Recently, I had the opportunity to speak at a joint Davenant Institute/American Reformer panel discussion on the theme, “Does Christian America Have a Future?” Before answering such a bold question, other questions perhaps are in order. “Should Christian America have a future?” for instance. Or even more basically, “What might it mean to speak of a ‘Christian America’?”
Why We Need a Christian Public Culture
For many American evangelicals, longing to see their nation’s churches full, the idea of a “Christian America” might not extend much further than the vision of a great religious revival. A Christian America, on the conversionistic understanding typical of so many evangelicals, might mean nothing more than an America chock-full of Christians. With their public theology limited to the Great Commission, and their vision of “making disciples” merely a matter of getting people to pray the Sinners’ Prayer, evangelicals have for the past couple generations been complicit in the de-Christianization of America, as faith is reduced to a purely private concern, and religion reduced to the business of saving souls.
Still, most evangelicals deep down know better. Their common sense is often better than their theology, understanding that private faith must express itself in public life. Indeed, earlier generations of American evangelicals understood that religious revival also entailed cultural renewal; the revivalists of the Second Great Awakening, for all of their emphasis on individual conversion, were also great institution-builders and moral crusaders, establishing schools, colleges, and societies to help transformed lives issue in a transformed society. Minimally, it seems, to speak of a Christian America then must mean an America that features a Christian public culture. By “public culture” I have in mind things like public social norms, artistic norms, popular entertainment, business practices (including some level of sabbath observance), and much more.
To be sure, we should not deceive ourselves into equating such a “Christian public culture” with the norms and practices of the institutional church, or be blind to the myriad ways in which such a culture will fall short of Christ’s call for radical discipleship. A Christian public culture, like a Christian person, will still be deeply sinful and deficient. But it can still be an awful lot better than the alternatives. If you’re skeptical, just pause for a moment to consider the blood-soaked public culture of ancient Rome, dominated by war, slavery, gladiatorial games and the “lust for domination”; or the sex-obsessed public culture of the post-Christian West, with ubiquitous pornography and its inane celebration of gender experimentation as the pinnacle of personal heroism.
A Christian public culture will be better than the alternatives in at least three ways. First, even for the many members of society who never come to share Christian faith, a Christian public culture serves as a profound form of neighbor-love. Why? Because, for all its imperfections, it is more in tune with reality, more in tune with the God-given telos of the human being. A culture that doesn’t glorify casual sex or gratuitous violence is, believe it or not, a more pleasant place to live for the vast majority of people—and especially for the weak and easily exploited, whom we are especially called to love as Christians.
Second, for Christians themselves, a Christian public culture is an aid to living out a life of Christian virtue. To be sure, it can also be a temptation—a temptation to complacency and compromise. But all in all, it is a benefit. No man is an island, and few Christians have the strength of character to live out the demands of the gospel all on their own. The support of a community that bestows recognition and praise on virtuous behavior, and that discourages vice and makes it harder to get away with, is a great blessing for the vast majority of people.
Third, a Christian public culture is even a support to Christian faith. No one is saved simply by being born into a Christian society. That is obviously true. However, it should be equally obvious that you will have a larger chance of coming to saving faith in a society that encourages and promotes the work of the church and by its habits and customs attests to the transforming impact of the gospel.
But how do you maintain a Christian public culture? Culture is not, after all, simply self-replicating, however much we may think of it that way. Culture—a society’s vision of the good, and of the many subsidiary goods that aid us in our pursuit of the good—is inculcated. It has to be taught, handed down, publicly affirmed and proclaimed. This requires institutions, especially educational institutions. And such institutions require funding. And much as we might like to imagine that everything worth doing can be effectively funded by the private sector, history laughs at such naivete. In every culture in every age, the crucial institutions that uphold a public culture have required public support—which is to say, government support. The Protestant Reformers, at least, weren’t shy about this. They put public education at the center of their reforming agendas. Today, Christians have turned on public education because it has turned on them—but the correct solution is to recapture it, not to denounce the very notion of public education.
