Over the last two decades, it has become increasingly common to hear Christians speak approvingly of the collapse of cultural Christianity in America. But “good riddance to cultural Christianity” means very different things depending on who says it. For some, the passing of a broadly Christian moral consensus is welcome because they regard many of Christianity’s moral judgments as an embarrassment in the first place. There have always been Christians eager to demonstrate that their faith poses no serious threat to whatever moral consensus prevails among the respectable classes, and today that means softening, nuancing, or simply declining to mention the parts of Christian morality that offend the editorial board of the New York Times. Those who celebrate the death of cultural Christianity for such reasons are not my concern here.
More interesting are Christians who welcome the same development for almost the opposite reason. They are not embarrassed by Christian morality; they are suspicious of what happens when Christian morality becomes a substitute for Christianity. If cultural Christianity made it easier for a man to confuse being a respectable American with being a Christian, then perhaps its collapse has at least removed one source of false assurance.
There is much in that concern that is correct. Outward conformity to God’s law cannot reconcile a sinner to God. The man who remains faithful to his wife because adultery would ruin his reputation, and who deals honestly in business because he fears losing customers, does not thereby possess the righteousness that comes only through faith in Christ.
The problem lies in the inference. Once the inability of outward morality to save becomes the only consideration, external moral constraint begins to look insignificant, perhaps even counterproductive. If the root problem is the heart, and only the gospel can change the heart, and outward conformity can make a sinner more confident in his own righteousness, then why should Christians care very much whether an unbeliever behaves morally at all?
Gospel-Centered Moral Anarchy
We might call that inference gospel-centered moral anarchy. Now, to be clear, I am not saying that those who hold this view believe that adultery ceases to be sinful when committed by an unbeliever, or that the command against theft binds only those who have been born again. The confusion appears instead in what Christians are taught to regard as ends worth pursuing. Such confusion asks questions like, “If laws, customs, or social expectations make men less willing to steal, fornicate, abandon their children, or lie under oath, but leave them every bit as unregenerate as before, should Christians regard that restraint as a good worth pursuing?”
There is an odd resemblance between this way of thinking and the older error of antinomianism. The antinomian reasons from grace to moral indifference: because the Christian has been justified apart from works and is no longer under the law as a covenant of works, the moral law can make no meaningful claim upon how he lives. Historic Protestant theology rejected that conclusion because it confused freedom from the law’s condemnation with freedom from the law itself. The error under consideration runs the same reasoning in the opposite direction. Because the unbeliever has not been regenerated, and because his outward obedience contributes nothing to his justification, his conformity to the moral law begins to look theologically unimportant. The antinomian says that the Christian, being under grace, may do as he pleases. This error says that the unbeliever, not being under grace, may do as he pleases, or more precisely that Christians have little reason to care because changing his behavior will not change his heart.
A Law with Only One Use
Behind the inference lies a truncated account of the moral law. In much of contemporary evangelicalism, when God’s law is not ignored altogether, it is treated exclusively as an instrument of preconversion conviction: it exposes sin, shuts the sinner’s mouth, and shows him his need for Christ. That use of the law is essential. Paul writes that “through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20), and the Second London Baptist Confession likewise teaches that the law exposes the corruption of our hearts and lives and gives us “a clearer view of [our] need for Christ and the perfection of His obedience.”1 The sinner must know what condemns him before he can understand the good news of justification.
1. Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), 19, in The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith in Modern English, ed. Stan Reeves (Founders Ministries).
But Protestant theology has never taught that this is the only thing the law does, and the law does not cease to serve a purpose simply because the man standing under it remains unconverted. The error is to let the convicting use of the law swallow every other purpose for which God gave His law. If the only morally significant thing the law can do for an unbeliever is expose his guilt, then his outward conformity to it looks beside the point whenever it does not end in conversion. It may even look dangerous. The respectable pagan, so the argument runs, is harder to evangelize than the open libertine, because his outward decency gives him more reason to think well of himself. On that reasoning, the man restrained by Christian morality has not merely failed to receive the greatest good; he has received something that makes the greatest good harder for him to see.
A theology that is concerned solely with the individual sinner’s conversion can explain why the restrained unbeliever still needs Christ, but it has no category for explaining why it is better that his sin remains restrained in the meantime. The result is not formal antinomianism, since God’s law is still acknowledged as binding in principle. It is a practical moral anarchy produced by an overly narrow account of what the law is for. Because the gospel alone saves, every use of the law that does not culminate immediately in salvation is treated as suspect.
