Evangelicals & the Arena of Public Discourse

Because I have written frequently – and, very often, passionately – about volatile topics like the Religious Right, the First Amendment and evangelicals in the political arena, some people (willfully or not) have misconstrued me to say that evangelicals should stay out of politics. That is emphatically not the case. I believe that people of faith – any and all faiths – have every right to allow their religious convictions to inform their political views. I also happen to believe that political discourse would be impoverished without those voices of faith.

At the same time, however – and this point is often missed – it’s essential that religious voices in the arena of public debate observe the canons of democratic discourse, including respect for other voices, especially minority voices. In a democracy, no one voice is entitled to commandeer the conversation, even if that voice represents, or claims to represent, a majority.

This principle is utterly consistent with Baptist teaching and with America’s charter documents. The Baptist tradition in America was begun by Roger Williams, who is best remembered for articulating the cornerstones of Baptist thinking: liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state. Majoritarianism, the notion that whatever conviction or policy is held by a majority – creationism in public schools, for example, or the Ten Commandments in public places – should be public policy, violates the principle of liberty of conscience as well as the protections for minorities encoded into our charter documents.

Therefore, when evangelicals talk about participating in public discourse, we must be careful to understand that participation does not mean domination. It means adding our voices to a conversation governed by the canons and traditions of democracy – and, in turn, respecting other voices.

On a related matter – the second half of Roger Williams’s formula: separation of church and state – has been, for reasons that elude me, controversial among some evangelicals. Put simply, the First Amendment and the separation of church and state is the best friend that religion has ever had. Faith has flourished in this country, as nowhere else, precisely because the government has (for the most part, at least) stayed out of the religion business. Why anyone, let alone evangelicals, would want to subvert the First Amendment remains a mystery to me.

The derivation of Thomas Jefferson’s summation of the First Amendment having constructed a “wall of separation” between church and state was Roger Williams’s declaration almost two centuries earlier. And while it is probably true that Jefferson was seeking to protect the workings of government and the common good from religious factionalism, it is equally true that Williams harbored the opposite concern. He wanted to protect the faith from being sullied by political entanglements and machinations.

Consider Williams’s language. He wanted to protect the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” To understand that image, we must remember that the Puritans of the seventeenth century were not members of the Sierra Club; they did not share our post-Thoreauian romance with wilderness. For them, wilderness was a place of danger, where evil lurked. So when Williams declared his intention to protect the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world,” he feared that too close an association between church and state would damage the credibility of the faith. Once you conflate politics with faith, Williams recognized, it is the integrity of the faith that suffers.

Allow me to provide an example. In July 2001, Roy S. Moore, chief justice of Alabama Supreme Court, installed a two-and-a-half-ton granite monument emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the Judicial Building in Alabama. Because Moore at the same time refused to allow any other religious representations in that space – Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and so on – Moore’s actions represented a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, the clause that prohibits any “law respecting an establishment of religion.”

I was summoned as an expert witness in the case, and when Judge Myron Thompson ruled – correctly – that Moore’s actions violated First Amendment, he ordered it removed. As workers were preparing to remove the monument, one of the protesters screamed, “Get your hands off my God!”

Now, unless I miss my guess, one of the Commandments inscribed on that monument had something to say about graven images. And that was precisely Roger Williams’s point: Too close an association between church and state ultimately devalues the faith. That should serve as a word of caution for those who want anything from Ten Commandments in public places to taxpayer vouchers in religious schools.

The beauty of the First Amendment is that is set up a free marketplace for religion in the United States. No one religious enjoys state sanction, and all religions must compete in this marketplace. This has lent an undeniably populist cast to religion in America, but it has also meant that we have a salubrious religious culture, one that is unmatched anywhere in the world. Why anyone, especially a person of faith, would want to tamper with that configuration utterly confounds me.

Neither does the First Amendment, contrary to some misinterpretations, prohibit those with religious affiliations from holding political office. Article VI of the Constitution is explicit about this: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” This article, frequently invoked by Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee for president, ensures that anyone who is otherwise qualified, regardless of religious affiliation (or none), can hold office.

And should evangelicals come to the political arena from different ends of the political spectrum? Theoretically, at least, yes – and recent history is replete with examples. The political right has been amply represented in recent years, especially since the emergence of the Religious Right in 1979 – Jesse Helms, Tom Coburn and George W. Bush – whereas an earlier generation of evangelical politicians tilted toward the left: Mark O. Hatfield, Jimmy Carter, Harold Hughes and others.

My “theoretical” response to the above question reflects my own normative concerns over the direction of evangelical politics during the last several decades. As I argue in my forthcoming biography of Jimmy Carter, the 1970s saw a brief efflorescence of progressive evangelicalism, a tradition informed by the teachings of Jesus to care for “the least of these” and that flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These evangelicals of an earlier era, from Charles Grandison Finney to William Jennings Bryan, directed their energies to the well being of those on the margins of society – slaves, women, immigrants, prisoners, the poor – a disposition that I find conspicuously absent in recent evangelical political advocacy. There are exceptions, of course, but I regard the sentiments of the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern and the policies of evangelicals like Hatfield, Hughes and Carter as far more consistent with both the New Testament and with the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelicalism.

Carter’s defeat in 1980 followed by Hatfield’s retirement from the Senate in 1997 left a void. I long for the return of evangelical voices like those to the arena of public discourse.