the church itself is a human institution accountable to God and subject to his judgment. Therefore, in our zeal to “do justly” and “love mercy,” we must not fail to “walk humbly” with our God.

Charles Colson, Jim Wallis, and Jerry Falwell represent three widely divergent views concerning the Christian as citizen. Each interacted at length with Christianity Today Institute participants, clarifying their views through a question/answer session.

Charles Colson, Chairman of the Board, Prison Fellowship Ministries

How would you respond to those who say an elected official’s faith is a private matter and should not be implemented in his public life?

This is the view advanced by Gov. Mario Cuomo and others. If they mean that we can’t impose what we may think is God’s will upon a pluralistic society, I would agree. But Cuomo went beyond that. He argued that he was under no obligation to help create a consensus toward moral positions in the society. If as Christians we privately believe something but it has no effect on our actions, we have a dreadful denial of the lordship of Christ.

Are you then more attracted to some of the organized Christian political movements?

The danger with Christian political movements per se is that they tend to make the gospel hostage to a particular political agenda. You may wrap the cross in the flag and make God a prop for the state. This is a grave danger.

How can the Christian community determine the public issues worthy of their energies at any point?

I think if you start reading the Bible you will see that there is a whole agenda that God has laid before us on the makeup of a righteous society. Obviously the abortion issue has to be at the top of everyone’s list because we are dealing with human life, and the sanctity of life is such a fundamental biblical principle.

Perhaps a threshold question would be laws that in any way restrain or interfere with the proclamation of the gospel, and I mean not merely its verbal proclamation. The Soviet Union in 1928 made worship officially legal, but they abolished the church’s role in help to the poor, church schools, aid to the needy, and other social functions. “Go ahead and worship, sing your hymns—that’s fine. But if you start helping people, you’re invading the priorities of a sovereign state.”

Do you see this today anywhere in North America?

We see some freedoms being chipped away. A local zoning board in Fairfax County, Virginia, threatened to rescind the zoning of a church because it houses indigent people at night. And the basis for their stand was that it is not the responsibility of the church to take care of people at night. The church should only conduct Sunday morning worship services. So the zoning officials are writing the agenda for the church.

Then you have the Marian Guinn case in Oklahoma, a case of church discipline over sexual morality. The church withdrew fellowship from her and she won a $390,000 judgment against the church for invading her privacy. One of the jurors said, “Well, what right does the church have to tell a person how to live?”

There is, then, a mindset gradually evolving in America that says the church doesn’t have any real relevance to how people live.

When you advocate criminal justice legislation, what argument do you make to the non-Christian for support?

We’re in a society in which 91 percent of the people say they believe in God, 81 percent say they are Christians. So when I argue for restitution in criminal justice policies I never fail to say that it is not only working now, that it is not only less expensive than incarceration, that it is more redemptive to the individual and pays back the victim, but—by the way—that it is what God in Exodus 21 instructed Moses to do first at Mount Sinai.

A congressman was asked in the last election, “If you were elected to represent the people, and your will differs from the people’s, will you vote your will or the will of the people who elected you to office?” How would you answer that?

Do we have a republic or a pure democracy? If we have a republic, the elected office holder is given certain responsibilities to lead the people and sometimes to make decisions that are contrary to the prevailing climate. It is the politician of courage and conscience who can stand between the mob and justice.

Can principled Christians survive in politics?

I don’t believe you can privately believe one thing and publicly act another way. If you believe one way you must take your stand, follow your conscience and God’s leading, and attempt to get the public on your side. If you fail and still feel as a matter of conscience that you then cannot discharge the law, then you have got to resign. God ordained government. The opposite is anarchy, which is worse than sinful government. But in being involved, we need to be free to pursue biblical righteousness as we’re best able to understand it, either as officials or as citizens.

Looking back on your own career in politics, could you have survived as a Christian?

I’ve thought, “Could I—believing what I believe today—have served four years as special counsel to President Nixon?” And the answer is, categorically, no. I would either have resigned or been exiled to the outer circle.

On what points would you have felt the pressure?

The whole way you fight your battles. Telling the truth. It wouldn’t have come up frontally on religious issues because Nixon happened to believe most of the things we evangelicals believe on fundamental values. It would have come up in one’s demeanor toward other people. Politics is a brutal game—particularly brutal at that level.

