[Editor’s note: This article takes up a similar theme to Dr. Mohler’s speech at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference. The transcript may be found here, and a video link here, and you may access a related free e-book entitled The Illusion of a Secular State & The Impotence of Secular Conservatism.]
An odd and disturbing dimension of our current political age is the extent to which some evangelical Christians argue against the lordship of Christ in politics and culture. Of course, this raises the usual questions about evangelical definition, but I will assume that some Christians of otherwise secure evangelical conviction are confused about this question. For some Baptists, this question seems particularly perplexing.
Why would this be so? How could any Christian of biblical conviction argue that the lordship of Christ lacks direct and current relevance or power over any sector or dimension of life? The answer is rooted in history, but it is based upon a misperception. Indeed, it is based upon a willful decision to ignore the obvious.
No Lordship Due to Separation of Church and State?
The misperception is what is implied in historic Baptist claims of a separation between church and state and the corollary motto that calls for a free church in a free state. The essentially American origins of this confusion reflect crucial Baptist insights. We believe that the state should not intrude into the internal affairs of a church or church-related body. We also believe that the state should take on absolutely no liturgical or sacramental function. To that extent, I certainly agree with the Baptist principles at stake here—no state interference and no state liturgy.
The problem with this formulary now is that it misses what Baptists, along with other citizens, simply assumed as a necessary and permanent state of affairs, namely that Christianity would continue to provide the essential moral culture that shaped the entire society. The founders of this nation and the framers of our constitutional order simply took for granted that marriage meant (and could only mean) the covenant union of one man and one woman, for example. Christianity and its biblically defined understanding of culture was so fundamental, so pervasive, and indeed so unquestioned that it was evidently invisible. The very Baptists who provided these clarion calls to the so-called “separation of church and state” simply assumed that the state would continue to rest on a moral foundation (and cosmological vision) that was essentially Christian (even essentially Protestant for much of our history).
Even within our constitutional order, the establishment clause of the federal Bill of Rights—that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—was understood to apply to the national government only. Established churches continued well into the nineteenth century in some states. The America of the colonial and early republican eras understood morality to rest on a religious basis and authority—and that religion was some form of Protestant Christianity. With regard to moral issues and the foundational moral vision, the framework was unquestionably Christian and often explicitly biblical. Baptists, along with other Protestants, certainly did come to question and oppose the concept of an established church, but they never meant to disestablish Christian morality or the basically biblical definitions of civilizational order. They could not imagine any such thing. Regrettably, they did not acknowledge this, for they evidently foresaw no need to do so.
The Secularizing State
In one sense, how could they have foreseen the rise of a secular age, or even the emergence of a multi-religious American culture? At the time of the revolution, the population of the colonies was “80 percent British and 98 percent Protestant.”[1] Or, As Mark David Hall explains, “In 1776, every colonist, with the exception of about two thousand Jews, identified himself or herself as a Christian. Approximately 98 percent of them were Protestants, and the remaining 2 percent were Roman Catholics.”[2] Even for the rarely identified skeptics or those described as atheists, the controlling moral vision was still drawn from Christendom. Thus, the terms of their relative unbelief were settled within an essentially Christian moral vision. They could not imagine a moral regime based on secularist principles. They had never seen one.
1. Eric Kauffman, “Demographic Change and American Instability,” in Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay, ed. Arthur Milikh (New York: Encounter Books, 2023), p. 265.
2. Mark David Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2019), p. xxi. Hall cites Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Harmony, 1993), pp. 28–29.
Well, we have seen them now.
Some of this lack of imagination shows up in the debate over the Constitution, sometimes with specific reference to the religion clauses. The fact that the Constitution makes no acknowledgement of any transcendent order or theistic commitment did not pass without notice or objection. Mark David Hall reminds us that William Williams of Connecticut (who signed the Declaration and served on his state’s ratification convention) “believed that it was a mistake not to overtly acknowledge the Deity in the nation’s fundamental law.”[3] The proposed amendment offered by Williams would have stipulated the unity of the American people “in a firm belief of the being and perfections of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme Governor of the world, in His providence and the authority of his laws. . . .”[4] Nevertheless, the pressing and urgent need for ratification prevented such proposed amendments from receiving real consideration.
3. Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding?, 26.
4. Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding?, 26.
My point is that the framers of the Constitution understood their own document—and our national charter—to rest on an explicitly theistic foundation and they further understood that theistic foundation to be defined in essentially Christian terms. John Adams argued that the bedrock foundation of the American order was “religion and morality alone” sometimes expressed as “religion and virtue.” Charles Carroll said that those who would deny a theological structure to the founding of the nation “are undermining the solid Foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of a free government.”[5]
5. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, eds, The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2009)., 225.
The notion of a “godless constitution” and a secularist vision of the American order are misrepresentations of American history. Those who argue for such a secularist vision have to deny the actual words used by the framers and the even more basic fact that the moral order that gave birth to the American experiment in self-government rested on a Christian foundation.
A Needed Acknowledgement
My argument is that the framers of the Constitution made a mistake. They assumed a moral and ontological foundation that other Americans, generations later, would deny. Furthermore, the very moral framework that was lamentably taken for granted at the time of ratification would be overthrown by a self-declared army of progressivists who would declare their secular vision in liberationist terms. The absence of explicit acknowledgment left the American constitutional order vulnerable to misrepresentation and subversion.
Put bluntly, I do not want the government of the United States of America to establish a church or to take on any liturgical function, but I most certainly do want to see the federal government define human life in terms consistent with historic biblical theism and to define marriage (according to the limited jurisdiction of federal policy) as exclusively the union of one man and one woman. I do want to see boys kept off of girls’ athletic teams and I want our government to be able properly to distinguish male and female. That hardly seems too much to ask.
Furthermore, it cannot be argued with a straight face or any honest conscience that the founders of this nation and the framers of our Constitution foresaw—much less intended—to offer constitutional protection to the confusion and corruption we now see all around us.
I will argue that no secular or non-theistic foundation will prove substantial enough to sustain the necessary moral order. That sad but inevitable reality is evident all around us, but it is particularly evident in the current reign of revisionist historiographies and leftist ideologies, especially within the ramparts of academe and the halls of elite law schools.
The framers of the Constitution foresaw so much, and their wisdom produced the most enduring constitutional order in world history, but they failed to see the tragic vulnerability represented by their lack of divine acknowledgement within their text. In my view, the only path to recovery is the emergence of a robust doctrine of acknowledgement that affirms theism as an a priori to the American experiment. I do not underestimate the difficulty of this task. I do not oppose recovery efforts based in a textualist or “originalist” philosophy of constitutional interpretation. Indeed, I earnestly support those efforts. At the same time, I do not believe such efforts are enough. There are necessary truths that exist prior to the Constitution, and an affirmation of natural rights, though proper, is not a sufficient affirmation of these necessary truths.
Conclusion
The doctrine of acknowledgment for which I contend is not in any way incongruent with Baptist conviction. It requires the government to establish no church and to take on no liturgical function. It does recognize the necessity of theism to our moral order. It does acknowledge both God and a divine grounding of human dignity and proper rights. Those who resist such a call on the basis of some imagined Baptist principles basically surrender to the secularist legions. I do believe that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, and that Christian citizens should seek to establish and sustain a moral, legal, and cultural order that is avowedly consistent with the Lordship of Christ. I certainly do not want to confuse the categories of believers and unbelievers, and that is a basic Baptist conviction. I do believe that, in our political order, even unbelievers should be accountable for a basic morality we acknowledge is derived from Christianity. If this acknowledgement is rejected, I believe our constitutional order is doomed to fall.
There are those who argue that the American experiment in ordered liberty has come to an end, or that the end is in sight. I pray not. But the idea that our national experiment, once severed from any theistic foundation, will long survive is a feverish dream. I see that as a Christian, I say that as an American, and I believe that as a Baptist.
