There is No Need for the PCA to Reinvent the Wheel
Four presbyteries have overtured the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) to address “Christian Nationalism.” Three requested study committees and one requested a pastoral letter. These overtures raise a number of issues, from the nature of the American version of the Confession on church and state to Theonomy and Ethno-Nationalism. There are, however, strong reasons to vote “no” on these overtures. Perhaps the most significant is that the PCA has already dealt with these issues. It dealt with Theonomy in 1979. It dealt with race and ethnicity with a statement in 2002, a pastoral letter in 2004, another pastoral letter in 2016, and a full report in 2018. Most interestingly, the PCA also received a report on church and state in 1987.
I can’t help but wonder how many of those calling for a committee have studied all of the work our denomination has already produced on these topics. For example, the legendary Rev. Dr. Douglas Kelly gifted the church a very fine treatment of church and state in his preamble to the 1987 report. It is worth examining in detail.
Kelly starts where every treatment of church and state worth its salt must begin: God. In his words, “Everything that can be said about man and society, life, structure and order ultimately flows from and depends upon who God is.” This statement includes the state as much as anything else. Even government flows from and depends upon God. The authority of government exists because God, who has “sovereign, unlimited power,” granted to man the privilege of sharing in “His power in a limited and structured way.” Hence, just like the power of the church, the power of the state arises from God’s divine institution. “The Bible teaches that both state and church,” Kelly says, “are ordained by God with legitimate and limited authority for the structuring of man’s life.”
But what is the purpose of government? Kelly puts it well:
Romans 13, which speaks of civil rulers as ordained ministers of God to whom every soul is to be subject, also specifies the goals for which these ministers are granted power: to be a terror to evil, to give praise to good works, and to revenge wrath upon those who do evil. Thus the state which is carrying out these goals is acting in terms of legitimate, divinely given authority, and is to be unreservedly submitted to for conscience’s sake.
Nevertheless, Kelly notes that Christians may–and in some circumstances must–resist government authority under certain conditions. When government goes horribly wrong, Christians may offer more than their “prayers and tears,” as Kelly puts it (quoting Samuel Rutherford). In fact, when the appropriate situation arises, Kelly acknowledges that “Christians have the right and duty to unseat [a government] or indeed, an entire civil order (under extreme conditions).” But when must Christians resist or even overturn civil authorities? Kelly makes the conditions clear: Christians must resist when either “a civil magistrate consistently abuses his position contrary to the limitations placed on him by the transcendent law of the Creator” or when a government is “flagrantly violating the basic moral law.” When government officials act in these ways, they forgo their rightful power and “turn themselves from a ‘higher power’ into a ‘lower power,’” which may be justly overturned by the people. In outlining these conditions, Kelly is not offering us a novelty. As he notes, this is “the resistance theory of Rutherford and his Scottish, English, and American successors.”
After this biblical and theological analysis, Kelly then turns to history. He notes that we cannot responsibly interpret “who we are” as Americans unless we start with the fact that “Americans are, culturally at least, transplanted Europeans.” The full statement reads as follows:
Any responsible discussion of church/state relations in this country must start with the fact that Americans are, culturally at least, transplanted Europeans: indeed, Northwestern Europeans (for the most part) who come from a centuries old Christianized cultural background. The fact that we come from a more than millennial old Christian cultural context rather than from an Islamic, Buddhist, or French Revolution secularist background is of utmost importance in properly interpreting who we are and how our civil and ecclesiastical structures function.
Kelly then offers a rough sketch of the history of church and state, tracing the reign of Constantine through the Magna Charta and common law tradition to the American revolution. In any brief telling of this story, it would be easy to fall into the trap of “the establish church is bad” and “a religiously neutral state is good.” However, Kelly judicially navigates the terrain, especially when he arrives at the founding of America. In his words:
Most of the American colonies had official charters which specified their Biblically based liberties (at least, in general), and by the time of the American Revolution in 1776, nine of the thirteen original states had established state churches. By this time however American life was marked by a variety of different denominations and sects so that the desire was widespread to disestablish the Anglican and Congregational Churches in favor of “a free church in a free state”. There was very little desire though to separate the state (i.e. the new national government) from Christianity itself; but rather from particular denominational hierarchies.
The last sentence is especially important. The early Americans, who were overwhelmingly Protestant, desired to protect themselves from any particular denominational hierarchy receiving federal power to rule the religious life of the whole nation. However, this is a far cry from desiring the separation of the state from the Christian faith itself.
