The New Coalitions

From social and political withdrawal to cobelligerency with conservative Catholics and other Americans is a long stride, but some evangelical spokesmen are eagerly encouraging this promising, if controversial venture.

Left far behind are fundamentalists of the 1930–50 era whose pessimistic view of history led them to exclude socio-political involvement and cultural engagement in favor of concentrated personal evangelism in expectation of Christ’s imminent return. Their apolitical stance arose from a conviction that the end-time apostasy is now under way. The viewpoint still has support in Bob Jones circles and in an older Dallas seminary constituency. But “Amish evangelicals” and traditional fundamentalists pessimistic about historical involvement and change are now “out of it.” Even many Mennonites no longer insist that the regenerate church as “a new society” must wholly avoid engagement with the world.

Most evangelicals assume we must be strenuously involved in public affairs. Some see this as a political necessity, since not to do so is to be disadvantaged by unbelievers sponsoring contrary values. Most declare it a moral duty implicit in the Christian’s dual citizenship. The divine mandate is to beam light, sprinkle salt, knead leaven into an otherwise hopeless world.

This Christian ingress is championed in its most intensive form by those who commend one or another form of ecclesiastical imperialism—the theonomic movement (or Christian Reconstructionism) being the most egregious example.

In sharp contrast to recent modern fundamentalism, which confined the relevance of Mosaic legislation to a now-superseded dispensation, the current Reconstructionist movement proposes to “restore” Christian legislation to the United States and holds that theonomy—civil government that implements the Mosaic legislation—is the divinely intended norm for all times and places. This transformationist view correlates the Mosaic legislation not only with a covenant people, as did the Hebrews, but would bring all society under its rule and treat all humankind as part of one faith community. The theonomists regard a democratic or republican form of government as heretical, and seek to implement the political lordship of Christ over the modern nations.

Given the tendency of totalitarian regimes to use power despotically, many Christians have in modern times preferred republican or democratic forms of government in the interest of political self-determination. They connect a beneficent totalitarianism only with the coming millennial reign of Christ and view the concentration of absolute political power in the hands of human rulers as fraught with risk. To be sure, they do not deny that democracy may through lack of consensus fall into chaos, or that a benevolent monarchy may now and then arise in fallen history. But they do not view democracy as heretical, as do Reconstructionists; rather, they see theonomy as an illegitimate proposal for civil government in the present church age, and a republican or democratic alternative as compatible with legitimate evangelical concerns, especially in the American context of church-state separation.

Private Versus Public Philosophies

The emphasis on a pluralistic republic poses a basic question for Christians: Are they in the public arena to concern themselves only or mainly with their own interests as one of the numerous faith communities? Or is their first obligation to identify and to promote the common good of society? Many evangelicals are uninterested in, or neglect, formulation of a public policy and exhaust their energies mainly in what they oppose, or in promoting single-issue special interests. Many church members are not taught that political developments are important. Emphasis on the importance of a shared evangelical view of a civic common good even seems odd to them.

The result is that evangelicals enter the political arena primarily in terms of the special interests of a particular faith community and justify their involvement solely in terms of an appeal to the revelatory authority of the Bible. Since they exhibit no concern for a public philosophy, they are readily perceived as a threat to pluralistic democracy; their civic involvement centers in a confrontational activism that promotes Christian legislation and a Christian state, if not under the banner of theonomic Reconstructionism then under that of a Moral Majority.

In this development, recent American political involvement acquired a very different identity from that of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Awakening in England. This departure of recent American political activists from a more traditional stance is a major reason for growing emphasis on the evangelical need for a public philosophy and for a strategy of cobelligerency. Earlier evangelicals were concerned for public justice, not simply for special evangelical interests. They identified themselves with the whole body politic in the effort to promote civic righteousness. They championed a public philosophy and addressed national conscience. This was not simply a matter of one’s private vision of civic decency; it was a divine compulsion to speak of public affairs in the context of transcendent justice and of a universally binding social good. These convictions—and not solely an appeal to biblical considerations—pulsate through Wilberforce’s plea for an end to the slave traffic.

The distinction between public interest and partisan interest is reflected by differing attitudes to religious liberty concerns. The Religious Right eagerly appealed to religious liberty and increasingly declared it to be basic to all other human freedoms. Yet it specially invoked religious liberty to protest encroachments on evangelical freedom, and to advance legitimate evangelical concerns. But a disciplined public philosophy would stress religious freedom for all persons of whatever faith, as at the same time the best guarantee of religious liberty for Christians. Had the Religious Right from the outset paid attention to this distinction, it would not so readily have been perceived by critics as a civic threat to nonevangelicals in its insistence on the relevance of religion to public affairs.

Conservative Protestants sought to transcend a misperception of religious intolerance by inviting like-minded Catholics, Jews, and Mormons—whose participation lent a pluralistic image of sorts to the movement. This somewhat diminished suspicions that they sought to impose an agenda of Christian sectarian legislation upon the state. But it stopped far short of articulating a public philosophy.

