Someone of Darryl Hart’s intelligence and learning is incapable of writing a book without offering many penetrating insights, and this book promises to be no exception. He starts out by observing the “tsunami of faith-based politics” (p. 3). He objects to this, as he should, because government sponsorship of a generic faith, or groups that have that faithy feel, is simply pragmatism. Christians should be no friends of any civic attempts to tear the “sectarian” heart out of the faith.
This is where someone like Darryl is going to be at his strongest. The position he is critiquing is vulnerable, and vulnerable because flatly unscriptural. But the tendency will be for Darryl to reject, for example, tax money going to support an ostensibly Christian soup kitchen because of the radical theocracy such an endeavor promises to promote, when actually the effort is thoroughly compromised and anemic. Such a case would not be an example of religion taking over the state; it would be the empire taking over a gaggle of deracinated religions. But there is a pro-Christendom argument that will not be vulnerable to this kind of critique at all. “But you want the government to become explicitly Christian.” “Yes, you have understood our position exactly.”
Darryl says things that are just baffling. “But the present-day consensus about religion and American politics — that politics needs the ideals, inspiration, and morality of faith — is unprecedented” (p. 5). What is actually unprecedented, in the history of the Church, is the novel idea that a culture can exist apart from a defining religious center, a cultus. After the War Between the States, America gradually inched into an experiment with this idea, and the Christians here probably could have gone on with that idea indefinitely — but the secularists overplayed their hand, and began insisting on sodomite marriage and dismemberment of unborn children as prime examples of civic neutrality — “they are personal religious issues (perhaps), but certainly not areas where we have to listen to the voice of God.” A lot of ordinary Christians saw this for what it was — a radical unveiling of the presence of an alien religion, one that insists on legislating in accordance with the will of its god.
But for all the surrounding confusion, Darryl still frames the question perfectly.
But here is Darryl’s question again, what does Christianity require of its adherents politically? The answer is that, like Paul before Agrippa, we should desire our rulers to become just as we are, baptized and in submission to the Word of God. We should recognize that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus, and that He used this as the basis for commanding us to disciple all the nations of men. We should want the establishment of a new and improved Christendom. We should tell the kings of the earth to kiss the Son, lest He be angry.
But Darryl identifies himself as a “Christian secularist” (p. 15). But this creates a dilemma for him. Either he must walk away from the historic Reformed conviction about the lordship of Christ over all things (including politics), in which case he is the radical innovator, or he must say that Christian secularism is to be preferred because Jesus commands it, the Bible requires it, and so on. But this is way too stark. Imagine what texts you might appeal to in order to make the point that the kings and rulers of the earth should studiously avoid any reference to the true God, avoid listening to His Word in any kind of submission, and above all, to avoid rendering thanks to Him for His kindnesses. Imagine trying to prove from the Bible that God wants rulers, especially the Christian ones, to pretend that He doesn’t exist — to pretend in public that they don’t Him.