Does that mean we should discourage Christian people from going into politics?

Oh, no. We must just get better people in there who will be able to withstand those pressures and survive as long as they can.

Jerry Falwell, President, Moral Majority

You are widely perceived to be intent on installing a theocracy, similar to the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts. How do you deal with that?

I don’t think anybody who believes his Bible would want a theocracy or believes there is going to be one until Christ returns. I think that, because the national media has intentionally painted this picture, the general public looks on Bible-believing Christians as people who want to do what the Ayatollah has done in Iran.

I personally could vote for a Jew for President or any other political office, or a Roman Catholic or Protestant as quickly as I could a fundamentalist as long as the person was competent to fill that office, was committed to the principles and values that I believe in, and had a track record of personal behavior and conduct that was becoming to that office.

On a moral issue like abortion, on what grounds do you ask non-Christian people to stand with you against it? Do you appeal to Scripture, or is there some other argument?

I would stand the same way Charles Finney did in the slavery debate of the 1850s, arguing that we’re dealing with the lives of real human beings. Most of the American people are, unfortunately, totally unconcerned about what the Bible says; but I think there is plenty of support for the dignity of human life beyond the Bible. I work very hard at quoting no Scripture when, for example, I am on the Phil Donahue show, so the secular audience won’t tune us out. Yet I want to say scriptural things. I think you can avoid Scripture without violating Scripture.

You avoid Scripture so that you won’t be tuned out. That’s very pragmatic.

I don’t think that pragmatism is always compromise. If you have a planeload of hijacked people—men, women and children—and the hijacker agrees to let the women and children go, you don’t say, “No—either everybody or nobody.”

I think you can state principles in modern terms that meet the criteria of all sides (or almost all) and thereby bring in a much-larger coalition toward a desired goal than if you decide, “I’m just going to bring the fundamentalists in.” To do that on an issue like abortion, we’re going to have to give a little—exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Slowly, we’re educating our people to a kind of pragmatism that doesn’t violate their conscience and accomplishes by consensus a general good—not an ideal good—but a general good. And in the meantime, in our pulpits we can stand for the ideal.

Do you expect an issue such as abortion to be solved on the legislative or the judicial level? Or should it be addressed in the culture?

I think we have a lot to do before we can turn to the justices in the courts and say, “Change the law.”

Twenty-five years ago Bishop Fulton Sheen said the church has no right to tell a teenage girl who is pregnant out of wedlock, “You cannot have an abortion,” unless, when she asks, “Who is going to take care of me?” the church is willing to say, “We will.”

This is why in the past three years we have started 191 Save a Baby Centers nationally. We plan to start a thousand in the next five years. We’ve worked with 11,000 pregnant girls in the past 35 months, and not one has had an abortion after the first counseling session, and not one has left us without accepting Christ as Savior.

I think in this decade we will have some kind of court ruling on the abortion issue, even if it will never be as absolute as it once was. But when that happens and convenience abortions are history, we’ve got to have in place a structure to handle the 1.4 million girls who are pregnant without any money so they will have an alternative to the back alley abortionist.

The literature of Moral Majority does not present that emphasis.

Moral Majority is a political organization that is involved in one thing only—political change. While we continue that emphasis, we in the churches have got to be consistent in our ministry and go after the creation of the structure I’ve just described. If we do, I think we will succeed on both sides.

In your statements on nuclear defense you appear to have written off those fellow Christians who may believe in defense but who reject the extremes of a nuclear solution.

It’s just that I disagree—not that I think they are heretics. I personally think that conventional defense is not adequate to prevent nuclear blackmail.

I feel the President’s position is not a warlike one. I really believe that the best deterrent to war, and the best guarantee to peace, is a strong defense. If we had all of the young men in this nation under arms, with every conventional warfare ability at their disposal, we’d be nothing compared to the nuclear might of the Soviets.

Even though on a personal level you are known to be likable, your whole style of political confrontation is perceived to be that of a political hornet. Some people feel this is wholly incompatible both with democratic dialogue in a pluralistic society and with your profession as an ambassador of the love of Christ.

