“If the church fails to apply the central truth of Christianity to social problems correctly, someone else will do so incorrectly.”[1] The twentieth-century theologian Carl F.H. Henry (1913-2003) made that argument in 1964. Regrettably, his thesis has held true over the past sixty years. But this doesn’t have to be. The moral decadence of American politics and culture can be reversed, but only through a God-given combination of spiritual graces. Theological conviction, moral clarity, and public courage on the part of American evangelicals are what is needed, and in this essay I hope to show how Carl Henry’s public theology is a good model for engaging our secular world.
1. Carl F.H. Henry, Aspects of Christian Social Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 82.
The Disconnect Between Profession and Voting Practice
Consider, for example, the November 2023 elections. The various electoral contests in that year revealed a disturbing insight into the state of American society: our cultural consciousness has been discipled by a resurgent neo-paganism. Indeed, ever since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement has endured significant setbacks and legislative defeats; and these failures occurred in what we thought to be deeply conservative states with high church attendance. In 2023, Kentucky reelected its Democratic governor who supports little to no restrictions on abortion. The residents of Ohio, where 73% of adults claim some manner of Christian faith (and 29% are evangelicals), passed a constitutional right to abortion in 2023.
These developments were captured in Ligonier’s 2022 “State of Theology” survey, which uncovered troubling realities not only about society, but amongst those who called themselves evangelicals. On the question of whether gender identity is a matter of choice, 42% of Americans agree that it is. Amongst evangelicals, that number is only slightly better at 37%. While 91% of evangelicals believe that abortion is a sin, exit polls from Ohio’s recent vote to enshrine abortion access as a constitutional right show that at least a quarter of white evangelicals support unfettered access to abortion. There is clearly a disconnect between what evangelicals believe to be unjust and their actual vote for unjust practices.
That same Ligonier survey also revealed the following about evangelicals: 43% believe that Jesus is not God; 26% say the Bible is not literally true; and 38% contend that religious belief is mere opinion rather than about objective truth. Is it any wonder that secularism triumphs when those who apparently bear witness to the truth of God’s revealed will have strayed from their obligations as disciples of Jesus Christ and have departed from the authority of God’s Word?
There is no Middle Ground
Our minds will either be conformed to this world or transformed by the Word (Rom. 12:2). In this scheme, no neutrality exists. The absence of obedience and the lack of abiding in Christ spells disaster for the Christian. We will find ourselves imaging this world, looking less and less like Christ with minds contorted by godlessness and worldliness.
This principle extrapolates into the broader culture. The Christian worldview rejects the myth of moral and ethical neutrality in the public square. Carl Henry stood upon that conviction, declaring that every contour of society—from its customs and culture to its legal structures—would either abide in the verity of God’s created order or conform to something else. Either the central truths of the Bible and its comprehensive moral framework would guide our civil and political communities, or a neo-paganism would nourish a national collective consciousness.
Indeed, Henry believed that “the fate of the Bible is the fate of Christianity and even of civilization itself.”[2] The eviction of the Bible and a biblical worldview as the ballast for society means the abandonment of the only stable source for societal flourishing. Dislodging the binding authority of God’s eternal law and his Word coincides with the embrace of ethical relativism and moral malleability. The result of this condition, Henry warned, was “society’s inevitable theological, spiritual, and moral suicide.”[3]
2. Carl F.H. Henry, The Christian Mindset in a Secular Society: Promoting Evangelical Renewal and National Righteousness (Portland: Multnomah Press), 34.
3. Henry, The Christian Mindset in a Secular Society, 34.
Failure to relate God’s revealed will to the broader society means surrendering our neighbors, communities, states, and nation to the ravages of a humanistic paganism. True human rights and human liberty, rightly understood, will disintegrate under the corrosive acids of moral relativism. Indeed, the democratization of ethics created the conditions for suffocating the vitality of families, the life of the unborn, and the recognition and respect of ontological reality in sex and gender. The stakes could not be higher.
Carl Henry’s Clarion Call
Carl Henry dedicated much of his career to the issue of public theology. The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published in 1947, called for a renewed evangelical engagement in the public square. He cast a vision for an evangelical movement that avoided the isolationist tendencies of fundamentalism while also providing a theologically orthodox alternative to Protestant liberalism and the social gospel. In the subsequent decades, Henry articulated the necessity of an evangelical movement that was equipped to confront a public square swiftly succumbing to secularism. Henry believed that no Christianity could be faithful to its divine summons if it failed to address societal injustice. In Henry’s words:
The need for vital evangelicalism is proportionate to the world need. The days are as hectic as Nero’s Rome, and they demand attention as immediate as Luke’s Macedonia. The cries of suffering humanity today are many. No evangelicalism which ignores the totality of man’s condition dares respond in the name of Christianity.[4]
4. Carl F.H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), 83.
Seventy-six years later, the situation has only worsened, and the need for a vital evangelicalism has surely intensified. As Christians struggle with how to respond to the burgeoning trends of secularization, we would do well to stand where Henry stood. He confronted the challenges of his day with a conviction in the sufficiency of God’s Word. Whether the heterodoxy of liberal Protestantism, the materialism of Marxism and Communism, or the nihilistic worldview that veiled the imago Dei, Henry built his political theology around the conviction that “Thus saith the Lord” was humanity’s surest and best hope for renewal.