There is, again, a truth here that we should not discard. Outward conformity does not justify anyone. The mistake is to take the inability of such conduct to justify as proof that it serves no other good. Scripture and the Reformed tradition do not force us to choose between saying that the unbeliever’s outward obedience cannot save him and saying that it is nevertheless better for him, and for those around him, when his wickedness is restrained.
Imagine two societies in which there are no Christians at all. In that respect the societies are identical: every citizen in both remains under sin and in need of the gospel. But suppose that in the first society the laws, customs, and social expectations cohere in significant measure with God’s moral law. Some of that conformity arises from the light of nature and reason, through which even fallen men retain some genuine knowledge of the law written on their hearts. Some of it may be inherited from neighboring Christian societies, whose moral judgments have been absorbed into the culture without the faith that produced them. Thus, even without saving faith, its citizens may obey these norms of the moral law from fear, habit, legal compulsion, or simple regard for the approval of their neighbors.
The second society is no more pagan than the first, but its moral culture is radically different. Its laws and customs do not restrain the same evils and in some cases actively commend them: sexual vice is celebrated, the destruction of innocent life receives legal protection, and vicious conduct is treated as an exercise of personal autonomy.
If the only question worth asking about an unbeliever is whether he has been converted, it is difficult to explain why the first society should be regarded as any better than the second. Both are full of men who stand condemned before God. No man in either society can say he has the righteousness that comes through faith. Yet surely the moral difference between the two societies is not imaginary.
The book of Jonah gives us reason to think that God Himself takes such distinctions seriously. When God summons Jonah to Nineveh, the stated grievance is not that the city lacks faith in Him but that “their evil has come up before me” (Jonah 1:2). Countless pagan cities lacked saving faith without drawing that summons; what distinguished Nineveh was the character of its conduct. The same holds when God relents. The king’s decree concerns outward behavior, calling every man to turn from “the violence that is in his hands,” and the text reports that God saw their deeds, that they turned from their evil way, and He relented from the disaster He had threatened (Jonah 3:8, 10). Whatever we conclude about the spiritual state of individual Ninevites, the book presents the outward character of a pagan city’s common life as something that matters to God.
The Second Use of the Moral Law
Protestant theology has a category for explaining this difference. Calvin famously distinguished three uses of the moral law: first, to reveal sin and drive the sinner to Christ; second, to restrain the outward expression of wickedness; and third, to direct the believer in the life of obedience.2 The distinction between our two pagan societies concerns the second of these uses. This is not a generic claim that social order is preferable to chaos. The restraint in view has moral content: God’s law identifies the good that ought to be promoted and the evil that ought to be restrained, and the Decalogue provides the summary of that law. Thus, one of the functions of the moral law, whether known through the special revelation of the Decalogue or the General Revelation of the created order, is bringing the outward conduct of fallen men into greater conformity with the rule of righteousness God has given to all mankind.
2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics (Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 2.7.6, 10, 12.
Calvin therefore describes the second use of the law as a bridle upon those who possess no inward love of righteousness but who are nevertheless kept from giving full expression to their wickedness. Luther uses the rougher image of ropes and chains placed upon a wild beast.3 Neither image suggests that the sinner has been inwardly transformed. The point is that God’s law can keep a man from doing some of what his sinful heart would otherwise incline him to do. A man may still covet his neighbor’s property while fear of punishment keeps him from stealing it; he may lust after another man’s wife while shame and social expectation keep him from committing adultery; he may hate his neighbor while the threat of the magistrate keeps that hatred from becoming murder. The inward sin remains, but the commandment has nevertheless placed a real restraint upon its outward expression.
3. Calvin, Institutes, 2.7.10; Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, vol. 26, Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1–4 (Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 344.
The moral law ordinarily exercises this restraining function through what we call common grace. God has written His law on the human heart and preserved in fallen men genuine, though corrupted, faculties of reason and conscience. He also works through families, customs, social shame, civil laws, and various forms of authority that reinforce what the law requires and attach consequences to its violation. These instruments do not create a different morality alongside the moral law. At their best, they give social force to the same moral law that already binds the men subject to them.
This also explains why Christian influence on culture matters. A culture can reinforce the moral law by praising fidelity, courage, honesty, chastity, and piety, and by attaching shame to their opposites. Or it can work against the law by reversing those judgments, removing shame from what God forbids and attaching it to what He commands.