Why We Need a Christian Government
A properly Christian America, then, will need to be an America characterized by laws and a government that promote Christianity and Christian norms. Many readers are likely to gasp with horror at such a sentence—not just progressives (who, after all, are unlikely to be reading this column), but conservative evangelical Christians. For many evangelicals, the idea of a Christian government is unthinkable, intolerable, a betrayal of the essence of Christian faith.
This learned reflex is partly the result of bad theology, but it’s also in large part the result of bad political theory. Most modern Americans, after all, have come to embrace a warped conception of law and government. As modern liberals, we think of government as there to punish, not reward; we think of law as boundary, rather than teacher. Law, we think, exists to corral and restrain criminal behavior, and government is there to prevent harm. But this is not how earlier ages understood it—and in this case, the older view has the advantage not merely of being older, but of conforming to reality as we actually experience it.
Law, as the ancients well understood, has a pedagogical function. By punishing bad behavior, yes—as the ancient Roman pedagogue and the pre-1960s schoolteacher with their hickory switches well knew—but that’s not all. Law, after all, serves more than anything else to establish and uphold public symbols. It anchors the meaning of the social universe, describing what it is that we value as a society and prescribing what it is that we should value. Law is an idealized mirror by which the public reflects back to itself what it wants to look like. Again, this is obvious when we stop and look around at how our laws have actually functioned—on divorce, abortion, or homosexuality; on markets and usury; on masks and vaccines. Deluded by our minimalist theory of law, we think that a more permissive law on divorce, for instance, simply represents a decision to be less intrusive in restraining a particular private vice. We fail to realize the extent to which it re-structures the meaning of the social universe, implicitly calling “good” what we once called evil.
Our minimalist theory of law causes us to ask the wrong questions when debating the meaning of a Christian society. “Are you planning to execute homosexuals, then? Are you going to haul up every desperate mother on murder charges for abortion?” Such questions presuppose that a Christian public law must be one that would strictly punish every un-Christian behavior—after all, isn’t law all about punishment? In point of fact, most Christian societies in the past have known that there are all kinds of evils that cannot always be wisely or effectively punished, but that did not necessarily stop them from legislating against them. They knew that the law had a much more fundamental role to play in educating the society in a vision of the good—and thus indirectly curtailing vices that might not always be directly prosecuted.
Again, Christians used to know this—as did everyone with common sense. But somewhere along the way (as late as the mid 20th-century, perhaps), we bought into a flawed liberal minimalist conception of law. Unfortunately, progressives did not. We swallowed a lie about how law could be neutral vis-à-vis questions of culture, and so we obsequiously vacated the public square, apologizing profusely for all the evils of Christendom.
Meanwhile, nature abhors a vacuum, and progressives happily leapt into the space that Christians had vacated, enthusiastically embracing the pedagogical function of law as they steadily reconstructed our country’s legal regime in the image of their libertine utopia. Christians, lulled into a libertarian stupor, either went right along with it or only half-heartedly objected. How bad could gay marriage be, after all, if only 2% of the population were gay? Fast-forward eight years from Obergefell and 16% of young adults now identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. How could a mere change in the law accomplish this? Easy: the law tells us what we should value as a society, and young people got the message loud and clear.
Why a Christian America is the American Way
A Christian America, then, would not be one in which theocratic zealots went around looking for reasons to lock people up. Rather, it would be one in which a largely Christian public culture used the authority of laws to maintain and perpetuate the goods of that culture: affirming the importance of the natural family, the Christian family, and the virtues of self-restraint, for instance. And it would be one that was not shy about using public funds to fund a recognizably Christian education and institutions supportive of Christian norms—again, as every thriving society in history has used public funds to promote its vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Nor does commitment to the idea of a Christian America involve one in some kind of idolatry, confusing America with the kingdom of Christ or insisting that America has an indispensable role to play in the divine purpose, as some Americans are prone to do. Quite the contrary: the idea of a Christian America should be plausible to us not because America is exceptional, but to the extent that it is unexceptional. There have been many other Christian nations in the sense I have just described and there still are quite a few. Perhaps we could be one of them again.