I hope in my own life there is a growth going on that leads away from some of that unnecessary stridency. I think you can go too far in the other direction, however, and become ineffectual, afraid to step on ants. Finding the middle has not been easy for me.

Jim Wallis, Editor, Sojourners

Although you are not formally in politics, you are mainly known for your political positions. How do you unite your biblical and your political interests?

At the heart of everything else, I’m a pastor in a local congregation in Washington, D.C. The gospel has a personal and a public meaning. And we’re trying to understand what that meaning is both on a personal level in our own lives and on the public level.

How does the Bible inform the public side of your Christian mission?

If we want to be biblical, our views and politics should be profoundly shaped by the priority of the poor. In my seminary days, we made a study of the Bible to find everything it said about the poor. We went through the entire Bible to find every passage about poor people. We found the Bible literally filled with the subject, second only to idolatry.

One of us took scissors and cut out of a Bible every reference to poor people, love for enemies, and reconciliation. It took him a long time to do it, and when he was done, the Bible that he was using was falling apart. I used to take that old Bible out with me to preach. I used to hold it high in the air and say to congregations of Christian people, “Brothers and sisters, this is the American Bible, full of holes from all we have cut out, all we have ignored. Our Bible is full of holes.”

How would you answer those who say you impose your political ideology on the Bible just as Jerry Falwell imposes conservative politics?

It is dangerous to go to the Bible with any ideological framework. I don’t believe that any ideological system or perspective can be justified from the Bible. I think the priority of the poor in the Bible is as clear as anything there, but that it does not prescribe specific solutions.

Those who believe in a liberal welfare state, for example (which I don’t), or a Marxist reordering of things, or the laissez faire capitalist system have difficulty deriving any justification from the Bible. But the priority of the poor is clear. And that raises a question about our response to the poor in concrete ways.

How consistently can you distinguish biblical politics from ideological politics? An article in Sojourners before the 1984 presidential election presented Reagan as the worst political option. It predicted “his second administration will be free of whatever restraints public opinion may have placed upon the greed and militarism of the first, a long-term crisis facing the U.S. economy will continue to deepen, the military budget will continue with its lunatic spiral.…” Is this not the language of ideological politics?

Sojourners is a journal of opinion, and this article reflects our opinion about what we can expect from the second Reagan term in the White House.

If the poor are the biblical priority, then we have to make a political judgment about how the poor will fare, specifically, in the second Reagan term. That same article is also very critical of the Democratic alternative of Walter Mondale around many of these same questions.

This was our opinion about what was going to happen. And it was not governed by, for example, a Marxist perspective. There are people who root themselves in the Bible who condemn the injustice of the American system not because of Marx, but because of the Bible. Others may disagree with us, but to simply call that “ideological” or Marxist misses the point. My objection to the American system of wealth and power is not because of Marx but because of the Bible.

Your rejection of nuclear weapons is total. You make it a test of Christian faithfulness. But how realistic is this in today’s international scene? Surely there is no way to roll back history and banish nuclear weapons.

I do believe that, by the grace of God, things are possible that Christians don’t believe are possible. Most people once believed that slavery was inevitable. Now, looking back, that view seems nonsensical to us. Most Christians thought slavery was so bound up in the fabric of society, and that the economy depended on it. Only a handful of Christian visionaries could, through the eyes of faith, see a world without slavery.

Are you urging unilateral disarmament?

We have always said that nuclear weapons must be abolished everywhere and anywhere they are. We have called for unilateral initiative on the part of the U.S.

And the time has come for the church to say as the church, unequivocally, that nuclear weapons are morally unacceptable and can never be sanctioned.

That’s a faith position; governments are not bound by these things. So we will have to propose what ethicists call “middle axioms,” steps toward a moral position that secular governments will feel are reasonable while there is moral persuasion going on.

I think it is very possible for nations, just pursuing their own perception of self-interest and survival, to begin to take steps away from the brink of nuclear confrontation and military build-up. And finally, I don’t believe nuclear weapons will be abolished without a spiritual awakening.

Where do you stand on the abortion question?

Christians must stand up in defense of life everywhere it is threatened, whether it be unborn lives, whether it be peasants in Central America feeling terror and death, whether it be lives of enemy populations under the shadow of our missiles, or whether it be those on death row.