Are These Not Splendid Vices?
At this point, an objection naturally arises from within the Reformed tradition itself. If the works of unbelievers do not proceed from faith, and if “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23), why should Christians place any positive value on the unbeliever’s outward conformity to the moral law? The description, often attributed to Augustine, of pagan virtues as “splendid vices” captures the concern. The unbeliever may perform acts that appear commendable before men, but because those acts do not arise from a heart reconciled to God and are not ordered ultimately to His glory, they cannot be called good in the same sense as the obedience of a believer.
The Second London Baptist Confession makes precisely this distinction in its chapter on good works. It acknowledges that works done by unregenerate men may be things that God commands and may be “useful both to themselves and others.” At the same time, because those works do not proceed from a heart purified by faith, are not performed in the right manner according to the Word, and are not directed to the right end—the glory of God—they remain sinful and cannot please God or qualify the sinner to receive grace. Yet the Confession immediately adds that the neglect of such works is “even more sinful and displeasing to God.”4
Note that, in that final qualification, the Confession does not reason that because the unbeliever cannot perform an evangelical good work, there is therefore no meaningful difference between his outward obedience and disobedience. Quite the opposite. The unbeliever who honors his parents does not perform the fifth commandment as a regenerate son ought to perform it, but he is still doing something God commands. The pagan magistrate who punishes murder does not offer an act of Christian obedience, but his administration of justice is still of good use to his neighbors. The man who refrains from theft because he fears prison has not acquired a pure heart, but his neighbor still has his property. The moral defect in the agent does not erase every distinction between the acts themselves.
Genesis 20 gives a particularly clear example. Abimelech took Sarah believing that she was Abraham’s sister, and God later told him, “It was I who kept you from sinning against me” (Gen. 20:6). God did not regenerate Abimelech in order to prevent the sin; He restrained him from committing it. Nor does the text treat that restraint as meaningless simply because Abimelech remained outside the covenant people. The adultery that did not occur would have been a real sin against God and a real evil against Sarah and Abraham. God’s prevention of it was therefore a real good, even though it did not amount to Abimelech’s salvation.
This is the distinction gospel-centered moral anarchy has difficulty maintaining. If the only category available is that of saving righteousness, every act of an unbeliever is flattened into the same verdict: unacceptable to God and therefore devoid of positive significance. Reformed theology is more careful. It denies that the unregenerate can please God by their works while still affirming that some of their actions conform outwardly to what God commands, benefit their neighbors, and are preferable to the greater sin that would follow from neglecting those duties altogether. The second use of the law depends upon precisely this distinction.
Honest Pagans and Respectable Hypocrites
A related objection is that the openly pagan society may at least have the virtue of honesty. The nominal Christian who outwardly conforms to Christian morality can mistake himself for something he is not, while the man who has rejected Christianity altogether is under no such illusion. Better, on this reasoning, an honest pagan than a respectable hypocrite. If the collapse of Christian moral expectations strips away false professions and forces unbelievers to recognize that they are in fact unbelievers, perhaps the resulting moral disorder is an unfortunate but worthwhile price to pay for greater spiritual clarity.
The problem with this argument is not that false assurance is harmless. It is a serious evil. The respectable hypocrite who mistakes outward morality for saving faith remains condemned before God, and his self-deception may make him less willing to hear the gospel. But the immediate cost of that error falls principally on the hypocrite himself. By contrast, when the honest pagan is freed from the moral restraints that once governed his conduct, the consequences of his lawbreaking are borne by other people. His wife bears the cost of his adultery. His children bear the cost of his abandonment. His neighbor bears the cost of his theft.
This is why the comparison cannot be reduced to a question of which unbeliever possesses the clearer self-understanding. Both men are lawbreakers. Both stand under the condemnation of the law. Both need the same Christ. But in one case the chief additional evil is self-deception; in the other, the sinner’s rejection of moral restraint multiplies the harms suffered by those around him. To prefer the latter simply because his paganism is more candid is to treat the sinner’s awareness of his spiritual condition as more important than the well-being of his neighbors.
Nor does the disappearance of Christian moral expectations guarantee that the pagan will become more honest about himself. Fallen men do not need cultural Christianity in order to manufacture self-righteousness. The nominal Christian may congratulate himself for being respectable; the modern pagan may congratulate himself for being authentic, tolerant, liberated, or morally courageous. The forms change, but the impulse to justify oneself does not. What reliably changes when moral restraint collapses is not the candor of the sinner but how much of his wickedness his neighbors are made to endure.