Kelly then turns to the First Amendment, drawing on the work of Robert L. Cord, who notes three reasons why the founding generation ratified this part of the Bill of Rights. First, “it was intended to prevent the establishment of a national church or religion, or the giving of any religious sect or denomination a preferred status [at the national level].” Recall that, during this period, “religion” usually meant “sect of Christianity.” It did not typically refer to any of the other world religions. Second, “it was designed to safeguard the right of freedom of conscience in religious beliefs against invasion by the national Government.” And finally, “it was so constructed in order to allow the States, unimpeded, to deal with religious establishments and to aid to religious institutions as they saw fit.” Moreover, the First Amendment was not “intended to preclude Federal governmental aid to religion” or create “absolute separation or independence of religion and the national state.”
Kelly provides more reasons to support this interpretation of the First Amendment. First, he notes the tradition of judicial rulings in America:
Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American courts largely proceeded on the assumption that while America had no established or favored denomination, still the basics of Christian morality were part and parcel of the Common Law.
In a footnote, Kelly expounds further, noting how the Supreme Court itself referred to American as “a Christian nation” in 1892:
In 1892 the Supreme Court of the United States, after reviewing the entire history of America, concluded that “this is a Christian nation” in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States.
He then marshals evidence from the Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story:
Justice Joseph Story, renowned commentator on the American Constitution, stated: “One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is, that Christianity is a part of the Common Law, from which it seeks the sanctions of its rights, and by which it endeavors to regulate its doctrines….There has never been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundations.”
Finally, Kelly again utilizes the work of Cord, noting “the hundreds of thousands of federal dollars given to missionaries of many Christian faiths to support their mission schools in christianizing the Indians.” The federal government provided “clear and direct financial aid to missionaries” and even entered into “treaties to build churches.” None of this evidence makes sense if the First Amendment means that the Federal government ought not to offer support to the Christian faith.
So, when did things change? Kelly lays the initial blame at the feet of the Civil War. In his words, “the general post-Civil War tendency for the turning of the United States from a (relatively) Christian-based constitutional Republic into a (relatively) secularized central Democracy.” However, these trends reach a tipping point after World War II. In Kelly’s words:
The ultimate cause of our current church/state problems lies in a deep shifting of moral and theological values in America that has been occurring for more than a century, and that has picked up great impetus since the 1960’s.
Kelly then quotes Steven Samson, who maps out the ensuing consequences:
Americans today are forgetting their cultural traditions and losing their moral consensus. The problem is both religious and political, not simply one or the other…
The American constitutional system is founded on the Reformation ideal of individual self-government. It is expressed in the cherished rights of free speech, religious liberty, and private property. But the center of American life has been shifting so dramatically that many of the old customs of local self-government, like the town meeting, are becoming cultural artifacts fit only for display . . . Any standard of value other than an ultimately hedonistic utilitarianism is apt to be rejected as an intolerable imposition.
However, Kelly does not lay the primary responsibility at the feet of the government. “Judgement begins in the house of God,” Kelly says, quoting 1 Peter 4:17. He goes on:
We will not be far wrong to assume that secularist hostility to the church on the part of various departments of state could not have gained the power it has, if the church had not lost much of its faith in God and His Word as well as losing much of its cultural vitality during the last century and a half. The aphorism of James Hitchcock is not comforting, that “in practice an orthodoxy which loses its authority has trouble even retaining the right of toleration.”
Kelly ends his preamble with a word of prophetic insight:
Many of us believe that there has been a turning away from secularism and back to vital, evangelical Christianity within the United States since the early 1970’s on the part of multitudes of individuals and many denominational groups, of which the Presbyterian Church in America is a part. While this evangelical trend may hearten us as believers, it is profoundly disturbing to dedicated secularists (in and out of civil government) who see it as a halting of a positive evolutionary trend towards democratic secularism. Thus, we may realistically be prepared for even more confrontations between church and state during the final years of this century.
Before we rush to form new committees or draft fresh statements, we would do well to remember the theological depth, historical awareness, and cultural discernment already found in our denomination’s prior work. Dr. Kelly’s 1987 analysis remains sharp and strikingly relevant. Rather than reinventing the wheel, perhaps the PCA would be better served by rediscovering and applying what we have already produced. Faithfulness does not always require something new; often, it demands the humility to listen to what has already been said.
Image: The Terms of the Armistice, 3rd and 4th November, 1918, Herbert Arnould Oliver (1918). Wikimedia Commons.
