I enjoyed getting to meet Darryl Hart at the Auburn Avenue conference last year, and also enjoyed our discussion on the Federal Vision over at De Regno Christi. He’s a good guy, and has many valuable things to offer the church, particularly in the realm of historical analysis. But in our discussion at DRC, the question of “two kingdoms” came up more than once, and so I thought it would be good to discuss Darryl’s thoughts on the relationship between the Christian faith and politics. A good way to do that will be a review of Darryl’s 2006 book — A Secular Faith.
The book is dedicated to J. Gresham Machen, which is a fact that will come up more than once in our discussion to come. The subtitle of this book is “Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State.” This is quite true, of course, because Christianity does favor the separation of church and state. But this is quite different than saying, to run a series of examples by you, that Christianity favors the separation of the Lordship of Jesus and state, or biblical morality and state, or God and state, or justice and state. I am enthusiastically in favor of separating ecclesiastical government from civil government. So was Machen. But that is a matter of government, and does not touch the question of how righteousness is to be defined in the civil realm at all. How does keeping clerics out of Congress reduce to the right to define justice without any reference to the God who made the world?
Darryl begins by noting that many American conservative Christians take comfort in the idea of a president praying for strength and guidance — “at best innocent if not becoming” (p. ix). Isn’t it good for the most powerful man in the world to “acknowledge his dependence upon powers mightier than his rather than proudly thinking he could manage on his own?” (p. ix). The pleasant thought experiment goes down quite well.
“But complications ensued when the group of conservatives considered the hypothetical of someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton offering a prayer for help in her conduct as chief executive of the United States. At this point the image turned from consoling to annoying, even alarming” (p. x).
You bet it does. But Darryl thinks that this exposes “the inconsistency that so often accompanies the way Americans mix Christianity and politics. Just the thought of Clinton beseeching divine favor drives conservatives crazy, the thought of Bush doing so is equally infuriating to liberals and Democrats” (p. x). But this should lead to the next question — who is right to react this way? Or are they both wrong? To react from the mere fact of different reactions into an agnosticism about God’s will for the political realm is way more conclusion than the premises will bear.
“The point of this book is to try to complicate contemporary understandings of of the relationship between Christianity and liberal democracy in the United States . . . It starts from the premise that Christianity is an apolitical faith” (p. x).
Now that is quite a premise. And we should not be surprised, if that is the premise, if the conclusion looks quite a bit like it. The sons of Abraham do the works of Abraham. But why should we start with an axiomatic assumption that the Christian faith, which has more of a political impact than any other force in the world, is apolitical?
“Historically the Christian religion, with the major exception of its American expression, has been concerned not with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but with salvation from sin and death” (p. x).
Okay, this should be lively. Before we get to our substantive disagreement, there is a point here that I find to be simply odd. Darryl is saying that the historic Christian faith has not been so much concerned with politics as it has been with saving our souls. The American Christians, in this view, are all about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But this construct seems to me to almost a photo negative of the truth. When Constantine convened the Council of Nicea, was he assiduously avoiding undue church/state entanglements? When Phillip II corresponded with Pope Sixtus about funding the Armada against Elizabethan England, what was that? Getting souls into heaven apart from politics has been the unique American truncation. The most ardent evangelical lobbyist in DC is nothing compared to the millennium and a half of established churches, a practice which American Christians successfully rejected for the first time in the history of Christendom. As I say, that point of Darryl’s is just a bit odd.
But here is the substantive thing. The message of Christ is about deliverance from sin and death. But do sin and death remain internally located in each individual soul, or do sin and death ever come out? Do they have any cultural forms and expressions? Do sin and death ever shape the polis? When a people sin in three dimensions, and they demand that the throne be established on unrighteousness, and they frame iniquity with a law, and they say that a woman can have her child dismembered in the womb as her constitutional right, does the Church, with its message of deliverance from sin and death, have anything to say about all this sin and death?
And when a professing Christian leader fights tenaciously for the right of women to chop babies into pieces, and is someday elected to the presidency while running on that platform, would Christians be right to be outraged at her professions of Oval Office piety? Sure. They would be wrong not to do so, because faith without works is dead. I would be distressed at President Hillary’s claims to have sought the divine guidance for the same reasons I would be just as distressed if she were the Anglican Archbishop of Somewhere or Other, making the same claims, and disregarding the Bible just as blithely. We can hold her professions of piety up against what the Bible says. If we can’t, then why have Bibles at all?
Incidentally, I am making this argument so that Christians may call their leaders to righteousness, whether those leaders are Republicans or Democrats. I am not assuming that only Democrats are guilty of this kind of hypocrisy — far from it. Remember that the present writer is currently being represented in the United States Senate by Larry Craig, the Terror of Minneapolis.
When Herod stole his brother’s wife, the approach of John the Baptist was a tad simplistic. He just went up there and said that it is not lawful to do that. Should Herod have replied that John needed to get back to his parish to work on his sermon? “Don’t meddle in politics, John.” John would have replied that he already had worked on his sermon, and he was delivering it now. “It is not lawful for you to have her.”