I say “again” because, as I wish to emphasize in closing, there is nothing crazy or radical or unconstitutional in what I have just outlined. All these things that I have described were done throughout much of America for much of America’s history. Sabbath laws used to be the norm, and the last statewide “blue law” in the United States was not repealed until 2014. Although public education in the US has generally been non-sectarian, that did not mean it was non-Christian. On the contrary, the Christian Bible, Christian teachings, and Christian prayers were widespread in public schools for much of our country’s history.
And of course, a Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality (which is also a natural-law understanding, but that’s a subject for another day) was woven into the warp and woof of our legal system, as indeed was a Christian understanding of property and money-making. Whether formal religious establishments at state and local levels are optimal or not, the First Amendment to the Constitution was never intended to restrain them, much less to ban more generic forms of public promotion of Christianity, and still less to rule out conceptions of law informed by the Christian tradition—which was in fact inextricably woven into the common law of Britain and America.
Justice Joseph Story, among the most eminent jurists America has ever produced and the most authoritative commentator on its Constitution, had this to say in 1833:
The right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well-being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues;—these can never be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how any civilized society can well exist without them. And at all events, it is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity as a divine revelation to doubt that it is the especial duty of government to foster and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects (Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, II:603).
In many parts of our country, the light has long since died, the churches are empty, and the revival of a Christian culture or Christian laws is hard to imagine without a deep and sustained revival. In other parts of our country, where churches sit on every street corner and you can’t tune the radio without hitting a Christian station, the light still flames bright—albeit flickering dangerously in the harsh winds that are seeking to snuff it out. In such places, the absence of a public Christianity owes less to a loss of faith than to a loss of civic will. It is high time that we remind those who believe in the truth of Christianity as a divine revelation that “it is the especial duty of government to foster and encourage it among all the citizens,” and arm them for the fierce battles they will have to fight—not only against progressives, but against many of their own co-religionists—on behalf of this once so common-sensical proposition.
*Image Credit: Pexels
This article — like many others here now — is why we (and only we; the ivory-towered, freakish Christian intellectual fringers) read American Reformer essays… because they are among the vanishingly few remnants of carefully reasoned, evidence based, Biblically inspired analyses of the devolution — and desired resurrection — of American Christianity.
As noted on one of the two Web pages where this essay is now prominently cited…
https://anotherslownewsday.wordpress.com/christianity-politics/
&
https://anotherslownewsday.wordpress.com/about/religion/christianity/christian-theology/evangelicalism/
…, Dr. Littlejohn and I differ on the primary purpose for Christian political action but his essay rightly recounts the primary consequences thereof. Good for Brad. May his work here (and elsewhere) continue.
A nice vision overall, and I appreciate the sentiment.
However, it is not yet effectively popularized in the church and I fear there are many influential leaders set against it.
Having passed from an upbringing in anabaptism to time in an OPC church, I was surprised at how well the sentiment of the leadership matched the sort of abdication of civic life I grew up in. And I think it is perpetuated in the OPC by several particularly influential men in educational seminary and church positions.
I noted that when the denominational magazine would even touch on a civic issue, it seemed to call on DG Hart, Richard Gamble or D vanDrunnen to write.
A sampling of the public resources recommended by the denomination can be sampled at https://opc.org/msfw.html#PCE
Notice that the recommended resources are old and removed enough from our context to be applied with difficulty by the layman to civic life or written by those friendly to a secular sphere sealed off from a redemptive kingdom.
Do you plan to try to popularize this perspective or will you plan to stick to niche intellectual pieces such as Davenant puts out?
Hi Grant: We intend to publish many pieces like this. There are many useful contributions to the discussion over how Christians should approach civic and political life. Our goal is to highlight a range of these, all unified in the single goal of equipping Christians to promote the genuine well-being of our nation as defined by divine revelation, both scriptural and in nature.
“With their public theology limited to the Great Commission, and their vision of “making disciples” merely a matter of getting people to pray the Sinners’ Prayer, evangelicals have for the past couple generations been complicit in the de-Christianization of America, as faith is reduced to a purely private concern, and religion reduced to the business of saving souls.”
I believe it should be stated that praying the Sinner’s Prayer does not save anyone and is really a false, perverted gospel that leads millions to eternal damnation.