Given the state not only of our nation but of theology in the churches themselves, we must heed Henry’s admonition to fight Christian indifference to activity in the public square. Henry staked his view of evangelical engagement upon the following premise: a decline in Christian theological conviction begets the loss of ethical transcendence, which culminates in society’s inevitable doom. “The evangelical failure,” as Henry lamented, “to proclaim Christ as Lord of the whole life allowed secular and sub-biblical agencies to pre-empt the spheres of culture for alien points of view.”[5] Secularism has fabricated a fantasy of democracy, one that promises its followers that displacing revealed religion from the public square will secure more individual liberty and rights. Yet, as Henry asserted, “Without shared values, democracy is on the move to anarchy.”[6] Throughout American history, the basis of those “shared values” had been Christianity. “America’s founding fathers,” Henry argued, “considered religion and morality the twin supports of a democracy; they did not champion a state that defames religion or creatively defines morality.”[7] Christians who fail to confront strict-separationism—that misguided, ahistorical political impulse that would erect an insurmountable wall between church and the political realm—invite calamity into their community and nation.[8] Christian truth and principles of biblical ethics necessarily extend to every corner of social and political life.
5. Carl F.H. Henry, “Perspectives for Social Action,” in Architect of Evangelicalism: Essential Essays of Carl F.H. Henry (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), 289.
6. Carl F.H. Henry, Christian Countermoves in a Decadent Culture (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1973), 31.
7. Henry, Christian Countermoves in a Decadent Culture, 31.
8. Strict-separationism suggests that policy positions rooted in sectarian beliefs have no place in the public square. It is also asserted that this was the view of the founders who wanted to erect a high wall between church and state, keeping religiously based arguments sequestered from policy and the national consciousness. For more why this is both politically untenable and historically false, see Cory D. Higdon, “How High the Wall between Church and State,” Providence Magazine (October 2023); Higdon, “Fighting for the Right to Be Jewish: Religious Liberty and Government Establishment,” Providence Magazine (September 2022), Higdon, “Let the Word of the Lord run freely: Religious liberty is essential to the spread of the gospel and the fight for truth,” World Opinions (August 2023); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
A Public Theology that Engages
To remedy this, Henry formulated a public theology that imbibed the divine summons to seek the welfare of the city and of the nation. Seeking this welfare, however, necessitated serious contemplation of what God decreed as good, just, and righteous and how to apply those truths within one’s given political context. In other words, Henry believed that a faithful evangelical approach to the public square required a detailed consideration of societal needs. The work of renewal and the ambition to rightly apply the ethics of the kingdom to the myriad of social issues plaguing Western civilization demanded an intellectual and spiritual seriousness—a maturity that neither trivialized nor simplified the challenges facing the public square.
Christian public engagement, furthermore, is a requirement for every follower of Jesus Christ, though the degree of engagement can and will differ depending on context. The lordship of Christ encompasses every sphere and sector, which leaves Christians with no warrant to carve out compartmentalized portions of their lives where they attempt to deny Christ’s rule and authority. “Social action, as Henry asserted, “must not be viewed as an independent and detachable concern, nor may the preaching of the gospel be aborted from the whole counsel of God.” In fact, the basis of Christian social concern emanates from the character of God himself: “Fundamental to Biblical theology is the revelation of the true and living God as the God both of justice and justification. Only where the command of God and the grace of God are both proclaimed can the church avoid a truncated message.”[9] The Christian God is both the God of justification and justice. Therefore, as God’s ambassadors, Christians appeal to the lost to be saved and summon their communities to recognize the binding authority and goodness of God’s created order.
9. Carl F.H. Henry, A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1971), 119–120.
The comprehensive nature of Christianity’s claims to truth, therefore, intensifies the need for evangelical political engagement. Our concern for justice, the outcomes of elections, and the kinds of policies pursued by our government redounds with greater significance under the Christian worldview, not less.
The same zeal for bearing witness to the gospel ought to nourish our aspirations for political justice as defined by God’s Word. As Henry charged, “If Christ’s church does not publicize the criteria by which Christ will judge the world, how will the world then know them?[10]
10. Carl F.H. Henry, The Christian Mindset in a Secular Society: Promoting Evangelical Renewal and National Righteousness (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1978), 41.
In other words, Christians who fail to keep their eyes fixed upon the revealed eschatological horizon will lose their way and diminish their public witness. In the process, moreover, they will lead their neighbors into the tumultuous waters of an ethical relativism that can only exist where the concrete stability of God’s revealed will remains shrouded and unannounced.
The Way Forward
As Christians look to upcoming elections and consider vital issues facing our public square, we must not be found silent nor unintelligible in our ethical convictions. Silence and underdeveloped theses for the verity of our moral vision are both an affront to our mandate and the duties of discipleship. At a bare minimum, Christians must express our biblical convictions in the voting booth, electing candidates that will uphold justice and promote the good. Christians must also articulate our convictions on abortion, marriage, and why the entire array of the LGBTQ rainbow revolution spells disaster for any nation that hopes to achieve flourishing. We also need Christians contending for the rights of children against the onslaught of “gender medicine.” In short, evangelicals must be more political, not less.
As Christians embody and proclaim the ethics of redeemed humanity, we provide a glorious portrait of true human flourishing. Our participation in education, politics, law, economics, healthcare, and every perimeter of political life, must arise out of a fundamental belief in the transcendence of God’s created order and the complete goodness of abiding in his Word.
“The present civilizational crisis,” Henry stated, “calls for recovering the transcendent basis of law and justice as well as the truth of revelation.” He went on to state, “Either we return to the God of the Bible, or we perish in the pit of lawlessness.”[11] Indeed, American Christianity finds itself at a crossroads. Will churches and Christians restore their conviction to God’s truth, renew their devotion to his glory and beauty, and declare our faith in the public square? If not, then we consign our neighbors and subsequent generations to intensified suffering and calamity. Those are the only two options facing Christians in the twenty-first century. Let us then, with confidence in God’s Word, boldly articulate the unassailable integrity of God’s created order and design. “The Church of Jesus Christ is here,” Henry declared. “We must march and sing our faith again in the public arena.”[12]