The polarities of this question have been so painfully tragic; the Left is concerned about nuclear weapons and seems not to care about abortion, which has resulted this past year in 1.4 million aborted lives. On the other hand, many of my friends on the Chistian Right are concerned with abortion, as I am, but seem not to draw connections between the defense of the unborn and the defense of the lives of children impoverished in my neighborhood. We need to be prolife across the spectrum.

And so we close our examination of the issue, “The Christian as Citizen.” The group of Christian thought leaders who gathered at O’Hare Airport in Chicago to discuss the topic represented a wide diversity of viewpoints. It spanned the so-called New Right, represented by fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, and the extreme Left wing of evangelicalism, by Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners. It included Mennonite Myron Augsburger from the Anabaptist tradition, and representatives from the Anglican church, Christian Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, “Bible,” and Free Church (the latter with its roots in the Lutheran tradition). With one exception, they were Americans. The only thing that brought them together for this consultation was their commitment to a conservative evangelical faith.

Despite their divergent backgrounds and obvious disagreements, however, it very quickly became evident that they were remarkably united on many church-state issues. Loyal to his Anabaptist heritage, Myron Augsburger not only expressed deep distrust of all government, but argued that Christian goals are not to be sought by reliance upon power and force through political process. Christians, rather, secure their goals through quiet witness and loving service.

Representing the Left wing from a different perspective, Jim Wallis expressed his “Christian anger” with the American church’s capitulation to worldliness in support of government militarism, and neglect of the poor.

The four scholars who wrote essays for this publication were nearly unanimous on church-state issues.

Evangelical Accord

Here are the points on which this diversity of people found agreement:

1. Liberty—political liberty and religious liberty—is a priceless heritage, hard won in the past, easily lost, and worth great sacrifice to keep.

2. No human government—even our own—can be fully trusted, for power corrupts, and the greater the power, the greater the corruption.

3. Though a Christian can survive under almost any government, he strongly supports democracy as most consistent with his understanding of the purpose of government and the nature of man.

4. While evangelicals seek freedom to witness to all by persuasion, they are unutterably opposed to any form of “theocracy.” They desire a nation of Christians, but they are opposed to a Christian government that mandates “Christian” laws simply because they are Christian.

5. The American “wall of separation” between church and state is good (qualified support from the Anglican representative), but must never be absolute because, first, practitioners of religions, including Christianity, are not perfect and, therefore, must be monitored to preserve the freedom of others; second, an absolute wall would discriminate against the rights of religious people.

6. Governments are ordained by God for human good. Their goal is justice: to give every person his due as a creature endowed by God with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own goals so long as that does not conflict with those same rights and freedoms of others.

7. Evangelicals should support their government. This demands obedience, unless obedience to government requires disobedience to God. And in a democracy, it demands participation in the political process (Anabaptists dissenting) because God holds all rulers responsible for the quality of government they provide.

8. Churches are to stick to their spiritual and moral mandate from the Lord of the church except where this mandate requires direct involvement in the political process. The church’s greatest contribution to civil government comes from its impact upon its individual members, through spiritual strengthening, moral instruction, personal counseling, and so on. These church members, acting as individual Christian citizens, will become active in government.

9. Ministers and church leaders are also citizens and have the right as citizens to participate directly in politics; but, when they do so, they must recognize that they place their spiritual ministry in jeopardy.

10. This is not to be construed as uncritical support of the existing order—wrapping the American flag around the Bible—but as a recognition of the rightness of our basic governmental structure and of the duty of the Christian citizen to take advantage of this structure to change things for good, that is, to produce greater justice and greater freedom.

Throughout the group’s discussion of all of this, there shone a transparent patriotism. Clearly the four essayists affirm in these pages the essential rightness of these principles and identify them with the American Constitution (and British law, except for the nonestablishment clause). They also argue that these were Christian principles not only in the sense that they were consistent with biblical teaching, but, more fundamentally, Christian theistic presuppositions served as the rational ground on which they could best be defended.