The Apostles, unlike today’s Evangelicals, never required a Sinner’s Prayer for salvation in the Bible (neither did evangelists in the First and Second Great Awakenings like Whitefield or Asahel Nettleton). The Biblical requirements for eternal life are (1) repentance, defined as turning away from your sins and (2) faith, defined as sole dependence upon the Lord Jesus Christ and His substitutionary, sacrificial death, burial, and resurrection for salvation, not any works (Ephesians 2:8-9). That is all.
Repentance and faith are attitudes of the heart, not outward actions (works). The Bible does speak about confession unto salvation with the mouth, but that is a work and merely an expression of faith which already is in the heart (Romans 10:10). Anyone trusting in the Sinner’s Prayer for salvation, rather than solely in Christ and His finished work, is not truly saved, no matter his sincerity or profession.
Seen in this light, standard Evangelical evangelistic methodology has been severely flawed for several decades and is likely the root cause of America’s spiritual problem from which most others spring. An Evangelical who believes he is a saved man just because he prayed the Sinner’s Prayer (not trusting in Christ directly) is just as lost as any Catholic or Protestant who is trusting in his baptism or church membership to go to heaven. Returning back.
You make a valid point, one that I had not considered before.
I think the reason that I had not considered it before, however, is that I never considered that the sinner’s prayer as a standalone sacrament but as one possible form of evidence of repentance and as a starting point for ongoing faith and discipleship.
In this way, I suspect that you’re actually agreeing with the author? Isn’t his complaint (in the paragraph you quoted) that the ‘Evangelical’ view of discipleship often doesn’t go far enough? Isn’t he saying that conversion is not just the sacrament of the sinner’s prayer and some kind of private belief – it’s an ongoing, outward, whole-of-life discipleship?
Thanks for the comment, it helped me to think this through.
Christians can believe that confession and/or baptism are essential to salvation while not trusting in either one for their salvation, just as one can believe that faith is essential while insisting that you don’t trust in your own faith for your salvation. You trust in Jesus Christ for your salvation; trusting in your trust (faith) would be a bit circular.
Very incisive comment. In regards to your point about evangelical, evangelisitic methodology being the root cause of America’s spiritual problem, you are not wrong, but I think that you are actually describing a symptom and not the underlying disease (not to say that the symptom you describe doesn’t also produce other symptoms, so to speak). This perverted methodology of evangelism exists because of a misunderstanding of those three little words you added near the end of your third paragraph, “not any works”.
You can see this by looking at your requirements for salvation, and observing that you skipped a third one: “For if you forgive men their sins, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you your sins, but if you do not forgive men their sins, neither will your Heavenly Father forgive you your sins.” Forgiveness absolutely takes work, but it is not a work. It is absolutely possible for us to forgive all others completely, but it can only be done by faith in Jesus, and by conditioning one’s heart to be forgiving by learning what Jesus says to do and how to live and by doing it. That is all work, but it is also called faith; it is adopting the spiritual maturity (teleios; Matt. 5:48) of the Lord and so becoming Sons of the Father in Heaven.
A prerequisite for this faith is repentance, absolutely, but evangelicals have been led to believe that “turning away from sin” doesn’t require work at all, that it is a mere formality akin to saying, “Well yes, all this Christian theology makes sense, so I believe it, hate my sin, and place my faith in Christ for salvation.”
I respond, “Great! Now go and quit watching porn, stop responding in anger every time your wife nags you (even if you don’t say anything in that anger, it’s still in your heart), and also, read what Jesus has to say on X, Y, and Z and spend your free time thinking about how to apply that to your life.” The people with this flawed methodology will respond, “Well, okay, but even if I don’t, I’m still saved.” And that is a lie, and it is this lie which causes evangelicals to go around preaching perversions, such as that a simple intellectual agreement with the Sinner’s Prayer is sufficient to be considered faith in Jesus.
Now, it is not a lie to say, “even if I FAIL, I’m still saved” because you will fail often when you are trying to turn a difficult behavior first into a habit, and then into a characteristic. Paul’s letters are to Christians who are trying and failing at making these very habits into character traits. But not trying, or giving up during the process rather than persevering, that is giving up one’s faith. That is saying, “I do not believe (not trying) or I no longer believe (giving up) in Jesus.”
