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Will Inboden, a towering redhead who drives a pickup truck and flashes a wicked grin when he laughs, landed on Capitol Hill fresh from his undergraduate years at Stanford. Working in the offices of senators Sam Nunn and Tom DeLay, says Inboden, "showed me the day in, day out sausage-making of practical politics." But Inboden was frustrated: "I realized I was not equipped with a theoretical framework that would help me approach politics as a Christian."

Inboden's desire for a theologically sensitive approach to politics became more obvious when he helped craft the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. "That experience challenged me to ask what role religion has in foreign policy. When is it right to leverage the kingdom of man for the ends of the kingdom of God?" These were big questions for a young policy wonk.

So Inboden went back to school, heading to Yale to pursue a Ph.D. in history. He wanted to figure out how piety applies to public life and look at how foreign policy had been conducted in the past. It's no great shock that he's found Yale a place where the latter question is answered in the finest detail. But figuring out the former is a little tougher.

"I'm not in a program that's equipping me with explicitly Christian tools," Inboden acknowledges. To remedy the imbalance, he spent last summer in Washington, D.C., studying policy and Christianity at a unique civic-education and leadership institute called by the Latin name Civitas (meaning citizenship, state, or commonwealth).

Civitas is sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust, which cooperates with the Center for Public Justice, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The Civitas program has, including Inboden, 12 doctoral scholars this year, who are pursuing Ph.D.s from Harvard, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and other top institutions. They participate in a five-week sum mer institute in Washington, where they attend daily seminars on policy issues and public justice.

"At Civitas," says program director Keith Pavlischek, "we want to emphasize that society is made up of a diverse range of institutions which have authority and responsibility before God."

The key question, says Pavlischek, is how government relates to those other authority structures. "What is the appropriate role of government in terms of how people's fundamental worldview, whether it's religious or not, works its way out in family, church, business enterprises, labor unions?"

Pavlischek presides as the impresario of Civitas, but special guest lecturers at each seminar come to speak about their areas of expertise: Boston University's Glenn Loury on affirmative action and Charles Glenn on school vouchers, and Cornell's Richard Baer on environmental ethics. Students are paid a $3,000 summer stipend (and have the opportunity to spend six months, within the two years of the summer stint, working as a Civitas Fellow at either Brookings or AEI for another $8,000).

The conversations of Civitas fellows, which take place on the rooftop deck of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities' Dellenbach Center, are fast-paced and wide-ranging. One night, in just two hours, talk turned to personalism, school vouchers, gay marriage, and, finally, how to write a dissertation.

Civitas students also talk Scripture. The Bible must inform how Christians think about government, Pavlischek explains.

"The grand narrative of Scripture is one of Creation, Fall, Redemption," Pavlischek says. "We need to introduce people to that grand story of Scripture, and we need to help them overcome the simplistic proof texting that one finds in a great deal of American evangelical Christianity, on both the so-called Christian left and the Christian right. Civitas gives these doctoral students a hermeneutical framework by which they can begin to ask questions about government and the Bible in the right way."

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13