Evangelicals And Separation Of Church And State

Strong evangelical affirmation of democracy and especially of the American principle of separation of church and state ought not to be surprising. The original framers of our Constitution in 1787 went out of their way to insure that our government would not be a Christian government, and not even a religious government. This is in spite of the fact that, almost without exception, the framers of the American Constitution considered themselves religious persons. The vast majority identified themselves as Christian.

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, moreover, was considered so essential to the Constitution that many states would not agree to join the new federal government unless it incorporated these rights into the Constitution. From its very inception, therefore, the United States has been a pluralistic democracy and has been committed to the separation of church and state. The phrase “wall of separation,” though not coined until later, expresses well the sentiment of the founders of our nation.

It is no accident that every one of our four authors referred to the words of Christ: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Here Jesus Christ, the Lord of the church, endorses this fundamental principle. American Christians today, with evangelicals at the forefront, are strongly committed to the separation of church and state. Their reasons are not pragmatic. An excellent case can be made that evangelical faith has fared especially well in this country just because it has been freed from tangling alliances with government, alliances that inevitably would warp it into what could not be recognized as biblical Christianity. Yet the basic reason for this strong evangelical commitment to separation is rooted in biblical teaching about the role of civil government in contrast with the role of the church, as our essayists have shown.

The Christian In The Church And In The World

As a church member, the Christian seeks to persuade all men to turn from evil, to come to know the living and true God, and to live a life obedient to God—productive for his kingdom and for the good of all men in this life and in the life to come.

The Christian is also a citizen with goals that are appropriate for his government. He works for an orderly, just, and free society. In this arena, by contrast with his role as a member of Christ’s church, he may advocate the use of force when necessary. Of course, such force must be used, not to advance his own church or his religion, but to advance legitimate goals of government: order, justice, and freedom.

He seeks a good government, good laws, and good officers—good in the sense that they will most effectively pursue and secure goals that are appropriate to a government. He certainly does not seek or favor a government that will put into law the Christian faith. Nor does he vote for the best Christian, but for the person who is most disposed and best equipped to carry on the functions of his office, keeping in mind the limited and nonreligious goals of a valid government.

The slogan “more Christians in politics” (or “religion in the public square” [Neuhaus]) is well meant and makes a necessary point, but it can be misleading. Christians, too, can be power hungry, and some are incompetent. We do not wish simply for more evangelicals to move into positions of power and influence in our nation. We seek, rather, dedicated, selfless public servants of good moral character and deep commitment to justice and freedom for all. We urge evangelicals to enter the public square because we believe they are, or ought to be if they are consistent with their faith in Christ, wholeheartedly committed to these goals of good government.

Church And State: An Armed Neutrality?

Evangelicals today strongly support the constitutional separation of church and state. Yet, as the Supreme Court has pointed out, the so-called wall of separation is not absolute and was never intended to be so. In his essay, Stephen Monsma also shows how this is true.

It is abundantly clear, moreover, that the Founding Fathers did not intend to rule out direct government support of religion. The rationale of deists such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson was that religious teaching incorporates moral values that tend to make good citizens and, therefore, a strong government. What they opposed was establishment of a particular religion.

Across the years, the Supreme Court gradually came to prohibit direct support of religion, and most evangelical Christians thoroughly support this broader principle. It could be stated this way: Government is never to support religion directly for the purpose of advancing it as a religion. Government support must be restricted to purposes that fall within its legitimate goals—an orderly, just, and free society.

Must government be neutral toward religion? Not at all, declared Chief Justice Warren Burger. Rather, our Constitution “affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility towards any.”

Justice William Douglas nearly three decades earlier had written: “When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best in our tradition, for it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual need. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do so believe.” In short, a nation that wishes a good government should not act with hostility toward those facets in its society that tend to make people good.

For the same reason, a Christian active in his government should not divest himself of his Christianity to function as a servant of the state in a pluralistic society. From the first, our national history has been totally against this.

Of course, this close association can easily lead to a sort of civil religion. Those whose allegiance is first to the state can water down religion to the least common denominator that will prove useful to the government. Religion thus becomes merely a tool of government. No Christian, certainly, can give his ultimate allegiance to the state or prostitute his religion to the state. Yet he finds common commitments between what he holds in loyalty to Jesus Christ and what some non-Christians of other religions or, indeed, of no religion at all hold. And he is grateful for their support in the passing of laws and in the buttressing of those moral values that he supports as a biblical Christian.

