I think that it is fair to say that since the heyday of Francis Schaeffer, most committed evangelical believers have known that our theology must be engaged with the culture around us, and that we are supposed to be salt and light. We are supposed to make a difference. Before that, the question didn’t really come up for most because the secularists were able to maintain a semblance of plausibility for their myth of neutrality. In other words, the bill of goods that believers bought into was that decent civil government was possible apart from an explicit Christian commitment. Secular government in America looked like a generic Christian government to many believers.
In the late sixties and throughout the seventies, the wheels came off, at least as far as the perceptions of evangelicals were concerned. Roe v. Wade was the starkest example, but there were many. The long cease fire had been violated by the secularists, and there is no way to pretend that abortion-on-demand and homosexual marriage were forms of generic Christian government.
So evangelicals, many of them, got involved in what are now famously called “the culture wars.” This took many forms — from moderate religious right activism to hard core reconstructionism. This, of course, caused panic and consternation among responsible adults everywhere, and every form of “theonomy” was shrieked down. “How dare you,” they asked us, their voices quavering, “try to impose religious law on a pluralistic nation?”
For various reasons, the steam then went out of conservative Christian activism, but I put much of the responsibility for this on the presidency of George W. — a cheap
knock-off of the old generic Christianity ploy, but close enough for many Christians to assume that the ship of state had righted itself, common sense governance had come back in, and so on. Of course it had done nothing of the kind, and then came the election of Obama. Sow the Texas wind and reap Chicago whirlwind. When a big government conservative sleeps with a big government liberal, and you will soon find that she is with child. And she’s having triplets.
And thus it is that many of us are now starting to wonder what number comes after a trillion, and this is why the peasants are hunting around in their sheds and garages, trying to find their pitchforks again.
In the meantime, the religious left took advantage of the lull in order to press the demands of what we might call a left-wing theonomy, the kind of theonomy that never makes any responisible adult shriek. This is because their observations about jubilees, social justice, and whatnot are really cool ways of growing the state. It turns out that the secular state doesn’t mind this. These guys have a way of prophetically telling the state to go on up to Ramothgilead (1 Kings 22:12). Jim Wallis, son of Chenaanah, makes horns of iron, and pushes against all the forces of injustice in the world, and everybody thinks that somebody is speaking truth to power.
Well, he will, but Micaiah isn’t here yet.