This takes hard work, but it is not a work, it is a new life. It is a life of faith. It can be abandoned, but if it is not, Jesus promises us that it will result in being perfect (not moral perfection, as that is not how this word is used in scripture). And it is this condition of perfection, spiritual maturity, completeness, etc. that is the condition of eternal life, or membership in the Kingdom of Heaven.
It begins with repentance, as you said, and it continues in faith, as you said. But those who believe that this faith in Christ requires no work, because they have misunderstood that there is a difference between this concept and the concept of good works, it is these people who are spreading a gospel that C.S. Lewis calls “Christianity and water”; in essence (but not always, as those who defend this idea will constantly shift it to account for Biblical arguments to the contrary), they are preaching that intellectual assent that accompanies the Sinner’s Prayer is the price into eternal life.
Those are not the words they are using, but it is the concept they are preaching, and you can see this because you will know them by their fruits, and by their love. What do they love? These people clearly love themselves. What fruits do they produce? You need only to look at the “converts” they produce to see the fruits…those “converts” are the very people who are leaving the church after months or years, disillusioned and bitter, because they bought into something that seemed too good to be true, and it was. (To be sure, genuine faith is ALSO too good to be true, but it IS true, which is why it is worth giving up the world to have).
I feel bad for them, but let me end with some encouragement that it took me years and years to realize…those who are falsely converted like this are not hopeless by any means, because if they do continue to seek the Lord even while having these perverted beliefs, will they not find Him? I was one of these people for the first 20some years of my life, but I came to see the false faith that I had, and now I have genuine faith – and I know this to be true because of the change of fruit in my life, and because of a deterioration in love for myself and an increase in love for the goodness of the Lord, and for others.
It is the same for many of these other false converts, because even though they were attracted to Jesus with the promise of a quick and easy transaction to gain eternal life, along they way, they were exposed to the true gospel, and some (not many, but some) have come to know the Truth.
I used to stress out about the overwhelming perversion of Christianity today, because it does seem to be everywhere, but I am coming to see that nobody ends up in hell by accident. God reaches out to us with the opportunity to realize these truths enough that, if we refuse to accept them and follow Him, it is because we loved something more than we loved Him, and so we chose that thing over Him.
Thanks for your article.
While I agree in principle with your points, I suggest that it has failed to read the times that we live in and that it does not remind us of our ultimate goal – to build Christ’s church.
Yes, we should be contending in the public square for laws, institutions, culture and art to reflect God’s reality. Yes, we should be doing this for the benefit of all, most especially for those who do not know Christ (because our children will be taught the truth and, therefore, can be insulated from some of culture’s lies and harms). Yes, this is part of our discipleship which should be public and whole-of-life, not private and limited to church.
But the concept that some kind of ‘Christian America’ can be created at this cultural moment and this is the immediate goal that Christians should set for themselves? No, it’s impossible and attempting to pursue it will make Christians even more tone deaf than we are.
I’m currently reading Stephen McAlpine’s book ‘Being the Bad Guys: How to live for Jesus in a world that says you shouldn’t’. It points out that we Christians are pining for halcyon days in which we remember being accepted and respected in the public square. He reminds us that the ground has shifted under our feet – our beliefs are no longer respected or seen as a valid option, they’re now considered *evil*. We’re the ‘bad guys’ according to our culture. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – we were warned by Jesus and the Apostles, notably in 1 Peter 4:12-19 – a passage on which McAlpine’s book is based.
McAlpine’s main point is that Christians cannot be seen as the ‘good guys’ in culture unless they give up their faith (as, sadly, so many have done). Remaining faithful to Christ means that we be seen as the bad guys by everyone else. Our goal, therefore, is to be “the best bad guys we can be”. To paraphrase the Bible, we are to live such good lives amongst the pagans that although they accuse us of doing evil, they’re ashamed of their slander and glorify God.
To make our culture reflect God’s truth, therefore, we’re going to have to convince people of the goodness of God’s ways in a culture which is deeply hostile to this message. We’re going to do selflessly, for the benefit of non-Christians rather than selfishly for ourselves. We’re going to have to do this in such a loving, humble and generous way that others are ashamed of the lies they say about us and glorify God, hopefully now through repentance but certainly on bended knee when Christ returns.