For the Christian, God is sovereign over all. The state is subservient to his moral law and is to be judged by it. The state is not absolute. It, too, is accountable to a higher law that stands over it in judgment. This is our best safeguard against totalitarianism. It is what we mean when we pledge the oath of allegiance: “One Nation under God.” Many nontheists believe that a government should be run for the good of its people. We can be thankful that they do so. But Christian theism gives a coherent ground for why this is so. God is sovereign and ultimately judges all; and, therefore, it is the Christian’s duty to judge any human government in the light of this standard.

Should All Biblical Commands Be Law?

Puritan pastor Samuel Rutherford argued that all biblical commands ought to be transformed into the law of the land. Few evangelicals would agree with him. As Carl Henry has shown here, not all biblical commands are appropriate to become civil law, because the nature of government restricts the scope of its laws.

Church and State at the Crossroads 7

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was an immensely influential English philanthropist, social reformer, and political leader. He spent over 40 years as a member of Parliament, working 20 years to abolish slavery in Britain. Today his life stands as a model of Christian principles bearing successfully on public issues. In great measure it was Wilberforce’s unusual temperament that allowed him to remain within the inner circles of British public life while retaining his own integrity. His self-confidence and charm enabled him to take the part of moral censor without being morose; and his evangelical views, generally regarded as gloomy, if not pharisaical, were shown by his own example to be compatible with transparent kindliness and sociability. One woman of high society pronounced him the most religious man in England and also the wittiest.

And even some ideals that lie within the bounds of government may not make wise law. New York governor Mario Cuomo made this point in a speech at Notre Dame in 1984. He said that unless there is a public consensus, we should not try to make these into law. To do so would only lead to scofflaw attitudes. Sometimes a society is not prepared to accept good laws. That is why a government can be no better than its people. Cuomo’s mistake was that he felt no moral compulsion to seek to persuade society to accept what is morally right. But he was correct that sometimes the populace is not prepared to accept good laws.

Archbishop John O’Connor was much more consistent with biblical mandates at this point when, in a speech to medical personnel in Manhattan, he urged citizens to speak out in support of their convictions about right and wrong. “Why is it,” he asked, “that questioning a candidate about abortion is somehow unfair or unethical? Must a candidate or an office-holder explicitly support abortion? Of course not! He or she is free to tell the world: ‘I am not only personally opposed to abortion, but I intend to do everything I can within the law to bring about a change in the law.’ … There is nothing unconstitutional about that.”

The charge is often leveled against Christians that they are trying to legislate morality or that they are imposing their private religious beliefs on everyone else. Of course Christians are trying to legislate morality. So is everyone who cares for his neighbor. Law making is the business of enforcing what is right for the good of a society. A law declares that one kind of activity is just and fair and another kind is unjust and unfair.

The Need For Vigilance

Many Americans fail to understand the delicate balance between church and government achieved in our pluralistic society. Out of zeal to protect precious freedoms, they battle against every alliance between government and religion. The American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (which includes many evangelicals) believe this is the best way to guard our precious freedoms here in the United States. Few in either of these groups are anti-religious or wish to destroy religion. Rather, they fear we may lose the hard-won liberties that we so greatly treasure and enjoy.

Evangelicals should stand with these organizations against establishment of a particular religion—be it Christian, Jewish, or atheistic humanism. And unless we first gain their confidence by showing that we stand firmly with them and are willing to fight with them in their concern for free exercise, we cannot expect them to see that some indirect support of religion by the government is really in the best interests of the government. With them, we must insist that eternal vigilance and a willingness to sacrifice are absolutely essential if we are to safeguard our own religious freedom and that of others. What the ACLU and the AUSCS seem to overlook is that the total withdrawal of the government from indirect support of religion would deny the religious freedom of many Americans and would deprive us of some of our most treasured values. Our citizens would be poorer citizens.

Religion Is Pervasive

Certainly religions sometimes provide powerful motivation for morals and values. Effective moral values are invariably tied to a framework that is essentially religious. Whether it is called that or not is beside the point. “All education,” T. S. Eliot rightly said, “is religious education.” Moral education raises the question “Why?” And the answer to that “Why?” will inevitably involve statements about the nature of man and of the universe, and the meaning of moral obligation. In the final analysis, these are religious questions. Even to present moral options cafeteria-style in an attempt at neutrality is to imply that moral issues can be decided without reference to religion—and that, too, is a religious issue.