The Theological Base

The theological basis for evangelical involvement in public justice is located in God’s creation-ethic and his universal revelation including the imago Dei that, however sullied, nonetheless survives the Fall. To be sure, Christian theologians have suggested other rationales. Some Reformed scholars appeal to common grace in expounding general revelation. Calvin propounded the doctrine, and Charles Hodge, Herman Bavinck, and Abraham Kuyper relied on it in expounding a philosophy of history and culture. No less than saving grace, common grace presupposes total depravity. But its role is limited to a divine restraining of the effects of sin and enablement of civil righteousness and human culture.

Some Reformed writers reject the doctrine of common grace, while others—notably Valentine Hepp, Kuyper, and Bavinck—developed it into a natural theology and apologetics based on general truths supposedly shared by all humanity. In doing so they disregarded Calvin’s insistence that unregenerate humanity suppresses its own inescapable knowledge of the Deity.

Roman Catholicism appeals to natural law, the theory that despite the Fall there survives a universally shared body of moral truths. This doctrine the Protestant Reformers disavowed as involving an inadequate view of the consequences of original sin. Calvin spoke of “natural law,” but by it he did not mean either that a universally shared body of ethical and theological truths survives the Adamic Fall, or that revealed ethics and theology can or should be superimposed on such an edifice. Yet the Reformers insisted that the light of general revelation penetrates the mind of unregenerate humankind universally and that all humans are guilty for their deflection of it. The basis for a public philosophy is therefore not located in sectarian religious tradition but in universal revelation and public reason, without disavowing the crucial importance of special revelation.

Some Roman Catholic Thomistic scholars confuse the Protestant emphasis on general revelation and/or on common grace with natural-law theory. In recent years a number of second-order Reformed scholars have controversially depicted Calvin as devoted to natural law, and have pursued an evidentialist apologetics highly compatible with empirical Thomistic theology. Whereas evangelical orthodoxy has stressed God’s rational propositional revelation and the importance of biblically revealed principles of morality, some contemporary Catholics move the discussion toward natural-law theory and church tradition by questioning that the Bible does in fact give us much in the way of principial ethics. Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran thinker, holds that conservative evangelical cobelligerency with conservative Protestant ecumenists and conservative Catholics need not involve an implicit commitment to natural-law theory.

Chartered Pluralism

Proponents of the so-called Williamsburg Charter have recently emerged to champion “chartered pluralism.” Shaped by British sociologist Os Guinness, the charter project is not predicated on shared beliefs. It assumes that American pluralism has now moved far past that possibility. Beyond traditional Christian (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) and Jewish distinctions, enlarging clusters of Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus are now emerging. The American population now also includes 4 percent who are completely irreligious—consider religion valueless and irrelevant to public affairs—and never go to church. Another 6 percent disavow any religious preference yet grant that religion can be important.

“Chartered pluralism” does not involve a general dilution of belief (Judeo-Christian theism) nor a fluctuating civil religion. Rather, it is a compact whereby pluralistic society embraces “the 3-R’s of religious liberty: rights, responsibilities, and respect.” It is “chartered” in that it accommodates no one interest group, and it is “pluralistic” in that it is not merely majoritarian. Moral and religious consensus is not a given, but a goal. Instead of focusing on the narrow rubric of “church and state,” it focuses in a pluralistic society on religion and government in a common version of religious liberty.

Since participating constituencies mean different things by rights and by responsibilities, some critics insist that such divergences weaken the stability of the compact. The charter was misrepresented by some critics as a betrayal of evangelical or Christian theological loyalties and the substitution of a heretical and pagan alternative. But it does neither. It is more formal than substantive. It affirms universal religious liberty, universally obligatory rights and duties. It leaves to the citizenry the establishment and vindication of specific content, whether on philosophical or revelatory grounds.

The charter has much in common with John Courtney Murray’s emphasis that Roman Catholics should enter the political arena not through attempted ecclesiastical controls but through projection of a public philosophy. Armed with the Vatican II emphasis on religious liberty and with natural-law tradition, Catholics will, no doubt, expound the content of public justice consistently with their own tradition. Evangelical Protestants must carefully identify areas of consensus and difference.

The population of the United States will be even more pluralistic in the 1990s than it is now. Religious liberty is a great evangelical theme, and evangelicals should be foremost among its heralds, showing that the case for public justice rests not simply on special revelation, but no less upon God’s moral purpose in Creation. Despite the Fall, humankind has some awareness of this, natural law or no natural law.

Cobelligerency will be a fact of political life in the decades ahead, not without both gains and losses for each participating group, and not without frequently shifting alliances for preferred ends. Nothing in scriptural revelation or in general revelation precludes an evangelical and a secular humanist from standing together against race discrimination or ecological pollution. A humanist may not want to stand with a theist any more than a theist would prefer to stand with an atheist. But if the issue at stake is human rights and duty or public pollution, not supernaturalism or naturalism, each can ignore what he or she perceives to be a shaky epistemology to jointly commend right action and public justice.

In A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration (1971), I stressed the importance of public evangelical identification with the body of humanity no less than with the body of Christ. Nothing precludes an interreligious or ecumenical cooperative public witness against injustice or for justice. If evangelicals were to take the initiative in setting the agenda, nonevangelicals would have to ask themselves whether they can “afford” to cooperate or not. We ask ourselves the question because we so easily forfeit the initiative to others.

Carl F. H. Henry is author of a six-volume systematic theology, God, Revelation and Authority (Word), and former editor of Christianity Today.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.