It would seem clear to me, therefore, that our objective is not to reclaim culture as a whole but rather to be faithful and generous witnesses as we contend for souls and enter cultural skirmishes, most of which we will lose. Yes, we can and should defend public schools, for instance, but we should not be doing this at any cost. We are not to act as mere Conservatives who use whatever political power is available to them. No, our goal is to be the best bad guys we can be for the glory of God – not to yell at school board meetings but to winsomely state the Lord’s case for truth and righteousness. Not to simply condemn teachers who run LGBT clubs for school children but to befriend them and share God’s goodness with them (e.g. Rosaria Champagne Butterfield’s story – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eykv-3hvFvI). Our enemy is not other humans, it’s the power of darkness. Our goal is not to conquer culture by silencing the opposition (so that we can go back to ignoring those horrible people), it’s to win evil people to Christ because we are also evil but forgiven (and are now moved with thankfulness and joy by God’s mercy and grace). And as we lose most of the cultural skirmishes we enter, we need to lose with grace, humility and love.
We must remember that our kingdom is not of this world and God’s church is not reliant on a Christian America. It is a fleeting, temporary goal. One worth pursuing to some extent, but never at the cost of becoming or remaining the ‘bad bad guys’. If a Christian America is obtained by non-Christian means, it is not ‘Christian’ at all – it is futile and not honoring to God.
So by all means pray for a Christian America in the future. Perhaps in fifty to a hundred years the culture will swing back toward God’s reality (as it has swung back and forth in the past). Revelation tells us, however, that the arc of history is to become increasing evil.
Let’s focus on and pray for building Christ’s church, only one small part of which is fighting cultural skirmishes in a loving and God-honoring way for Christian laws and institutions as common grace for all.
To this end, I recommend Stephen McAlpine’s book. As a starting point, here’s an interview with him: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/podcasts/gospelbound/when-you-became-the-bad-guy/
I also recommend Carl Trueman’s work as a means of understanding our cultural moment (and why society has rejected Christian morality): https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/podcasts/gospelbound/the-rise-and-triumph-of-the-modern-self/
I hope and pray that this is a useful response to your article.
Some of these comments make me chuckle, and highlight a deep misunderstanding of the Gospel and Kingdom. Oh, the enlightenment runs deep!
The Gospel is not a plea. It is an announcement of the reality of a King, a crucified One at that. And, it requires obedience. It is a demand (that will be, one way or another) fulfilled – “ON YOUR KNEES!”
Brad’s article here is fantastic. It calls for a follow-up on the cultural nature of nomos. Bravo!
America, and every other nation, is already Christian because Jesus is Lord- all authority is his. However, the nations are in rebellion to their highest authority and rightfully deserve the wrath of God. The church is commanded to teach the nations how to live in the obedience of faith in every aspect of society which includes loving your neighbor as you love yourself. Since we’re not envisioning deporting unbelievers, why should I demand my Muslim neighbor pay for my child’s Christian education? It is absurd and unloving.
Thanks for the thought provoking article.
The crux of your argument is that law teaches beliefs but survey data on issues with changing attitudes argue against this. Acceptance in gay marriage has been slowly and steadily rising independent of any laws passed. The Defense of Marriage Act did not slow the rise and Obergefell did not accelerate it. Surveys on attitudes on legalization of marijuana show the same pattern. Looking further back, acceptance of interracial marriage was slowly increasing for a decade before Loving vs Virginia and continued increasing at the same rate afterwards. We don’t have survey data for Prohibition, but that would be another case of a law failing to teach the culture. The pattern seems to be that the culture slowly changes until a large enough percentage of the population supports something which leads to changes in laws. Law ends up being more a reflection of the actual beliefs and values of the culture than a teacher.
You start to address this in the last paragraph but I’d like to hear more on the universality of such a Christian political ethic. Does this assume that a majority of people in the country or state are Christian? Does it make any assumptions about the form of the government? What are the criteria for deciding which laws should be pursued and which shouldn’t?
It would also be good to read something on the argument on public education that you mention but don’t develop here.