Why We Should Desire Restraint
If the second use of the law is real, then Christians should positively desire the restraint of sin among unbelievers. That desire does not require us to confuse restraint with regeneration or outward conformity with saving righteousness. It simply requires us to take seriously the fact that God’s law remains good even when it is obeyed imperfectly and for imperfect reasons. There are at least three reasons why Christians should want unbelievers to be restrained by the moral law.
Zeal for God
The chief reason is zeal for God. One of the errors of gospel-centered moral anarchy is that, for all its concern to exalt the gospel, it can become surprisingly man-centered. The value of moral restraint is measured almost entirely by what it accomplishes in the sinner. Does it expose his need for Christ? Does it make him easier or harder to evangelize? Does it increase the danger of false assurance? Those are legitimate questions, but they are not the first questions Christians should ask about sin, because the sinner is not the chief party offended by it.
David makes the point after his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps. 51:4). He obviously knew he had sinned against other people. Uriah was dead, Bathsheba had been wronged, and his household would bear terrible consequences for what he had done. Yet David could still say that his sin was against God, because every violation of the moral law is most fundamentally rebellion against the God whose law has been violated. Sin harms the sinner and his neighbor, but before it does either, it dishonors God.
Why should that matter to us? Because Christians love God. Jesus teaches us to pray, before we ask for daily bread or the forgiveness of our sins, “Hallowed be your name” (Matt. 6:9). The Christian desires that God be known, honored, and obeyed because God is worthy of being known, honored, and obeyed. The psalmist expresses the same disposition when he writes, “My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law” (Ps. 119:136). He is grieved by sins that are not his own because he loves the God whose law is being despised. A Christian zealous for God’s glory cannot be indifferent to whether His creatures honor or defy Him.
This gives us reason to desire moral restraint even when nothing changes in the spiritual condition of the man restrained. Suppose an unbeliever is prevented from committing some act of wickedness, and the restraint does nothing to make him more receptive to the gospel. If our only concern is what has happened inside that man, we may wonder whether anything of Christian significance has occurred. But the Christian has another interest at stake. The man has been prevented from doing something God forbids. His heart may remain hostile to God, but that hostility has not been permitted to issue in that particular act of defiance.
We should therefore pray for two things at once. We should pray that the adulterer repent, believe in Christ, and be reconciled to God; and while he remains an unbeliever, we should also pray that he stop committing adultery. We should want the blasphemer to come to Christ, and we should want him to stop blaspheming. The second desire is not valuable only insofar as it contributes to the first. We love the sinner and desire his salvation, but we also love the God against whom he sins, and because God is worthy of obedience from every creature He has made, Christians should desire to see less of what dishonors Him.
Love of Neighbor
Love of neighbor gives us a second reason to desire restraint. Christians should seek our neighbor’s greatest good, which is that he be reconciled to God through Christ. But it does not follow that his greatest good is the only good we may seek for him. We do not reason this way anywhere else. We pray for an unbelieving neighbor when he is sick, help him when he is poor, defend him when he is unjustly accused, and rejoice when his children prosper, all while knowing that none of those goods can reconcile him to God. His need for salvation does not make every lesser good irrelevant.
The same is true of the society in which our neighbor lives. We should desire that he live among people whose wickedness is restrained rather than given free expression, and that he enjoy the shalom of a society with a real measure of peace and moral order, rather than endure the consequences of moral anarchy simply because neither condition can save his soul. As I argued in The Law for the Lawless, to love our neighbor is to desire that he experience the good of living where evil is restrained and good is upheld; to be content for him to live amid the horror of moral anarchy is not a more spiritual form of neighbor-love.5
5. David Mitzenmacher, The Law for the Lawless (Founders Press, 2025).
It is worth noting that the consequences of unrestrained depravity are borne chiefly by other people. The weakening of moral restraint means that men, women, and children are made to live with more of what proceeds from fallen hearts. There is something perverse about claiming that we love an unbeliever too much to care about his outward morality while showing so little concern for the unbelieving neighbors who must live with the consequences when his morality collapses.