Yet constitutional grounds and biblical teaching lead evangelicals to oppose direct support of religion to secure these values. In the United States, unfortunately, we seem to be moving toward the awkward position that the government cannot support values in the framework of any traditional religion (either Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish), but it will support them in a humanistic framework. The practical effect, thus, is to make humanism an established religion.

The First Amendment does not rule out indirect support of religion or, as it sometimes turns out, the direct support of religion but not for the sake of the religion itself. Only if government is free to support religion indirectly for those values that lie within the legitimate sphere of government (even if they are also religious values), can it achieve the original intent of the Amendment.

Ought A Christian To Compromise?

The problem of political compromise is particularly hard for many evangelical Christians to accept. Certainly no Christian ought to compromise his convictions. Still, many needed laws that would bring great good to our land never get passed because different factions within the government cannot agree on precisely what form they should take. Some want a bit more, some want a bit less. Holding out for the very best precludes the passage of what is good or, at least, far better than no law.

Here God-given wisdom is needed. Agreeing to a law or even supporting a law that is less than ideal is not always wrong. It is true that a refusal to bargain and a stubborn holding out for the whole will sometimes bring a better law. Here the Christian must proceed with great humility, making sure that he does not make the mistake of forfeiting a great good for human beings by insisting upon all the good that he longs to introduce into the perfect law. Compromises of this sort are essential in a pluralistic society. Christians should develop strategy for working out such compromises. And they should feel free to do so without bad consciences.

Dual Citizenship

We conclude this essay with a call to all evangelicals to take their responsibility as citizens with the seriousness it deserves. Every Christian is a citizen of two kingdoms—the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world. This is not to foist upon him a divided loyalty that weakens. It rather offers him complementary roles in which each may strengthen the other.

The Christian is to be salt and light in the world about him. But how many Christians spend even as little as five minutes a day in private prayer for their government and its leaders? How frequently does the church seriously engage in public prayer for political issues, righteous laws, and for government leaders? This is not making Christianity into a civil religion. God has commanded his church to pray for its rulers.

In a democracy, the individual citizen is the government. This lays an awesome responsibility on every Christian living in a democratic society. The God of the Bible holds rulers responsible for order, justice, and fair and righteous government. Every American Christian shares 1/240-millionth of the responsibility for the kind of government we have.

As American evangelicals, we cherish our heritage of justice and freedom. It is a rare gift of God—all too rare on planet Earth. But to those who have been given much, much will be required. Political justice and religious freedom are like fragile plants. They must be nourished and cared for tenderly. This is both our duty to our country and our call from God in order that we may hand onto the next generation the gift that we have received—a land of justice and freedom.

Christ and Culture, by H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Harper & Row, 1951).

This is one of the few works of Christian theory about society that deserves the term “classic.”

Niebuhr suggests that Christians have approached the larger world, the “culture,” in one of five typical ways: “Christ Against Culture,” or a position attempting to divorce oneself from the world entirely: “The Christ of Culture,” whereby believers identify the finest aspirations of the faith and of some particular environment; “Christ Above Culture,” which affirms a synthesis between eternal values and selected aspects of the world; “Christ and Culture in Paradox,” a dualism in which believers are active in the world but not confident about success in bringing it captive to Christ; and “Christ the Transformer of Culture,” where believers attempt to shape the world in every particular according to the norms of Scripture and Christian tradition.

Those like John Calvin in Geneva or the Puritans of early America, who believe that it is possible to transform a culture for Christ, are going to be relatively optimistic about the potential of political activity. By contrast, Christians like the early Anabaptists, who felt that they must shun the world to find Christ, will be almost entirely skeptical about politics. Still others, “dualists” like Luther, who see ambiguity and irony in the relationship between Christ and politics, will combine activity in the world with considerable reservation about the chances for ultimate political success.

This book calls for self-analysis as we define for ourselves what we think is possible as Christians in politics. It also opens a path to better relationships within the body of Christ as we perceive more clearly the foundational commitments of other believers whose political ends and means differ from our own.

Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915–25, by Lawrence W. Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

Bryan was the most visible evangelical in American politics during the century before World War II. This book describes his career after he resigned as secretary of state from Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet because he felt Wilson’s negotiations with Germany were less than honorable.

During the last decade of his life, Bryan campaigned for the rights of labor, but even more actively for Prohibition and for laws against evolution.

Bryan had a great heart for the common person, a deep love of American and Christian traditions, and a gift for stirring speeches. In spite of all this, his campaigns, especially against evolution, were not successful. The biographer concludes that his activities probably did as much harm as good to the causes he espoused.

Bryan was innocent as a dove but often not wise as a serpent. He tended to favor victories in public relations and to preach most effectively to the already converted. He could serve today as a useful case study in Christian activism.

For Further Reading …

The following are selections from among the best books on the topic of the Christian as citizen. The list was compiled by Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch.

The Wars of America: Christian Views, edited by Ronald A. Wells (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982).

Historians here ask how Christians in the past acted in time of war, whether they applied standards of “just war” to the conflicts, whether the wars themselves were justified by such criteria, and what we can learn in the present from such history.

The general picture that emerges is not reassuring. Christians seem to have been as eager to fight, as jingoistic, as callous to the costs of war, and nearly as unloving to national enemies, as non-Christians. Most of the essays conclude that the wars of America have been questionable on Christian terms. The book counsels modern believers to cool their rhetoric and sharpen their analysis of international conflict.

The Putritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, by Edmund S. Morgan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958).

This biography of the first governor of the Massachusetts colony deftly tells the story of Winthrop’s effort to overcome the “Puritan dilemma”—how to do justly when the world, and one’s own heart, are infected by sin.

Winthrop was not hungry for power, nor was he eager for fame, wealth, or other rewards of high position. He rather saw his political service as a charge from God. He put first the “commonwealth,” seeking justice in disputes over money, land, and trade. He accepted philosophically the loss of power. He labored to lead Massachusetts in righteousness as well as in security. It is a sterling portrait of a godly ruler.

The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, by Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1984).

Neuhaus, a Lutheran theologian, understands full well two powerful cultural forces: rampant secularism, which attempts to limit religion in the public square, and right-wing fundamentalism, which attempts to recover on its own terms the religious foundations of public life.

The book argues that the American experiment is severely and unnaturally crippled if the religious values of the American people are ruled out of order in public discourse. At the same time, he calls American Christians to a new level of civility and mutual respect: “Talk about Christian America will continue to frighten many sensible people until Christians make clear that they welcome and cultivate [a] limitation of their authority.”

A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought, 1966–1976, by Booth Fowler (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983).

This perceptive study is a history of the first years of the recent evangelical reemergence into the political arena. Fowler, who teaches political science in the University of Wisconsin system, read evangelical periodicals from the mid-60s to the mid-70s (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, The Reformed Journal, Sojourners, and The Other Side, among others) to chart not just a new evangelical concern for politics, but a growing diversity of political stances within the evangelical camp. The aims of the book are modest—to describe rather than to assess. But for background on the recent past, often the most difficult historical period to recover, this is essential reading.

Also : Born-Again Politics, by Robert Zwier (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1982); Reconsecrating America, by George Goldberg (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1984); America, Christian or Secular, by Jerry S. Herbert, editor (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1984); The Search for America’s Faith, by George Gallup, Jr., and David Poling (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980); Religion on Capitol Hill, by Peter L. Benson and Dorothy L. Williams (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982); Pursuing Justice in a Sinful World, by Stephen B. Monsma (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1984); The Christian Mindset in a Secular Society, by Carl F. H. Henry (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1984); God and Caesar, by John Eidsmoe (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1984); The Battle for Religious Liberty, by Lynn R. Buzzard and Samuel Ericsson (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1982); God in America, by Furio Colombo (New York: Columbia, 1984); The Search for Christian America, by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, George M. Marsden (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1983); Holiness and Politics, by Peter Hinchliff (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982); If the Foundations Be Destroyed, by James T. Draper and Forest E. Watson (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984); With Liberty and Justice, by Lynn Buzzard (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1984).