Jeremiah’s command to the exiles makes the point from another angle. God did not tell the Jews in Babylon that, because Babylon was pagan, its temporal welfare was of no concern to them. He told them to “seek the welfare of the city” and to pray to the Lord on its behalf (Jer. 29:7). Christians can likewise seek both the eternal and temporal good of those among whom God has placed us. We want our neighbors saved, and we want them spared, as far as possible, from having to live amid the unchecked wickedness of other unsaved men. Those desires do not compete.
The Good of the Church and the Advance of the Gospel
There is a third reason to desire the restraining work of the moral law, and it bears directly on one of the arguments commonly made in favor of the collapse of cultural Christianity. We are sometimes told that the disappearance of Christian moral expectations may actually be good for evangelism. The respectable unbeliever can mistake his outward conformity for Christianity, whereas the man living in an openly pagan culture at least knows that he is a pagan. On this reasoning, the loss of Christian moral restraint may clarify the church’s evangelistic task by stripping away one source of false assurance.
Even if we judge the question chiefly by its consequences for evangelism, however, that conclusion does not follow. The second use of the law restrains the outward expression of depravity, and one of the ordinary consequences of that restraint is social peace. Calvin makes precisely this connection when he argues that the law’s constrained and forced righteousness is necessary for the tranquility of human society, since without it men would be left increasingly free to act upon the wickedness already present in their hearts.6 The church lives within that same society. Moral anarchy does not simply make unbelievers more candid about their unbelief; it also makes the world in which the church must worship, disciple, and preach more disordered. The peace preserved by the second use of the law does not accomplish the church’s mission, but it can providentially remove impediments to that mission.
6. Calvin, Institutes, 2.7.10.
Paul appears to assume as much in 1 Timothy 2. He commands Christians to pray for “kings and all who are in high positions” so that “we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way,” and then immediately adds that this is pleasing to “God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:2–4). Paul does not suppose that social peace converts sinners, and he certainly does not make the success of the gospel dependent upon favorable circumstances. He does, however, teach Christians to pray for a kind of peace in which the church can live faithfully, and he connects that prayer with God’s saving purposes. There is therefore no biblical reason to assume that the breakdown of moral restraint ordinarily leaves the church better positioned to evangelize simply because the resulting paganism is more obvious.7
7. I develop this same argument in David Mitzenmacher, Prayer and Politics (Founders Press, 2024).
None of this denies that God can advance the gospel under conditions of persecution and disorder. He plainly can, and Scripture gives us examples of Him doing so. The persecution that followed Stephen’s death scattered Christians from Jerusalem, and “those who were scattered went about preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). But God’s providential use of persecution does not turn persecution into something Christians should prefer. Paul knew that the gospel could flourish under hostile rulers, yet he still instructed the church to pray for peace. Confidence in the power of the gospel means that we know no amount of social disorder can finally defeat it; it does not require us to pretend that disorder is therefore better for the church.
The advance of the gospel is not what gives the second use of the law its legitimacy. We already have reason to desire the restraint of evil because we love God and care about His honor, and because we love our neighbors and do not want them to endure the misery produced by unrestrained sin. But even on the question of whether moral restraint helps or hinders evangelism, the case for celebrating the collapse of cultural Christianity is weak. The same restraint that preserves a measure of peace in society can also give the church greater freedom to carry out the work Christ has given her.
Loving God’s Law
Christian theology has never exhausted God’s dealings with fallen men in the question of whether they are justified. God saves some men by His grace, but He also governs a world filled with men whom He has not regenerated. He sends the rains upon them, feeds them, gives them families and neighbors, appoints authorities over them, restrains their wickedness, and preserves forms of social life that would otherwise be impossible among creatures corrupted by sin. The second use of the law belongs to this work of divine government. God has not failed when His law restrains a man whom the gospel has not yet converted. He has accomplished a different purpose.
That purpose is good because the law itself is good. The evangelical instinct to insist that outward obedience to the law cannot save is entirely correct; the trouble begins when we smuggle into that truth the further assumption that outward obedience therefore has no value. Scripture never asks us to make that inference. God may be displeased with the unbeliever’s heart while still restraining him from a greater act of wickedness, and the fact that the restraint leaves him unregenerate does not make the sin that was prevented morally irrelevant.
The proper response to the respectable hypocrite, then, is not to wish that he were less respectable. It is to preach the law and the gospel to him. If cultural Christianity allowed men to mistake outward conformity for saving faith, the remedy was clearer preaching about sin, grace, repentance, and Christ—not the destruction of the moral restraints that kept those same men from acting upon more of their depravity.
